Sir Lenny Henry in conversation with historian, broadcaster and film-maker David Olusoga on media diversity, institutional memory and racism in the UK television industry.
Lenny Henry: My colleagues and I set up the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University because we had this feeling that the industry often doesn’t learn from its mistakes or build on its successes. Why do you think history is so important in achieving media diversity?
David Olusoga: The thing history can bring to the debate about diversity and inclusion is an understanding of where race came from. These ideas are so deep, so ingrained within our society, that when we just talk about structural racism and we don’t talk about the historical process of construction, I don’t think we land that idea properly. These ideas did not come about of their own volition. This was not accidental. The idea of black inferiority, black intellectual inferiority, cognitive inferiority, behavioural inferiority – these things were invented and they were propagated in our societies for decade after decade by people with vast amounts of money and political power in order to justify slavery, the slave trade and then later, empire. Then they were armoured with pseudo-science.
I think the job of historians is to look at the process of construction and explain what the phrase ‘structural racism’ means. To make more people understand that this is not an extreme kind of racism that black people have made up to annoy white people. It’s an accurate terminology for an idea that was built and that needs to be deconstructed.
Lenny Henry: How much does your background as a historian shape how you view the media, television, film industries?
David Olusoga: I think it relates to the previous question. It makes me alert to the way race operates and what the tropes and the stereotypes are. What I see in my career is really nice, good, decent, liberal people acting in ways that reinforce stereotypes because they’ve never examined their thinking. I’m sure people would say I’m over-alert but I don’t believe I am, because actually there’s now a young generation who, almost instinctively, seem to be alert to these issues. But I see an industry full of people who’ve never thought – and get upset when they’re asked to think – about how race operates in our interactions with each other, in the ideas that they’re comfortable with and the ideas that they’re uncomfortable with, or in the positions in which they’re perfectly happy to see black people and the positions where it just feels uncomfortable to see black people.
What happens with black people in the media is there’s this slow realisation that it’s you and maybe two other people. As I say, nobody’s horrible but the status quo is that you guys are on your own.
Lenny Henry: And it’s damaging to people?
David Olusoga: One of the great subconscious biases in our society is a bias against the idea of subconscious bias. Because it’s seen to be a slight against people’s views and their status as a good person. But if you have a production in a city like London where the population is 48% BAME, and if we believe that ability and intelligence are equally distributed across all races – which we have to believe if we don’t believe in racism – then a random recruitment would create something close to the background of the city. And it’s nothing like the background of the city.
Lenny Henry: Do you think diversity and inclusion is getting better in the UK film and TV industry?
David Olusoga: I think it might be – but because of the past six months, not because of the past 30 years. If you asked me that question in January 2020 before Black Lives Matter, before the murder of George Floyd, I would have said I see very, very little progress. I see some progress in content, I see some progress in youth programming and again there’s a problem with seeing black people and youth as intersecting and overlapping, but I didn’t see much progress behind the camera.
That might be about to change. It seems to me that the initiatives do seem of a different order – although who’s going to hold people to account is a big question. But the level of urgency seems of a different order, people are saying things they haven’t said before. That makes me more hopeful. So, I don’t think we have seen change behind the camera but I think we have to hope that we might be about to see that change.
Lenny Henry: Yeah. They don’t want to have authority wielded over them by somebody that doesn’t look like them.
David Olusoga: If you look at the attitudinal studies done about race over the years, there seem to be two big fault lines. One is about interracial relationships and the other is about neighbours and if you would live next to someone. They always missed out the third one because it never seemed a possibility in the 50s when they were asking these attitudinal surveys: would you work for a black boss?
Lenny Henry: Can you imagine that, in post-war Britain?
David Olusoga: People were comfortable with black people driving the buses but they didn’t want them as neighbours and they didn’t want them going out with their daughter. They never thought about the possibility of saying, you know, I hope he’s running the bus company.
Lenny Henry: The way to change it is to increase who’s running things. It’s what we’ve been saying for years.
