{"id":3339,"date":"2015-12-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/a-fantasy-of-whiteness\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:20:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:20:44","slug":"a-fantasy-of-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/a-fantasy-of-whiteness\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fantasy of Whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a British history factoid to wield this winter: Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham, a market town in southwest Lincolnshire, where her father, famously, was a grocer (as well as mayor). If you are one of the many American viewers of the hit British television series <\/span>Downton Abbey<\/span><\/i>, which returns next week for its last season on PBS, the name should ring a bell. Lord Grantham is the show\u2019s patriarch, a flawed but lovable aristocrat who huffs and puffs but ultimately, generally, does the right thing for his family and dependents. And his name is highly appropriate: Lord Grantham, like the former Conservative Prime Minister, is fond of \u201cVictorian values\u201d and highly suspicious of replacing hierarchical benevolence with a centralized welfare state. Thatcher had her own prime-time moment in American politics earlier this fall, when, during a Republican primary debate, Jeb Bush <\/span>named her<\/span><\/a> as the woman he\u2019d put on the US $10 bill. He was, it seemed, inspired by the debate\u2019s setting in the Ronald Reagan presidential library, since <\/span>he quipped<\/span><\/a>: \u201cI would go with Ronald Reagan\u2019s partner, Margaret Thatcher. Probably illegal, but what the heck?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Downton\u2019s popularity, Bush\u2019s answer suggests the depth of the Anglo-American connection. But when taken in comparison with the most popular answer to the $10 bill question\u2014Rosa Parks, offered by no fewer than three candidates\u2014it also suggests a more troubling pattern, one that relegates \u201crace\u201d to American history, and celebrates British history as a specifically <\/span>white<\/span><\/i> field of cultural connection. In other words, British history, in American popular discourse, frequently becomes<\/span> an aesthetically appealing fantasy about whiteness and stability. This is inaccurate, but also tragic: We could desperately use a clear-eyed assessment of the messy, complicated country that ruled much of the world not so long ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"<em>Emmeline
Emmeline Pankhurst<\/em>. Photograph courtesy of BBC Radio 4 \/ Flickr.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Take another recent example. The recent movie <\/span>Suffragette<\/span><\/i>
\n(directed by Sarah Gavron), which portrays the British militant suffrage movement from the perspective of its working-class members, was no blockbuster, here or in Britain. But its publicity material generated a brief, illuminating debate. It started when Meryl Streep, who appears in the film as suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, posed with fellow cast members on the cover of <\/span>Time Out London<\/span><\/i> wearing a t-shirt with the tag line, \u201cI\u2019d rather be a rebel than a slave.\u201d The image sparked <\/span>an immediate negative reaction<\/span><\/a> and was criticized for trivializing actual slavery, particularly <\/span>the enslavement of Africans in the Americas<\/span><\/a>. When it was released, the film, too, earned criticism for its relentless whiteness.<\/span><\/p>\n

What interests me is how \u201cBritish history\u201d came to be figured in the debate that followed. In the US, the film\u2019s defenders frequently cited <\/span>context<\/span><\/i>. In a generally positive <\/span>review<\/span><\/a> published here in <\/span>Public Books<\/span><\/i>, for example, Linda Gordon, a prominent historian of American feminism, writes that American viewers <\/span>\u201cmight be excused for not knowing that very few black people lived in England at the time, but these accusations can become viral and damage unjustifiably the reputation of a film and filmmaker committed to social justice.\u201d Critics of the t-shirts, too, she suggests, were missing the relevant context. <\/span>In the <\/span>Los Angeles Times<\/span><\/i>, on the other hand, Johanna Neuman <\/span>rehearses<\/span><\/a> the complex, tortured historical relationships between US feminism, racism, and abolitionism in support of her conclusion that \u201c<\/span>criticizing a film\u2014and, by extension, its stars and its marketing\u2014for portraying the passion of the times, however ill-phrased, seems an attempt to erase a past that discomforts those of us in today’s audience.\u201d<\/span> For Gordon, <\/span>British<\/span><\/i> historical context is all-important and ultimately absolving; for Neuman, it\u2019s beside the point, and the film instead illuminates <\/span>American<\/span><\/i> historical complexity. Talking about race, it seems, means talking about the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nevil Shute\u2019s 1947 novel <\/span>The Chequer Board<\/span><\/i> contrasted the systematic, vicious racism of the US Army with the open-mindedness of small-town England, where local residents welcomed Black American servicemen on equal terms. The scene of the first encounter is emblematic: some white American surveyors have spread the rumor that Black American soldiers are so \u201cprimitive\u201d that they will bark like dogs when hungry. The patrons of the local pub, which bears the rather heavy-handed name The White Hart, agree that the story is \u201cimprobable\u201d but take a cautious, wait-and-see approach. The Black soldiers, having heard the story, bark good-naturedly on their way into town, and the local people take the joke in their stride. \u201cBy the time they reached The White Hart, the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers to whom was owed some sort of apology.\u201d The English novelist apparently worried about the reaction this portrayal would elicit in the United States: he called the novel \u201ca sincere book which I genuinely thought would ruin my American sales.\u201d But he was pleasantly surprised, both by sales figures and by the personal reactions he heard on a bus tour of the country later that year.1<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

