Cast Aside

If we spent half the time not talking about the differences but the similarities between us, the entire planet would have a shift in the way we deal with each other. As humans, we are obsessed with race. And that obsession can really hinder people’s aspirations, hinder people’s growth. Racism should be a topic for discussion, sure. Racism is very real. But from my perspective, it’s only as powerful as you allow it to be. I stopped describing myself as a Black actor when I realised it put me in a box. We’ve got to grow. We’ve got to. Our skin is no more than that: it’s just skin. Rant over.
Idris Elba “Becoming Idris Elba” Esquire Magazine

Dear Idris Elba: You cannot opt out of racism, even if you are a celebrity.

In a recent interview, Elba said he no longer refers to himself as a Black actor because the label put him in a box and an obsession with race can hinder aspirations and growth. He also said racism is only as powerful as you allow it to be. The interview was featured in numerous outlets and was met with much praise.

But here’s the problem: ignoring a leaky pipe doesn’t fix a leaky pipe, just like not talking about racism doesn’t make racism go away. It is by NOT talking about these things that you give more power to these problems.
Paul Lapido LinkedIn Post

Mr. Elba, however, never advocates for “not talking about racism.” He explicitly says the opposite.

When I read Mr. Lapido’s post on LinkedIn, the lack of any links or direct citations stood out for me. I’m familiar enough with the World Wide Web and things posted on it to know that I should look up the “recent interview” in question.

My father once told me a parable, if you will, about the Black community in the United States. He likened it to a cast (and I am told that this is actually the collective noun for crabs) in a bucket. Whenever one crab would start to climb out of the bucket, the other crabs would seek to amputate its legs with their claws, ensuring that it stayed in the bucket. In this way, the crab ensured that none of them escaped the bucket. Now that I’m older, and have learned more about the world, and how people navigate it, I can more easily make sense of the story.

Cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand noted something about social groups: “Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds,” where “tight” refers to strict following of social norms. “Loose” cultures, on the other hand, are more laid back. Mark Anthony Neal, African and African-American studies professor at Duke University, also noted this: “I think that’s always been a tension in Black culture, around this idea of America’s rugged individualism and the collectivity of Blackness that was born out of necessity because of segregation. [...] But for folks who are pushed out of the mainstream — you know, Black folks have rarely had the luxury of thinking about just simply being themselves. And I think that’s always going to be an ongoing tension — this idea of America that’s rooted in individualism, that’s rooted in transactional practices. ‘I do this for you and you do this for me.’ Folks who come from a collective standpoint where, ‘I do this for you, but you’re doing this for us’ — that’s a very, very different way of seeing the world.”

And not only is Black American culture “tight,” especially by the standards of some other communities in the United States, but many Black people have difficulty understanding that some people live in, and have adapted to, looser worlds. Like Idris Elba. And even he hasn’t gone completely off the reservation, as it were (although Mr. Elba is a Briton, rather than an American). He simply has come to a conclusion that any number of other people, including Mr. Lapido, have come to: “that talking or worrying about racism every 5 minutes is exhausting and counterproductive.” But Mr. Lapido, like many Black Americans, is of the opinion that the path to a just world in the future is to remind people, time and again, of the injustice of the present.

But the rub lies in the fact that those Black people who have made it, for the most part, have not taken that path. Idris Elba didn’t get to where he is by constantly talking about how unjust he expects the world to be towards him.

For a lot of Black people, however, that feels like someone who managed to escape the bucket looking down on them. Someone who has made it is now turning his back on the collective, since he needs nothing from them. Which, while understandable, is a shame, because it closes off what could be multiple productive avenues of tackling the problem. Would steering more conversations towards what we have in common fix the situation? I have no idea. But I suspect it’s unlikely to make things any worse. And not because they can’t get worse; nearly the entirety of the history of the United States is a litany of “worse” when it comes to race and racism.

Mr. Lapido is calling for Mr. Elba to “return” to the fold of a chorus of voices, all singing from the same hymnal of past injustice and requests (or demands) for recompense. It is, basically, a recitation of the effects of the social distance that has been created between White and Black America. Mr. Elba, on the other hand, believes in simply closing that distance, and in doing so, forestalling future injustices. What sets them apart is how they perceive that distance, and how it acts on them.

In my own experience, I have come to the conclusion that racism, like so many other things, is a box. But the way it acts of people varies. The farther one is able to climb up the social ladder, the less racism is a box that others impose on one, and the more it becomes a limit that one places on oneself. Hence, Mr. Elba’s statement that he stopped describing himself as a Black actor because he realized that it placed him in a box. Because at the level he’s at, the petty grievances of some studio executive are unlikely to be a problem for him. After all, he has a remarkable variety of film roles to his name, and is in high demand. Is this the reality of people scraping to get by in America’s urban housing projects? No; for them, the box is very different. Its walls are made of the expectations and reactions of the more affluent people around them; the people whose choices very nearly entirely dictate the trajectories of their lives. When Amy Cooper called 911 to falsely report that birdwatcher Christian Cooper threatened her (Remember that?), she had done so with the understanding that she would be believed, and he wouldn’t. (Why she held this expectation when she knew the interaction was being recorded is another matter.) The video was all the evidence anyone needed, and Mr. Cooper came out of the situation none the worse for wear, but it’s generally understood that without it, things could have gone much worse. Mr. Elba can acknowledge that without having to live it on a daily basis.

But the relative tightness of Black culture in the United States demands collective actions. And it pushes, hard, against people who, for whatever reason, take it into their heads to go in a different direction. When I was young, I saw it as a fight that didn’t need to happen. Now that I’m older, it seems unavoidable, because Black culture is unlikely to loosen up enough to be at peace with those who defy the groupthink anytime soon. Still, the waste of energy is lamentable.