David Olusoga: I’ve noticed throughout my career when I’ve been in positions of authority that some people have really struggled to actually do what I say and to see that my judgement is valuable. I had an experience with an assistant producer: I’d devised a sequence and I’d spoken to a lot of historians and I thought it would work, and I’d asked the assistant producer to go and look into it and find the people and see if we could get access to the locations. And she had gone to my business partner and said, ‘David wants to do this, and I don’t think it’s right or appropriate’.
And my business partner said, ‘Well he’s written books on slavery and I haven’t, and he’s been a producer for 20 years, what’s the problem?’ If that had been the other way around, there’s not a chance she’d have come to me and said my business partner has this crazy idea and it’s not going to work. And, you know, we made the sequence and it made perfect sense. And it made perfect sense because I’d been making TV programmes since my late 20s… I’m really good at it.
I haven’t had that experience writing for newspapers or working for publishers. It’s only in television where I feel my confidence chipped away at. There’s something specifically wrong with television and I think it’s worse than other industries. It’s more insidious, it’s more damaging. People leave with their personality and their abilities and their sense of self more damaged in this industry than the others I’ve worked in.
The game plan
Lenny Henry: What lessons in more recent history can we draw upon to understand the situation we’re in now?
David Olusoga: We need to remember that every black movement for equality has been demonised. The example I’m fond of is that what’s happening to Black Lives Matter is exactly what happened to the African American veterans of the First World War who came back to America in 1919 having fought in the French army. They weren’t allowed to fight in the American army because white officers wouldn’t lead them into battle. They came back with medals on their chest having fought in what was called the Great War for civilisation and they began to make demands for equality. They made civil rights demands and their movement was tarred with being Bolshevik. Rather than civil rights in the 1920s, what you got was the Red Summer of 1919 when hundreds of black people were killed. I think 13 black soldiers were lynched for wearing their uniforms, returning from the war. You have this unleashed political campaign to say that these demands for black liberty and equality were radical and dangerous and communist.
And I think we need to realise that this game plan has worked before and it is now being applied to what is actually a movement rather than an organisation – a kind of global uprising against racism. There’s a blueprint and it’s being applied and we need to watch for the signs of it being applied. Also we need to imagine if it hadn’t been applied. Imagine if America had listened to calls for black equality in 1919 and they’d had civil rights in the 1920s, not the 1960s. America would be 40 years ahead of where it is now. It’s a tragedy that appeals for civil rights were tarred with being Bolshevik. It’s a tragedy for everybody.
Lenny Henry: Could you unpack that… Bolshevik as in having communist leanings, right?
David Olusoga: Yeah. They were said to have come back contaminated with the Bolshevism of the trenches. Remember there were revolutions and uprisings and rises of socialism all over the world and people did come back from the trenches with these ideas. They’d gone to France, they’d been treated too well, they’d been Frenchified, in the phrase of the time, and they’d come back with these uppity ideas of equality – because the French had spoiled them by treating them like human beings.
Exactly that game plan was applied in the days after the murder of George Floyd and if you go back to the newspapers and the discussion programmes, even Newsnight, in the days after George Floyd’s murder, one point was made over and over again: ‘Surely you’re not saying this applies here.’
There was an attempt to suggest that you couldn’t make parallels between Britain and America because of the issue of guns. Well, guns weren’t involved in the murder of George Floyd or Freddie Gray, or others. There’s all these devices used to say that American racism is of such a depth and ferocity that it can’t apply, and when black people see parallels in their lives and the experiences of African Americans, that they’re deluding themselves. That it’s a form of false consciousness. Well it didn’t work this time because it wasn’t just black Britons, it was black people all over the world, people of other minorities all over the world, in New Zealand and Tasmania, who saw the clear parallels between that situation and their own lives.
Being a black boss
Lenny Henry: You set up your own company, as did I. Again, bearing in mind everything we’ve just spoken about, is there anything we can learn from the past about what black company owners have had to do in order to succeed?
David Olusoga: There’s a view that the black community has not set up businesses as readily as some immigrant populations, and I think there’s a lot of problems with that. Black people have set up businesses, but also lots of black people have looked at the society they live in and the level of hostility aimed at them and they’ve asked, is this a society that is going to treat me fairly as a business owner when it can’t treat me fairly as an employee? Is this a society where I want to take a risk with my finances and the financial security of my family? A society that unleashes police forces that are deeply racist, that are exempted from the Race Relations Act, upon our communities.
