‘How come Chris Rock can do a routine and everybody finds it hilarious and groundbreaking and then I go and do the exact same routine, same comedic timing, and people file a complaint to corporate? Is it because I’m white and Chris is black?’
This scene summarises the significance of context and intent in a much better way than the thousands of tedious blog posts and think pieces on the same subject, including the one you are currently reading.
Incidentally, it’s become very fashionable to say that the US Office ‘only really gets going in series two’, which is absolute rubbish. The first episode is not great, as it’s a direct remake of the UK original, but the rest of the series – including this episode – is excellent. I’m aware it’s strange to stop in the middle of an essay, in what is otherwise a credible and excellent book, to talk about a sitcom that ended in 2013 but I just think it’s a point that’s really worth making. Anyway – the message here is context is key and Steve Carell is great.
So I was now the Confused Muslim. I wanted to contact someone, but there was no one to contact. Quickmeme was just the host website, there was no way of tracing who did it originally. The anonymity of the internet is a real problem. It facilitates the culture of ‘trolling’ – it’s easy to say anything to someone when you don’t sign your name to it. That’s why ‘KINGOF69ING’ can spout whatever hateful nonsense he wants without fear of reprisal. In my case, it meant that someone could steal my face, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt like Nicholas Cage in Face/Off before he steals John Travolta’s face. Or maybe it’s the other way round. I can’t remember – whichever one the good one was.
In any case, the picture was a publicity photo and so was supposed to be put into the public domain. This wasn’t what we had intended if I’m honest. They say all publicity is good publicity, but I’m not sure the term ‘all’ covers ‘publicity that doesn’t have your name on it and somehow could make you look like either the victim or perpetrator of a low-level hate crime’. If they did, then I salute the inventor of that phrase for the specificity of their foresight.
Without any way to trace the creator, it fell to me to establish how they had got my picture. No one had sought permission so, how had this happened? I googled the phrase ‘Confused Muslim’, hit the images tab and then saw a picture of my face. Then I worked backwards by clicking on the picture. It was a link to a review of my Edinburgh show. It quoted a line from my show where I described myself as ‘one of the few people that’s regularly confused with being both a Muslim and a Jew’. That meant that the Google algorithm, or whatever the technical term is, had picked on two words from that sentence when you searched for ‘Confused Muslim’. Incidentally the other pictures on the search were Omid Djalili and Jesus Christ. What incredible company to keep. I’ve always seen myself as the mid-point between those two (this is obviously a joke, I don’t want to start getting angry emails from ardent fans of Omid Djalili). This also means that if some other idiot decides to balance things out by doing a ‘Confused Jew’ meme, it’ll probably be my fucking face again.
I posted the meme on my Facebook wall and my Twitter page, to friends and sympathisers of my comedy (I can’t quite bring myself round to the idea that I have ‘fans’, I prefer to think of them as people who tolerate, rather than actively enjoy, my humour).
I had expected people to react with incredulity and outrage on my behalf. However, my expectations were quickly confounded. Instead of being passive, the internet – or at least my miniscule section of it – went to work defacing the entire meme. People started posting things like ‘This is a comedian called Nish Kumar’ and ‘Is the Confused Muslim meme, isn’t a Muslim’. A couple of my friends used it to settle some scores: ‘Nish Kumar owes me a fiver’. Sadly as these are all anonymous I have no way of knowing who that fiver belongs to so will never return it. It may have something to do with those texts my friend Ed keeps sending me saying ‘you owe me money’. I guess we’ll never know, and in any case, I’ve already spent that fiver on sweets.
I often think about the person who created the meme. I imagine that they’re pretty frustrated. The great thing about doing memes about cats is that cats don’t tend to have the internet and ruin the meme by having their friends write things like ‘Mr Whiskers did not sanction the use of this photo’. And if they do we’ve all got much bigger problems than my face being stolen.
There were no reprisals, or at least none of the kind that my family were worried about. When I told my mother she speculated that I’d be banned from America. I had to inform her that the CIA were probably not spending their time trawling through Quickmeme looking for suspects, otherwise Guantanamo Bay would be full of cats and that guy who sang ‘Chocolate Rain’. On the plus side, if they were, it certainly would have livened up the second series of Homeland.
My dad was worried that it would offend religious extremists. I had to inform him that they were too busy being offended by absolutely everything in the world to worry about me. The only people I’d really been worried about offending were ordinary Muslims, who have nothing to do with terrorism and spend their time having to deal with reprisals for the actions of lunatics that have nothing to do with them. My friend, the comedian Tez Ilyas, has reassured me that they discussed it at the last big Muslim meeting, and I’m fine. However, I suspect Tez to be lying about the existence of these meetings as he always smiles as he mentions them. Then when I ask him about why he’s smiling, he claims he’s ‘remembering a joke that he heard at the meeting and I wouldn’t get it because I wasn’t there’, which seems pretty plausible.
