Bun Babylon
Media Round-Up:
Silent Roars (BFI Player - Free): A short doc about female influencers on social media, shot with the hollow beauty of a John Lewis advert. It feels very #BeKind feminism, especially in its strange equivocation of the anti-blackness and transmisogyny Munroe Bergdorf faces with the misogyny (but also genuine criticisms!!!) that white influencer activists face.
Deep Red Instant Love (BFI Player - Free): This is a really fun, colourful and hilarious short satire of the supermarket and consumerism.
The Last of England (BFI Player- Subscription): Easily my favourite Jarman film. Poetic and harrowing but also beautiful? Such a specific queer lens on Thatcher’s London with so many layers to unpack.
Unknown Language: Unlike anything I’ve really read before? The book is a real dreamlike experience that you should absolutely get onto.
X
If you’re reading this now you probably know that England lost the Euros final. It didn’t come home and it was lost on penalties. Specifically, penalties were missed by three Black players: Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho.
In many ways this is what Black people have been dreading. Both the press and the fans had largely put away their overt racism when the England team was winning, but as soon as they lost, the racism came back in full force. Especially since it was Black players that missed penalties.
On the night itself I had several discussions with my friends who were out watching the game about how to get home safe - and what would happen if England lost. We had to constantly be checking up to make sure people were safe. And I think what hit me afterwards was, what the fuck sort of country is this? Where we have to pray a team wins so that we can be safe in public? Why the fuck are we practically held hostage by this shit with people afraid to even leave their homes?
This could easily just be a series of questions and frustrations but there are two main thing I want to unpack here, the first is the figure of the Black Hero and the second is about the way that people engage with football.
Part 1 - Making a Black Hero
There are many ways to unpack the framing and representation of Black players in this tournament but I am going to focus on two players in particular. The first is Saka and the second is Rashford.
In the conversation about Saka he was always presented as The Pure Child. This was most clearly exemplified by the memeifying of him floating on an inflatable unicorn. On the one hand I’m happy that the 19-year old was getting to be young. Black people are rarely positioned that way or given the grace that comes with it. Instead we’re guilty adults from the moment we leave the womb.
On the other hand, this insistence on his innocence and purity still feels a little…off. it almost feels like his goodness has been emphasised in opposition to others of his kind. He’s the good boy unlike Raheem Sterling who has a tattoo of a gun on his leg or any other Black man who is dragged through the press for supposed imperfections. This position of protection is predictably fragile. He must now be the picture of perfection, the Good Negro, the Boy who proves them all wrong. This boyishness has been ascribed to Black men throughout history as part of the paternalistic framework through which white people could justify upholding a racial hierarchy. So when white people jump to protect this Good Boy (like they would a dog more so than a human) I can help but feel a way about it,
The second man I’ll focus on here is Marcus Rashford. He is constantly presented as the self sacrificing hero, the real Leader of the Opposition - this only intensified when he got racist abuse from fans in the wake of missing a penalty at the Euros final.
Once again, it is nice to see a Black player who is beloved by the nation instead of being hated - but we have to look at what it took to get there. Rashford had to raise over £20 mill and force the UK Government to make U-turns on policy to be given that elevated status - all that someone like Harry Kane has to do is score goals. As can be seen here with white people now expecting him to constantly be working outside of his job description to fix child poverty because he is this ‘hero’ that rose above their expectations of his Blackness to do something spectacular.
I’ve never played anything for a national team, but from my own experiences of being positioned as The Exceptional Negro, there are some advantages to it. You experience a little less direct violence and have access to some opportunities that others don’t. However, it is an enormous weight to hold on your head and deeply restrictive, you feel like you have to perform a specific version of yourself 100% of the time lest this incredibly fragile position be taken away.
Aside from contributing to these racist Good Negro narratives, the lionising (lol) of these players also individualises the issues they face. The question of racism then isn’t about the violence that the British state and English society exercise on Black people (and POC writ large) as a collective, it becomes about a few shitty people saying shitty things to Heroic Men. This is exemplified most clearly when people were putting #StopHate on social media as a result of the abuse these Black players were getting. It becomes abstracted from an issue of racism and is now an issue of vaguely defined ‘hate’.
That abstraction then shuts off critical thought. We end up with inane discussions about social media and people calling for legislation like the Online Harms Act which would further securitise the internet and make it an even harder place for minorities to just exist.
As such, Englishness as a cultural object doesn’t need to be interrogated. We don’t need to talk about how at this point it is largely an empty cipher for whiteness to be laundered through, or how the construction of modern England (and Britain) is based on the past and present violences against the marginalised communities whose exceptionalised icons are now being hailed as heroes. Instead we can use England flags to cover over the racist defacing of the mural of Marcus Rashford (whose ancestors were almost certainly enslaved by people who believed in that same flag) and ignore the inherent contradictions therein.
