I
Anne Boleyn was not black.
The Boleyns were old East Anglian gentry, servants to the Crown, prosperous merchants, clerics. They had been prominent, in a quiet way, for more than two centuries before their entanglement with Henry VIII’s dynastic troubles led to their downfall. Families like them - embedded in their localities but also plugged into national and even international networks of power and influence - were the administrative backbone of late medieval England. One thing they were not was African. It is noteworthy, then, that the part of Anne in a recent TV drama went to the black British-American actress Jodie Turner-Smith.
This casting decision has been in and out of the news for a year or so now, and the responses have been fairly predictable. Progressives rejoiced at a victory for diversity and inclusion against the sinister forces of bourgeois reaction and latent racism; conservatives protested against what they saw as a historically nonsensical casting that would render the entire programme ridiculous.
I do feel an instinctive sympathy with objections to the progressive attempt to project present-day multiracialism into the past, a clear object of which is to neuter objections to twenty-first century demographic change by falsely implying that ‘twas ever thus (it very much wasn't, as I showed in a 2016 post).
Until the mid-twentieth century, the number of people in Britain from non-European ethnic minority backgrounds was extremely small – far below one per cent of the population. Historians such as Professor David Olusoga (Black And British: A Forgotten History) have done valuable work in highlighting the neglected experience of ethnic minority Britons in earlier eras than our own. Nevertheless, however fascinating the individual stories, the tiny numbers mean that their broader historical significance was generally minimal.
It matters that we properly understand the history of ethnic minorities in Britain. The alternative, at a time when a principle US export is racial neuroses, is that Britons of all colours come to see the UK race relations experience as more or less akin to that of the USA, i.e. a single numerically significant minority enduring long and systematic oppression and civic exclusion, enforced by brutal and constant state violence.
But their history is not ours.
Without wishing to minimise the racial prejudice and racial violence that has existed and continues to exist in Britain, it is quite unlike the American experience. The USA saw literally thousands of racially motivated lynchings of black people during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; there was nothing remotely comparable in Britain during the same period. By and large ethnic minority Britons are people who have freely chosen to come and live here, or whose parents and grandparents did; in the USA millions upon millions of African-Americans are the descendants of slaves. Britain has sometimes treated minorities poorly but has never had legally enshrined racial segregation and there have never been formal racial bars to voting or other forms of civic participation (the first Indian to sit in the House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected for a London seat in 1892 and was permitted to swear his oath of allegiance on the Zoroastrian holy book). There is a fascinating book about the Second World War in Britain titled When Jim Crow Met John Bull, which explores the culture clash between the racially divided US Army and the frequently – though not invariably – more easygoing British civilian population.
II
All that said, I do think there is a conservative argument for colourblind casting in historical dramas, even if it is initially jarring to see a prominent English person from times past played by someone of non-European ancestry. And yes, I do know that these kind of casting decisions are often taken by media types to own the cons and get a controversy going in a bid to improve their viewing figures.
I’m still working this through in my mind, so take this as the barebones of a possible argument, not a settled impregnable position. But I think it comes down to a dilemma: what will hold Britain together in the years to come? Is there any prospect of maintaining a trusting, orderly, peaceful society despite historically unprecedented demographic change? Most Western countries are staring down the barrel of this problem in some form or another, whether explicitly or implicitly, scrabbling around for some idea of what their country is about, what it is for.
There are a number of things which might form the underlying bedrock of a social order. I am not saying this this is an exhaustive list but the main possibilities, it seems to me, are these: