I first noticed it 10 years ago while watching a BBC adaptation of Graham Greene’s famous 1938 gangster novel Brighton Rock. Considered a very violent book for its time, it was famously filmed in 1948 as a classic piece of British noir starring a young Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, the hoodlum with the sharp suits and penchant for throwing acid in his rivals’ faces.

But in the BBC adaptation there was something wrong. Pinkie’s gang, Dallow, Spicer and Cubitt, were depicted in the novel as runtish and impulsively violent criminals, but there was one thing about them that was clear from the prose; they were all White. In this version, however, Dallow was Black. The notion that an English south coast gangster just before World War II would be anything other than White is absurd, and I assumed this was just the usual BBC tokenism. However, over the next decade it would become increasingly common for producers to cast Black actors in what were obviously White parts. Today it seems almost mandatory.

Going forward a decade we find another BBC drama which tells the story of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII’s famed six spouses, and executed for her troubles in 1536. The actress playing Anne was Black. While the fictional Dallow in Brighton Rock being Black can be dismissed as a by-product of BBC moral rectitude, casting a woman who history and portraiture tell us was a White Englishwoman is operating in different territory. Anne Boleyn was born in Norfolk in England circa 1501. Her father was a knight who had attended the burial of Henry VII. Again, the idea she could have been Black makes no historical sense whatsoever. But that is not the point.

Interviews with the acting profession are rarely of any interest intellectually, but Jodie Turner-Smith, the Black actress who portrayed Anne Boleyn, caught my attention in an interview with the New York Times: “As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like.”

The idea that “lived experience” can be transplanted from one era to another, one race to another, one class to another, one ideology to another, and carry all its accidental attributes with it whole, is absurd enough in itself. But I would imagine Turner-Smith does know the experience of limitation and marginalization. Her culture limits itself, and its marginalization is entirely self-willed and driven by a visceral racism towards the more successful White races. This is one of the reasons that boosting Black culture to match their achievements on the basketball court gives White progressives such a perverse pleasure. They are helping failure, like wiping the spittle from the chin of someone slightly retarded trying to eat dinner.

The colouring-in of British history via the delivery system of televised drama serves two purposes for the progressive British deep state, and it does this by targeting two age groups. For those of us well into middle age, like myself, it reminds us who are the new masters, and it discomforts and irritates us because we know that what we are seeing is, in the context of history, fake news. All of this is a bonus for folk such as the BBC, who are often charged by the Right with hating the British while in reality they despise only the English. Also, for the younger generation, who know no history because they are being taught other ‘subjects’, it creates a whole new past, one which never existed outside of BBC storyboards but which explains to the youngsters that Britain was always Black, whether portrayed as history or as fiction.

This year’s film Mr. Malcolm’s List is a work of fiction, but nevertheless has as its premise that London around the turn of the  nineteenth century contained Black people just as it does now. Billed as a “Regency Rom-com”, the movie features a Black lead role, that of an aristocrat. It is also billed as a “period comedy”. In what sense could it be? Period pieces are not about stately homes and perfumed wigs and whether everyone is smoking cigarettes or not (the standard British televisual way of explaining to the watcher that they are watching something set last century), they are about the authenticity of who was actually there, and what colour they were.

The casting of Black actors in what are obviously roles designed for White people has built into it two fail-safe systems. Firstly, it is revisionist history delivered via a medium guaranteed to be useful to the political class, wherever they might reign; entertainment. Legend has it that the reason Stalin didn’t have Shostakovitch shot the same as he did other musicians was because Dmitri could write film music, and Stalin recognized the power of movies as delivery systems for ideology.

Secondly, if a largely White audience decides to switch off the new wave of blaxploitation movies, it is not due to the quality of the product, but to White racism, which we are told exists the way gravity exists. It has enraged the Left that Top Gun: Maverick has been such a box-office success while Hollywood’s woke scripts have turned into loss-leaders for the industry.

The casting of Black actors to play what are clearly White characters leads inexorably to the introduction of judgmental racial themes, meaning the inherent goodness and victimhood of Blacks at the hands of oppressive and privileged Whites. The Railway Children is a film which the British, and English in particular, took to their hearts in the same way as, say, the Americans did with It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a film which is English in essence, evocative of a certain period and a certain moral climate. The sequel, The Railway Children Return, made this year over half a century after the original, has a very different tale to impart from the first film’s tale of small villages, long summers, simple families and happy White children who avert a train disaster.

The sequel revolves around the arrival in a village of a Black soldier. Race was entirely absent from the original, but even the Left-wing Guardian was of the opinion that the film’s “BLM messaging… was jarring”. The British never watched The Railway Children and saw it as a film about Whiteness, but you can bet your shirt on the fact that the majority of films made in the foreseeable future will be about Blackness, particularly if they are remakes or sequels of movies deemed to be quintessentially White.

Britain’s other avowedly Left-wing newspaper, The Independent, notes that the sequel is shot in the same villages as the 1970 original, and ‘all that’s really changed is a slight shift in perspective to adapt to the modern social consciousness’. This is coding, of course, like most Leftist MSM journalism. What they mean is there are race-baiting sub-texts running through this film and there had better be. Whereas the first film revolved around the children’s father having been wrongly accused of espionage, the sequel has the children protecting a wounded Black soldier (which The Independent writes as ‘Black’ (but not White), the grammatically incorrect capitalization adopted in line with Associated Press protocols and noted above) and the headline to the review is:

‘A belated sequel that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about racism’.

Why should it? We note again the irritated expectation of the Left that everything be reduced to the two skimpy dimensions of the race argument. But the “re-imagining” of British history via the medium of entertainment goes on.

Earlier this year, London saw a West End revival of the popular musical My Fair Lady. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which premiered in 1913 and was itself based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, the story of My Fair Lady is that of a cockney flower girl in London’s East End just before World War I. A professor of linguistics, Henry Higgins, is appalled by her rough accent and bets a colleague he can make her speak like a duchess. It was filmed in 1964 starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. It is a charming fantasy, and the film features songs well known to any British audience of a certain age.

The most recent theatrical production in London casts a Black actress as Eliza. Again, this is unfeasible. A Black cockney match-seller in the east end of London in 1912 is as likely as a Tibetan hot-dog vendor outside an American ball-game in the same year, probably less so. The only Blacks in London at that time would have been transitory sailors. But, again, the point is not historical verisimilitude but propaganda. The semiotics of casting Black actors in White parts from different eras of history is intended to convey the message that Britain, and particularly its major cities, has always had a large Black population, and a virtuous one at that. This is what the viewer is being told and not just expected but commanded to believe. In passing, I note that most of actress Amara Okereke’s roles are traditionally White. Not her fault. She is a pawn. And a Black pawn, meaning she moves second, after White ideologues have moved first. And, in the end, it is Whites in charge of this cultural revisionism.

The point is not that the BBC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4 and all the other cultural commissars patrolling the grounds are trying to convince a guppy-mouthed British audience that history was largely populated by Black people. It wasn’t, and the older fish know that. What these people are telling you is that you had better start seeing it that way, because soon there will be examinations after class, and if you don’t make the grade things may change for you, just like they did for Anne Boleyn at the precise moment the axe went through her neck. The beauty of a Black Anne Boleyn, of course, is that the execution can be an imprimatur of racism. And racism is cause for, if not monetary, then certainly societal reparations, as Black people are shuffled into positions from the public sector to the entertainment industry to politics as a kind of bewildered meritocracy, one which will gradually pick off the culturally important posts, roles and offices of a rapidly declining United Kingdom.

Two of British entertainment’s most iconic fictional screen characters are Dr. Who and James Bond, the eccentric time-lord forever battling the Daleks and the suave spy with a shaken Martini and a licence to kill. It was inevitable, then, that cries for the roles going to Black actors would become increasingly shrill. The producers of Dr. Who had already tried a woman—to disastrous ratings, and the idea of ‘Jane Bond’ has been mooted on many occasions. But earlier this year Dr. Who got its first Black lead, Ncuti Gatwa, and the 14th Doctor will also be portrayed as a homosexual to bolster the show’s woke points tally.

The Blackening of British history via its dramatic representation only boosts one ethnicity, of course. You would never see on screen a Chinese Anne Boleyn, a Sikh Dallow, or a Maori aristocrat in Regency London. Just as Blacks are absurdly over-represented in British screen advertising — Blacks are only 3% of the British population but are inescapable in ads — so too it is vanishingly rare to see any other ethnicities. But that is not to say that the re-writing of history is taking place exclusively in Black terms. This revisionism does not stop with race.

I, Joan, a production of the story of Joan of Arc at London’s famous Globe Theatre (actually not Shakespeare’s original, but the third version, although any visitor to London should visit it anyway) has Joan as ‘non-binary’, and answering to pronouns of ‘they and them’. I trust the French inquisitors who burnt Joan didn’t midgender her. But, again, that isn’t the point, as the Globe Theatre’s website explains that the production is ‘alive, queer and full of hope’.

This racial revisionism currently dictating the make-up of British casting is a befuddled kind of re-wilding. White liberals have always been rabid Rousseauists, believing that Black people represent some sort of primal force the White man lacks, being pre-occupied as he has been by trifles such as the Classical world, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the age of technology and the founding of civilization and democracy. It is well known now that Blacks invented everything from the plough to the Large Hadron Collider, so they should be fairly represented in history, even if they weren’t there, rather than the racist reminder that the main place Blacks are over-represented seems to be prison.

Sir Richard Attenborough, who I mentioned at the start, directed the film Gandhi in 1982, with Ben Kingsley in the lead role. Kingsley, a brilliant and much-loved actor in the UK, has escaped cancel culture for the role as he was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji (albeit in Yorkshire in the north of England) but a story attaches itself to the production which I hope is true, as it offers advice to the British entertainment industry as to how a producer might respond to a demand for more Blacks in the cast. An Indian adviser on the film suggested to Attenborough that the main character of Gandhi might be more properly portrayed by a beam of light rather than a human actor. Attenborough replied; “We’re making a film about Gandhi, not fucking Tinkerbell”.

We recently saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, who may not have shared our beliefs entirely (we don’t know for sure) but who I thought spent her entire life maintaining the proper decorum and class of British tradition and conducted herself like a lady the whole time. Her tragic but expected passing has caused me to spend a few moments thinking of these special islands in the North Atlantic where my ancestors came from. I also shed a few tears thinking about them. I don’t think I love any other ethnic group more than the British when recognizing them historically and not just in the modern sense. I love them even more than I do being a Southerner. You could call me an Anglophile. Shouldn’t I be one since that is where my blood is from?

Now before anyone critiques me on English vs British vs UK vs British Isles, I am talking about the four main nationalities that inhabit those two islands off of Northwest Europe. As a Southerner I am descended from all of them except for perhaps Welsh. I know Northern Ireland is separate from Ireland, but I don’t want to nit-pick too much because I want to broadly talk about all four groups together since they have interacted so closely over the centuries. So, from here on out I will just say “British”, and I hope I don’t offend the same group that I am writing today to lavish praise on.

In other news, other than the Queen, we also hear that it is currently being celebrated that no White men will currently hold the top positions in British politics under the new UK prime minister. The demographic that gave the world more achievements than any other is now not allowed to run its own country. I know when I am on James Edwards’s show I like to say “we” when talking about what my ancestors achieved even though it was primarily men and not women who achieved these things. I fully understand that. But I still like to say “we” and claim the achievements because I am related to these men by blood and can therefore claim them as “mine.” I am also very proud of them. British women were important because for centuries they were the mothers of great British men as well as the supporting wives, even though they didn’t create the achievements. But I still like to claim the achievements as “mine” since this is my blood and I am proud of it.

It causes me to ponder and shed some tears thinking about how no other group in the world is currently more underappreciated than British men are on the global scale. We expect this disrespect from the Left, but I would like to take a moment to observe how indifferent and condescending people are on the so called Right — all parts of the Right I might add. If you are confused, I can easily give some examples.