I think black people have been less entrepreneurial in Britain because they’ve made an accurate assessment of the level of hostility aimed against them. And that’s been put down to a lack of entrepreneurial spark. Well, look at the entrepreneurialism of black people all over the world – in Africa, in the Caribbean. Looked what happened after slavery in Jamaica, there was just a rush to become farmers and market gardeners and to become traders. I come from a town called Ijebu Ode in Nigeria which is infamous for its traders who will bargain you down to your last penny. The stereotype against people from where I’m from in Nigeria is that they’re ruthless businessmen! You come to Britain, you’re black British, black people don’t do business.
Lenny Henry: The thing we always asked for was some kind of fund to provide a cushion but also to enable people to feel confident in setting up a business. If you feel like there’s a direct pipeline to money then it’s possible that your business might survive. Absolutely put gatekeepers on that money but have an open pipeline where a conversation can be had about creating something cool or something that not just a black audience will want. Because we all know that if a person of colour creates something, as Jazzie B puts it, the underground very quickly becomes the overground.
We can make things that have a global appeal. We don’t just make black things, we make things that have an overground appeal. And why wouldn’t you want to be in on that? So, make some development funds available and have some slots available for that and we can do business. But if we’re scrambling, we can’t do it… it’s very difficult, it’s like pushing a boulder uphill.
David Olusoga: A lot of black producers don’t have the networks, they don’t have the connections with the commissioners. Channel 4’s trying to get more companies to know more commissioners, and I think that’s sort of a help, but when people have known each other for years, in networks from which black people have been excluded, the domino effect is that you don’t know the people in positions of power. So the number of commissioners that you know, the number of people that you are pitching ideas to… I don’t know if any quantitative studies have been done but it seems to me that black companies don’t have that range of 50 commissioners from six broadcasters, that they’re targeting with ideas.
Black history is British history
Lenny Henry: How do you think the lack of media diversity shapes the way television approaches history programmes?
David Olusoga: There’s a huge presumption that the audience is familiar with a small number of historical stories and we just need to keep doing those over and over again. There’s a lack of interest in new subjects and the focus of interest is on new approaches to old subjects. Who Do You Think You Are has created an interest in documentary evidence and emotional journeys which I think has the possibility of encountering a broader range of stories.
But, the problem with the way we do black history is, ‘here is a self-contained, hermetically sealed, black history for the black people who are watching so we can tick a box’ or ‘here’s the black contribution to the stuff that we’ve done’. Not the story of how the exploitation of black people through slavery was one of the biggest industries of the 18th century, not how the cotton industry of the 19th century built on the enslavement of African Americans, accounted for 40 per cent of Britain’s exports and was the justification and the rationale for the damn civil war. Not the fact that the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was one of the biggest stories of the 19th century that repeatedly almost brought Britain, France and other countries to war.
Black history is British history, it seeps out into everything. We’re not marginal. We’re not a sidebar, we’re not a ‘nice to have an additional bit of colour’ for Black History Month. This is British history, it’s fundamental. Time and time again… and it’s not just black history. Take the story of the Battle of Britain. Tell the stories of the Polish and Czech pilots. They’ve never bothered to interview them! We don’t know about the Indian Army, the biggest volunteer army in the Second World War. The majority of soldiers who fought at Waterloo weren’t British. They were Belgian or Dutch or German or they spoke one of the German dialects. It’s a European battle, but we don’t know that.
The problem is the version of history we’ve got is bullshit, not that black history needs to exist alongside this myopic, whitewashed history. It’s that history is wrong and it’s written out the chapters that explain who the hell we are.
The infantilisation of blackness
Lenny Henry: That’s brilliant. I love to hear you talk about this because I never see you like this on television, you’re always so polite and smooth.
David Olusoga: Yes, because there’s the trope, the angry black guy.
Lenny Henry: You’re the Teddy Pendergrass of history, David!
David Olusoga: But it’s such a landmine to walk into, the angry black guy is just… ‘There we go. He’s angry, he’s unreasonable, he’s unbalanced. This isn’t objective, look at him, he’s emotional.’ For me to get emotional means I’m operating on the emotional spectrum and not the intellectual one. That would give them what they want.