The meme itself served as the inspiration for my 2013 Edinburgh show Nish Kumar is a Comedian, a show which most critics agreed was ‘another comedy show by Nish Kumar’. Within the comedy community, it is generally agreed that the second show is the hardest one to write, a phenomenon musicians refer to as ‘second album syndrome’ and further evidence that all comedians just secretly wish we were as cool as musicians. The consensus was that I was given a pretty substantial hand by the meme, with one of my friends claiming ‘the internet is writing your show for you’ – an opinion with which I found it hard to disagree. Ironically, more people probably found out about the meme through me talking about it in my show than if I had just kept my big mouth shut. I had managed to spin a minor internet-based incident into a moderately successful comedy show, like some kind of poundshop Dave Gorman.
If you visit the website, you’ll see that the meme still exists, as a monument to the strange, brief period when I was the ‘confused Muslim’. That seems like as good a place as any to leave things – what with that being the name of the meme and all. It gives a nice sense of circularity and strikes a definitive tone. To be honest the rest of this all seems a bit unnecessary. I’m sure they’ll edit it out of the finished book, in any case.
Forming Blackness through a Screen
Reni Eddo-Lodge
I have just finished writing a book about whiteness. This was a book about whiteness as a political force, how it settles like a blanket on our comprehension, how it seeps, and strangles, and silences. I wrote about whiteness from the perspective of an outsider, who – despite my university-educated, well-spoken relative privilege – has always been locked out of whiteness’s exclusivity clause. Dissecting political whiteness is paramount to understanding how racism operates in Britain. So often positioned as invisible, neutral, and benign, whiteness taints every interaction we’ll ever engage in.
But now I am at a loss. And although I am not a fan of binaries, spending so much time staring into the face of whiteness has forced me to ponder my blackness.
My blackness as a whole, defined not in opposition to a dominant majority, nor constructed as an undesirable ‘other’ by racialised forces intent on denigrating it. To ponder my blackness. Not the blackness that is tacked on to the phrase BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] for flimsy equality and diversity purposes by public sector organisations beholden to the Race Relations Act.
No. Blackness defined by black folks. The celebration of melanin. For as long as I could comprehend the world, I only knew I was black because I was sure I wasn’t white.
Now I want to talk about blackness, our representations of it, how we understand ourselves through the eyes of someone else. How, when I was growing up, the positive black-led and black-owned representations of blackness weren’t to be found in the British Isles. Instead, they were being imported from the United States. With globalisation, this is par for the course for all aspects of our pop culture. Yet when it comes to blackness, American-centric media contributed to an erasure here.
It was a kind of displacement that went hand-in-hand with Britain’s collective forgetting of black contributions to British history. The black history I learned in school was about the United States. I learned in school that on December 1st 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat at the front of the bus, setting off a chain of events that resulted in a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. But I didn’t learn that less than a decade later, a similar bus boycott took place in Bristol,14 roughly 106 miles west from the stuffy south London classroom I was learning these facts in. British black history, positioned across the Atlantic, was as real to me as The Simpsons, and that was a tragedy.
I had an incredibly strong sense of heritage. Being a third generation Nigerian immigrant is not something your extended family will let you forget. I knew where I came from, but I struggled to see where I was presently at. I needed anchoring, but the legacy of blackness I kept seeing was characterised as thoroughly American.
As a nineties child, I came of age before social media had really taken off, before normal girls were DIY-ing their own media in their bedrooms, creating blogs and YouTube channels, and reassuring their peers that black is beautiful.
I relied on television. My life was pretty sheltered. I ricocheted from the small council flat that I shared with my mum, to my school around the corner, and occasionally to a childminder. I was the only black child in a class of 30 in suburban south London. I have memories of my little white girl classmates trying to convince me that because my skin was black, my tongue was black too. I have memories of an art teacher encouraging my class to draw our ‘beautiful blue eyes’ whenever we got the crayons and sugar paper out. Everything around me was so starkly white that I began to believe that I would turn white sooner or later. I was quietly being written out of the narrative of humanity in my immediate surroundings.
I needed to find a blackness that was vaguely relevant to a tall, skinny, London-born-and-raised Nigerian girl, and that wasn’t to be found in after school and Saturday morning television. When you’re young, you translate yourself through representations of people who look like you. And when those characters look like you, but were of a different continent, and a different culture, it invited a kind of cognitive dissonance.
The first black family I saw on television was on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. For many late-eighties and early-nineties babies, the Banks were the archetypal black family, that all black people should be aiming to be. They were affluent and upper-middle-class, well-dressed, and incredibly well-educated. They even came complete with Geoffrey, the (black) British butler. It was a complete transgression against the reality of the majority of black families’ lives in America at the time, let alone black families in the UK. Even today, 20 years after these episodes first aired, white households in the States hold on average 16 times more wealth than black households. Despite the continued growth of the black middle class in the US, at the time, the Banks family were a total fantasy. And that was OK, because light-hearted entertainment is supposed to help us escape from the drudge of reality.
