When I was a kid and having the kind of fun a mixed race Anglo Somali transracial adoptee was likely to have in 1970s rural Worcestershire, I used to stare into the mirror and try and will my skin lighter. I did this in part because wanted to look like my family or just about anybody else I ever saw, but mainly because it’s not nice to be called a ni*ger’s miscarriage and spat at when you are just walking down the street on your way to get a fist full of blackjacks and fruit salads.
The point of adoption was supposedly to give an unwanted child the trappings of the middle class white experience. The fact that this experience itself was a fragile construct that leaned heavily on patriarchal flim flam and a very very very selective reading of English history really didn’t seem to count in those days. There was no defense against racism and yet racism was just usual. The lie of the land was; should anyone have felt the need to tell me to fuck off back to bongo bongo land, as long as the f-bomb wasn’t activated, they’d be as safe as houses with the bongo stuff.
I never really understood the need for the racism. I was just going about my life in much the same way my brothers did, but just because I had darker skin and fuzzy hair it was open season on me, all year. The most surprising thing about it was it was always people who didn’t know me who did it, as if I was wearing a tshirt that said fuck the queen or dig up Churchill and throw stones at him. Seriously, I’d just be minding my own business and could be thwacked on the back of the head with a tennis ball, closely followed up by some tyro who wanted to make sure I understood that there ain’t no black in the union jack. It’s flag, ak-chew-ly fucknuts, so while I’m being pedantic, it really should have been there ain’t no jack in the union flag, but I digress.
Most racist behaviour collapses into hedging and panic with the smallest tickle. If I had a quid for every time I’ve been told, we don’t mean you as of that was in some way positive, I’d own a bigger flat. People who say daft shit like that should give their heads one hell of a wobble. Those other dark people, they are unknown and absolutely must be wronguns, or at the very least are wrongun adjacent. In my view, we are all wrongun adjacent to some degree or other. Take my family for example, there everybody was cool about my racial background, by cool I don’t mean supportive, I mean not a wanker about it. Except grandma. She was a wanker about me from the moment my parents decided to adopt right the way through to her last will and testament. I don’t recollect anybody lobbing tennis balls at the back of her head and telling her to fuck off back to whatever coven in Kidderminster she’d been hatched in.
Anyway, I’m writing this because hateful thundercnut Sarah Pochin decided to foghorn the opinion that so many black and brown faces in advertisements make her feel sick. She’s since apologised, but the geni’s out of the bottle now. So just like the boats and islam and trans people and whatever shoddy distraction tactic her and her handlers have decided to relentlessly pump into the public domain, the value and meaning of the skin I mainly use to keep my innards inside, is now a topic of debate. And this is only going to further twist and madden people who have been successfully groomed into holding some of the most contemptible and thoroughly wrong positions in the history of political thinking.
The possibly uncomfortable thing is, I’ve had limited agreement with some of words she said for some time now. Over the past 5 years I have frequently caught myself totting up the white to black people in adverts ratio and it has been making me worried. Not because I have a problem with seeing black and brown people in advertisements per se, not least because I have the mental processing power to understand that they are not real. However, because it was clear that the current direction of political discourse meant that any minute now some piece of human scabies would use it as a dog whistle. And thoroughly unsurprisingly, here’s Sarah Pochin appearing like a pool of vomit on your doorstep.
Just to be clear, Pochin is the kind of venal scumbag that would only be welcome in my home if I thought I could get away with kicking her off the balcony. The reason why I was uncomfortable about the proliferation of black and brown faces in advertisements is because how it could be used. I thought it would eventually tickle at the insecurities of people who have fears about migration. Those black and brown bodies in adverts provide visual cues to impressionable people in landlocked Buxton (98.3% white, 0.6% Asian, 0.2% black and 0.8% mixed/multiple source United Kingdom: East of England (Local Authority Districts and Wards) – Population Statistics, Charts and Map), or landlocked and riverless Malvern (White 29,007 95.24%, Asian 2.11%, Black 0.50%, Arab 0.05%, Mixed/Multiple 1.79%, Other Ethnic Group 0.32% source, as for Buxton ) that they were being replaced.
Advertisers are there to sell products, not politics. Their world is tidy, clean, healthy and comfortable, none of those things are exclusive to one or another race. Those black and brown faces in advertisements were about income streams and attempting to look inclusive and engaged in a 20 second chunk. It never was about DEI it was about M.O.N.E.Y. If Ms Pochin wanted to really address this, she’d be looking at the demographics of the companies involved in making those advertisements and I’m pretty confident, the employment roll would act like Lorazepam on her troubled guts.
Advertising is inclusive in order to be able to extract more money from as many people as possible. This is why you get wildly successful things like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. All those different kinds of female bodies living their best hariy, smooth, pierced, tattooed, old, young, thin, not thin, wrinkly, lifted lives. That’s good messaging that is; as long as you only take the message and don’t think about the actual product: Dove is owned by Unilever, a company frequently criticised for loads of things, but off the top of my head: its heavy reliance on palm oil in products and the related deforestation; its large carbon footprint; allegations of poor working conditions and low wages; questionable employment practices; promotion of skin-lightening products that perpetuate harmful beauty standards and colorism; accusations of greenwashing with sustainability claims that don’t match actual impact; marketing products to low-income communities with questionable nutritional value; aggressive tax avoidance strategies and profit-shifting to lower-tax jurisdictions. I could go on, but I feel the gist is gettable. It makes more sense to attempt to sell stuff to the widest possible demographic rather than trying to persuade that same demographic that they will start looking like some absurdly beautiful 19 year old Slovenian if only they use this soap.
The proliferation of black and brown faces in adverts that happened after George Floyd might more usefully be called blackwashing. It was always clear to me that some people were always going to see this as evidence of overrun. And here we are.
Black and brown bodies have been part of the same English landscape for thousands of years no matter what branch of history you chose to read, unless you like the stuff that isn’t true. Pochin (is that an english name, Mr Farage?) is a thundercnut, Farage is a despicable piece of shit. Anybody who votes reform is voting for me to be further abused because scapegoating racebating is now hard and fast on the agenda. If you can’t see that and still plan to vote for those bastards, then fuck off and keep going. Really. I mean it. You are no use to me at all. Because once again I’m looking at being on the receiving end of public racism, and, you know what, I don’t like that, it makes me very angry. You might not like me when I’m angry, but you read this, didn’t you.