Lenny Henry: People accept youth-skewed images of black and Asian and working class people of colour, but when we are talking about adult programming, it’s a very different matter.
David Olusoga: Think about the workings of anti-black racism and the idea, the fundamental idea, that black people were childish, that they had a level of mental capacity that was equivalent to that of European children. Lord Lugard, who was a governor of Nigeria, described Nigerians, my ancestors, as attractive children. Generations, from the 1860s until the 1960s of African American men, middle-aged men, elderly men, were called ‘boy’. There is an urge within anti-black racism as it emerged in the new world to call and to think of black people as children. As a result, you can see in the way that we approach race that there is a comfort with black people as children. Youth – I think you can see that in recruitment.
I’ve been doing this since I was 16. It’s an industry full of people who’re quite happy to have a junior black runner who they’re instructing and advising but less comfortable when the black person is their boss. Less comfortable when there’s a black person challenging their ideas. They’re comfortable with black people in performing roles but not in administrative and managerial roles.
But also there’s a fundamental willingness in programming to see youth programming and black programming as almost the same thing. I’ve heard nice, decent, liberal people in television say, ‘If you solve the youth problem, you solve the diversity problem’. And so, the answer to television’s lack of focus on black stories and black experiences is to have more things like BBC Three and T4 because that’s where black people are because black people are children. It’s deeply, deeply subconscious.
Making programmes about black history – this is just one example of many – I once had a shoot in a church in Jamaica, and I was in the edit and all of the shots they’d used were of the children. Now, this is a church in Jamaica, most people are elderly, they are incredibly well-dressed, they are visually so attractive and appealing. And this is about history, this is about the role of religion in the creation of a moral mission for Britain in the 19th century. Why were the editor and the director more comfortable with the shots of children? This is the way race plays out. These ideas are so deeply ingrained in our society that we swim in a water that’s poisoned by them and we don’t see when they operate through us. And the infantilisation of blackness is one of the big tropes of racism.
The race/class nexus
Lenny Henry: Is there one historical/academic study you want the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity to embark upon? We’ve got all these academics waiting for David to tell us what to do. What would your recommendation be?
David Olusoga: I think we need to be smarter on the nexus between race and class. The thing that’s unspoken is how wealth allows people to build TV careers. It’s anecdotal but there’s no research. When I was a producer what was said, the truism of the time, was that you had to leave the BBC in order to advance. And the rich kids whose parents had literally bought them a house, could give up a staff job, go and work for the indies for nine months and come back and be my boss. I’d lived through the eighties in the north east where shipyards closed and my mates had to leave school and go and live somewhere else because they couldn’t afford the rent on their house. The idea of giving up any form of financial security when I had no safety net at all, was just not a possibility. Just culturally, never mind financially, not a possibility.
It’s almost unspoken that those realities are not valid in this discussion. These are the rules, we don’t care that they impact on some people differently to others. We don’t care that those with wealth and family money and safety nets can get over that hurdle easily – that’s just the way it is. And that sort of blindness to the impact of institutional culture is incredibly damaging.
I was a researcher on a shoot and the production manager was furious with this runner because he didn’t want to go and get lunch for the crew. And the reason was because he didn’t have the money in his bank account. The presumption is that you’ve got a couple of grand in your bank account as a float and you can afford to wait six weeks for a crap expenses system to pay you back. This kid’s trying to work out whether he can pay his rent or whether he’ll be waiting for the money to come back from buying lunch for a cameraman who’s making, you know, 900 quid a day. It didn’t occur to her. I’ve seen these things operate, but I’ve never seen them studied.
Lenny Henry: David, thank you.
Why historical perspective is important in analysing media diversity efforts
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Racism is “structural”, we need to understand the origins of those structures to address current problems.
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Black people are traditionally entrepreneurial - if BAME-led indies are not being set up we need to look at the business environment, not blame black producers.
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Race and class are not separate issues - there needs to be more analysis of how the two intersect.
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We should seek to expand the range of historical topics we think an audience will find interesting.
This is a transcript of a conversation which took place over Zoom on 16th September 2020, produced and edited by Marcus Ryder.