The Fresh Prince was as much about class as it was about race. The whole point of the show was examining the social faux pas that came about when lower-class Will went to live with his upper-class family. From west Philadelphia, to Bel-Air in Los Angeles. It was class that provided the most laughs, from the clashes between Will’s relatives and his friend Jazz, to the withering looks of Geoffrey the butler.
As well as The Fresh Prince, I was peripherally aware of the Huxtable family on The Cosby Show, although it was a little bit before my time. As far as I can tell, the set-up was essentially the same. The Huxtables, based in Brooklyn rather than Los Angeles, were another wealthy black family breaking stereotypes. Like The Fresh Prince, the show had its affable, loveable patriarch, traditional family values, and more morals of the story at the end of an episode than you could shake a book of Aesop’s Fables at.
But, whilst casting blackness in a positive light, the black American characters I watched were not allowed to be complex. Everyone was good deep down. If they misbehaved, it was never out of ill will, and any intra-family disagreements would be cleared up before the end of the episode. Perhaps this black-led programming was responding to programming that had gone before it that represented black people as a monolith – lazy, uneducated and stupid. These were simplistic, narrow, and binary narratives that didn’t afford us any humanity. It was predictable (and understandable), then, that the black-led response did just the opposite.
I watched black nuclear families – successful, moral along conservative Christian lines, educated and wealthy families – who deeply loved one another despite the light trials and tribulations they might endure throughout the span of a 23-minute episode. And I got it. After centuries of racist depictions of blackness, from blacked-up actors in theatre to blackface minstrels, black programme makers wanted to put their best foot forward, and not let the side down. They probably thought that in order to encourage successful black families, they had to show them in the first place. Almost 200 of The Cosby Show’s episodes were written by Bill Cosby himself, whilst the legendary TV and music producer Quincy Jones was at the helm of The Fresh Prince.
But this defensive, albeit understandable, response was just as binary and just as simplistic as the overtly racist depictions of blackness before it. It would take another couple of decades of fighting regressive stereotypes until black characters could be afforded the same kind of complexity, humanity and sometimes downright mundanity that depictions of white male characters had enjoyed for centuries.
And of course, the lionisation of the small ‘c’ conservative, wealthy and successful black family in these television programmes was nothing more than naked respectability politics. This was the logical conclusion of these faux positive representations of blackness, and it couldn’t have been more obvious when the now disgraced, but then widely celebrated, black patriarch Bill Cosby delivered his ‘Pound Cake’ speech to an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] event in 2004. This was the speech that launched his career as a conservative cultural commentator, and considering that The Cosby Show was initially based on Cosby’s stand-up sketches, it wasn’t surprising that respectability was a consistent theme in his work.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Cosby to his audience. ‘These people set, they opened the doors, they gave us the right, and today, ladies and gentlemen, in our cities and public schools we have fifty per cent drop out. In our own neighbourhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. (Clapping.) No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child. (Clapping.)
‘If you knock that girl up, you’re going to have to run away because it’s going to be too embarrassing for your family. In the old days, a girl getting pregnant had to go down South, and then her mother would go down to get her. But the mother had the baby. I said the mother had the baby. The girl didn’t have a baby. The mother had the baby in two weeks. (Laughter.) We are not parenting. Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people, they are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards – isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? (Laughter.)’
Ever the conservative traditionalist, Cosby blamed black people for everything, spouting rh
etoric more commonly found behind closed doors at posh dinner parties. ‘Those people are not Africans,’ he said. ‘They don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.
‘Now look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. Fifty per cent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry.’
Cosby’s pound cake speech revealed the class hatred of respectability politics.
Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress better and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop their racist ways. Respectability politics puts all of its faith in racist gatekeepers (telling us that we must change to appeal to their inherent, good-natured humanity), and puts none if its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life anyway they can. Poverty is narrow and limiting. People work within the confines of it. That they have to do that is not the problem. Poverty itself is the problem.
So, how could a lanky kid from London go about asserting black Britishness after a childhood full of seeing blackness through a conservative American cultural lens? I searched for a bit of authenticity amidst the onslaught for many years, eventually cutting off all my hair and hoping for the best, letting it grow back in tight curls, and spending time getting used to them. These were the bits of me that I had tried to erase, in pursuit of looking like the pretty, light-skinned American black women on the TV. I am loath to write about a monolithic blackness, because I know it doesn’t really exist in that way. So I settled on exploring my own. To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either. It is about both consuming versions of blackness, digging around in history until you get confirmation that you were there, whilst creating your own for the present and the future. It is up to you to make your own version of blackness in any way you can – trying on all the different versions, altering them until they fit.
The Good Immigrant Page 8