Even if these heroes get protection and sympathy, what happens to the people who aren’t that visible? Or for Black women who are less likely to be slotted into the Hero mould? We owe nothing to this Babylon but now we are expected to be its heroes?
I want niggas who are complete and utter dickheads, but still know how to score goals/make tackles etc. to be worthy of dignity. I want niggas off the street to be worthy of dignity. I want niggas with criminal records to be worthy of dignity. I want niggas still behind bars to be worthy of dignity. I want niggas to be worthy of dignity just because we are people.
Part 2 - Sit in the contradiction
I’m also going to talk a little about the way in which so many people whose politics are generally pretty sceptical of the British state (and Englishness in particular) approached their very loud support for the English team. To start off, as much as I’m not the biggest football fan, I’m not actually criticising the mere fact of people engaging with it, I fuck with a lot of deeply problematic media and institutions all the time - the thing I want to interrogate is how people engaged.
The main frustrating thing for me was the presentation of supporting the England team as some progressive cause. You saw this in the media and on socials, from liberals to communists. This relied on a few different premises.
The first of these is that football is a uniquely working class and should be given more support/leeway by the left on that basis. In many ways that is true, football is one of the few ways that working class people can actually push past the stratified English class system to gain capital (though I would question overstating or fetishsing that). It’s also one of the few areas of life which has a pretty consistent cross-class appeal. Beyond that, a lot of the criticisms of football and football fans become proxies through which working class people can be attacked.
However, this narrative is a little flawed. To frame football fans as uniquely working class ignores the reality of how expensive football tickets and season passes are. When the cheapest tickets for the Euro 2020 final were £295 a head and the most expensive were close to a thousand (and that’s before you get to scalpers), it’s hardly an accessible sport to spectate. This focus on football as working-class is reflective of a particular kind of view of class as a series of aesthetic markers rather than a series of material relations.
Another narrative here was that this England team were good lads with progressive politics. Again, this isn’t without truth. They did all take the knee and most of them seem like genuinely nice people.
The problem is that the political side of this was projection. There are maybe a handful of people on that squad who you could reasonably tell me the politics of without knowing them personally or making baseless assumptions. Also while taking the knee is a positive gesture, it’s just that - a gesture. Keir Starmer also took the knee, but then called BLM a moment and continues to support ‘tough on crime’ narratives which will disproportionately increase state violence against Black and brown people. None of this means anything without the action to back it up.
They also weren’t proving the racists wrong either. The fans who were booing them taking the knee were the same ones who were chanting that it was coming home when they beat Denmark. All these racists learned is the same they always learn, that they can have their cake and eat it. That they can be violently antiblack and a few individuals may face consequences but the monkeys will continue to dance for them. This isn’t an indictment of the Black players, I have no clue what I’d do in their position, but it is me saying that we shouldn’t pretend like there were progressive victories here.
The third key narrative was that you could separate the English national team from England as a whole and the British state.
This is perhaps the most nonsensical. There is a reason why Priti Patel, the head of what is arguably the most transparently racist government departments, donned an England kit and posed for a camera to show her celebrating the games. There is a reason why the opposition were tripping over themselves to show support for the teams. There is a reason why Downing Street was covered in flags. Football is an extremely powerful political object, and nowhere is this clearer than the national team.
A lot of people insist on their support being tongue-in-cheek because being a full-throated English nationalist is gauche. I think there’s something to be said for POC ironically donning the aesthetics/language often used to oppress us, thought I think this argument is often used to avoid interrogating the complicated feelings of fealty that a lot of POC have to this country. When it comes to white people in particular, the supposed irony is an even thinner cover which was tired when Morrissey used it. You’re telling me that (regardless of race) you don’t feel something rise in your chest when you chant, surrounded by red, white and booze? That this feeling somehow doesn’t touch any other part of your lives? You’re a person living in the imperial core and nobody is immune to propaganda.
Once again I’m not actually saying that someone who supports the English national team is morally repugnant. I am a critic who writes about media which comes from industries full of exploitation of various kinds and which often (re)produces nationalist myths. The thing I am saying is that the search for moral absolution is a fool’s errand. You are human. You make compromises. So sit in that contradiction. Sit in that awkwardness. Be critical. Analyse what you’re consuming instead of pretending like your consumption is a sort of revolutionary praxis.
That’s when we can have the real discussions which move beyond the bullshit pretense of purity.