By the time Julian Fellowes was writing the fourth season of <\/span>Downton<\/span><\/i>, the pattern was well-established: historical Britain is white, and \u201crace,\u201d as a category and a problem, comes from America. In that season, Fellowes introduced the character of Jack Ross, a Black American jazz singer. Ross and Lady Rose, the show\u2019s lightweight flapper character, become romantically involved. Eyebrows are raised, but in general the central characters react phlegmatically: the two head servants, Carson and Mrs. Hughes, even conclude that Ross is rather nice. Ultimately, Ross ends his relationship with Lady Rose, on the grounds that British upper-class society is not ready for an interracial union. However, the overall impression is one of gentility and awkward, but sincere, acceptance of Ross, as a musician and visitor if not as a future in-law. True British aristocrats, when given the chance, somehow rise above the petty constraints of racism (not to mention anti-Semitism and homophobia).<\/span>
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

We are ill-served by the beautiful escapist fantasies offered by Downton<\/span>, <\/span>Suffragette<\/span>, and, before them, <\/span>The Chequer Board<\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nNumerous British historians have done <\/span>extensive work<\/span><\/a> countering the notion that the island of Britain was simply \u201cwhite\u201d prior to the postcolonial immigration that began after World War II. Edwardian Liverpool was famous for its polyglot population, which included men and women who could trace their roots across the British Empire, from North America and the Caribbean to Africa and Asia.2<\/a><\/sup> The areas of working-class London that featured in <\/span>Suffragette<\/span><\/i> were <\/span>home<\/span><\/a> to Chinese, Jewish, and other minority populations. Jazz was described as a \u201cnew American invasion\u201d by a British music magazine in 1918, but Jack Ross would have been joining an entertainment sector in which non-white musicians had been performing for British audiences for decades.3<\/a><\/sup> Nor were such populations free from the pressures of racism. In 1919, for example, the year after British women over 30 were granted the vote, there was a wave of seaport riots in which white (often Irish) workers attacked African, Caribbean, South Asian, and Chinese workers and destroyed their businesses and property.4<\/a><\/sup> <\/span><\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t pedantic details: they\u2019re manifestations of a much larger truth, which is that no aspect of modern British history can be adequately understood without reference to the empire. During the eras of <\/span>Suffragette<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Downton<\/span><\/i>, the British Empire was at or near its greatest geographical extent, ruling over nearly a quarter of the world\u2019s land mass and governing millions of non-white people. Empire is the inescapable context for modern British history. <\/span><\/p>\n

To return to the suffrage example, restoring that context means recognizing a movement that approached empire both inclusively and instrumentally. As Sumita Mukherjee <\/span>recently pointed out<\/span><\/a>, representatives from India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies took part in a 1911 \u201cempire pageant\u201d in support of votes for women, and Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of a prominent Punjabi Sikh, was an active suffragette. At the same time, British suffragists argued for their right to the vote <\/span>based on the existence of empire<\/span><\/i>. British women, they argued, could bring new elements to politics that would benefit imperial as well as domestic governance. In Antoinette Burton\u2019s words, British suffragists \u201c<\/span>conceived of empire as a legitimate place for exhibiting their fitness for participation in the imperial nation-state,\u201d and indeed argued that they had a special, indispensable role to play in preserving Britain\u2019s imperial role.5<\/a><\/sup> As the famous patriotic song \u201cRule, Britannia!\u201d (1740) puts it, \u201cBritons never, never, never will be slaves.\u201d Pankhurst\u2019s use of the word \u201cslave\u201d <\/span>put the realities of women\u2019s legal status in Britain into a harsh, revealing light: upon marriage, a woman lost political rights, property rights, even the right to decline sex with her husband. But it rested upon a claim that British women were being denied their rightful role in an empire structured by racial hierarchy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The United States has much to learn from British history, especially the rise and fall of its effort to rule the world. We are ill-served by the beautiful escapist fantasies offered by <\/span>Downton<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Suffragette<\/span><\/i>, and, before them, <\/span>The Chequer Board<\/span><\/i>. England is a green and pleasant land, but it is not, and has never been, <\/span>a shire in which the difficult problems of racial inequality and histories of oppression that bedevil American political discourse simply disappear. Nor are American racial legacies unique: they grow out of the same larger patterns of colonialism and capitalism that produced modern British society. We can\u2019t come to grips with the current global situation without knowing the history of imperialism, of which our own legacy of transatlantic slavery is just one part. A more complete presentation of the British past would be one way to start learning that history.<\/span><\/p>\n

  1. Julian Smith, Nevil Shute<\/em> (Twayne Publishers, 1976), p. 78. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-century Liverpool<\/em> (Liverpool University Press, 2014) \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Hilary Moore, Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class (Ashgate, 2007), pp. 17-18. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism, and Resistance in Imperial Britain<\/em> (Liverpool University Press, 2009) \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  5. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 207. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u201cWe could desperately use a clear-eyed assessment of the messy, complicated country that ruled much of the world not so long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497,1982],"tags":[154,52,14,84,80],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-3339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-season-two","tag-american-studies","tag-britain","tag-history","tag-race","tag-television"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Fantasy of Whiteness - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cWe could desperately use a clear-eyed assessment of the messy, complicated country that ruled much of the world not so long ago.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/a-fantasy-of-whiteness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Fantasy of Whiteness - 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