Fausterella

The creator of Midsomer Murders, Brian True-May, has been suspended for his comments about the lack of non-white faces on the show.

The countryside isn't white. It's green and brown, mainly.

Asked about the whiteness of the village in which the show is set, he said, “…we just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them.”

In other words, an English village is only English if it’s all white. The implication here – not even an implication, really – is that only white people can be English. I’m sure the BNP would enthusiastically agree. But it’s not true. It’s not true legally, obviously, and it’s not true in practice. The history of England is a history of immigration, and hurray for that.

That last paragraph shouldn’t need saying at all, but I know it does, because lots and lots of white English people would agree with Brian True-May, and that’s very depressing.* And then those people will talk about how white people are really the ones being discriminated against these days, although they’d be hard-pressed to find much evidence to back that up, but then that’s not the point, is it? Groups of people who have power never want to acknowledge that they have it. It’s a lot more satisfying to pretend you don’t have power and privilege, because then you can complain about being victimised. Which is particularly annoying for the actual victims of discrimination: not only are they dealing with institutional racism (or sexism or all the other prejudices people have to deal with), the people doing it are also demanding sympathy.

I love English villages. I love duck ponds and cottages and cream tea, and mysterious bodies found in the library of the local manor house, and little old ladies who ramble on endlessly about knitting and then turn out to have known who the murderer was all along. None of that depends on anyone’s skin colour or ethnicity – or religion or gender or sexual orientation. If Brian True-May thinks it does, he’s the wrong person to be writing about it.

*A few links – I could post dozens – to show what I mean:

- There is massive discrimination shown in workplaces, still.

- Objects can be casually divided up into, effectively, ‘normal‘ and ‘ethnic‘, as if not having a white face was some kind of weird aberration.

- People who don’t think they are racist are often still racist, just less aware of it.