Arguments Against Black Britons

While invalidating black Britons’ experiences of racism as unauthentic is objectively wrong, and one cannot deny the ramifications of American imperialism on the formation of black identity across countries, others argue these claims are based on the false idea that experience of racism can actually be independent of the systems that enacts it (Haile 2017). They argue that minimizing the specifics of a racial experience, or as articulated by Alcoff, stripping them of their historical context, is a benign form of erasure that unites in spite of other struggles (Haile 2017). While black people are united under a shared experience of racism, and black Britons may have a connection to American black experiences because they have been outside participants …show more content…
This point of view pulls from Fanon’s ideas about the power of language in shaping inward and outward identities. There seems to be a consensus in the industry that British actors are better trained, due to their traditional backgrounds in theatre, implying a sort of class superiority compared to American actors, black and otherwise (Haile 2017). Further, these sentiments often come from black American filmmakers, for example Director Ava DuVernay, who cast Brits to play both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in Selma, once said “Our system of creating actors is a lot more commercial… there’s a depth of character building that’s really wonderful” (Haile 2017). This opinion is unfounded, of course, as plenty American actors are also classically trained, but is an implicit desire to conform to whiteness (as implied by the descriptors “traditional” and “classical” compared to “commercial”) at the base of these casting decisions? Never mind that what makes Brits an “other”, their accents, are undetectable when they play American roles, but there may be an aspect of performativity of whiteness in order to attain a certain status involved in these