The South where I am from is one of the most conservative parts of the country as well as the most racially aware. Yet we seem to be the most out of touch with our ancestry compared to other White Americans. On one hand this is entirely understandable. What else do we expect from Southerners when we have been in America for so long and we just want to say we are “American.” In a sense that is correct, but I would think a group of people would want to know more about where they came from, and many Southerners do, and I need to give them credit.

But then you have the others who quite ignorantly turn up their noses when they hear the word “British” and they immediately go into rants about “weak men who drink tea and like soccer instead of football.” If you ask them if they will watch the Queen’s funeral, they will say “we got rid of our King centuries ago,” or “who cares?”  As a Southerner I have never related to this ignorance and have actually had a great fondness for the British since I was a girl and have felt a closer connection to them than I do to most Americans. I am not just picking on Southerners. Their attitudes are representative of much of red state America.

I see parallel disdains in other parts of the Right. In our very own movement, it seems common to look down on many of Britain’s achievements from more recent centuries, such as the idea of freedom, the creation of America, and what the Founding Fathers achieved. I am personally a loving fan of the Founding Fathers. They created something remarkable and monumental. I don’t think any other ethnic group would have come up with something remotely similar. What I find peculiar about the people in our movement who criticize Britain’s achievements and ideas from the Enlightenment is that they do it while choosing to remain in a country created by British men from that time, instead of moving elsewhere, and they also do it while speaking the English language and while using many British inventions.

I have never met even one person inside or outside the movement who has chosen to leave this country and go back to their country of origin, wherever that may be.  And usually when people speak of leaving, they mention possibly heading to another British creation such as Canada or Australia. People on both the Right and the Left look down on the Anglosphere for different reasons, yet they all choose to remain in Anglosphere countries. I doubt I am alone among British people or people with British ancestry in wishing a large number of people would leave our countries if they are so disgusted by them. The British are just as much an ethnic group with an ancient history—as ancient as any other, and we deserve our own countries where we can stay the majority just like any other ethnic group does.

I have a great deal of respect for Eastern Europe. I think it is an interesting place with a remarkable culture and I wish the best for its people. Much of our movement has an odd fascination with moving to Eastern Europe, even people who have no ancestry from there. They fantasize about that part of the world, yet almost nobody moves there to start over.  Nor do I encourage people to move there unless they themselves have blood ties to that part of the world. I want to see Eastern Europe survive just as I wish the same for Great Britain.

What I find particularly disturbing is how many in our movement seem to cheer the future of Eastern Europe as our only hope for the future while condemning Great Britain as a lost cause doomed for destruction and no chance of survival. For people who have British ancestry to do this comes across as odd to me and very unnatural. I myself refuse to partake in this mindset. A culture that has existed on that island (islands) for over 1,000 years and that spent the past few centuries leaving a mark on the world far more impressive than any other group should not be condemned to disappear just because it has become obsessed with multiculturalism for 70 years. Again, to see actual people with British ancestry in our movement think this way is very concerning to me.

I follow Mark Collett and his work with Patriotic Alternative over in Britain. He seems to be an optimist about his country. He is always giving uplifting reports about the progress of his organization and how they are constantly attracting more and more White British people. They even do door-to-door surveys all over the country and have interviewed a large number of White British people. If I recall correctly, one such survey had at least 60 to 70% of respondents agreeing that the current immigration to Britain is not a good thing. As Mark pointed out, how many more would have answered honestly if they could say so in private with nobody coming to their door?

I love being an American Southerner, but if the day comes where I have to move from Dixie, my first choice is Great Britain. I don’t care if they have a bigger diversity problem than Eastern Europe. I pick Great Britain because that is me. That is my blood. I can’t imagine going elsewhere.

And I still have hope for that great country because that is naturally what you are supposed to do for your homeland where your very blood came from. If you think the future will be wonderful for the White race without Great Britain, I would be careful what you wish for. It might not be so grand. The world would be unrecognizable. So don’t give up on it so quickly.

British men should stop having a low opinion of themselves. You have so much to be proud of. You are Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Thomas Savory, Francis Drake, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and many others. You are the creators of the Industrial Revolution, much of calculus, and much of modern medicine. You created the fairest justice system in the world. You settled new continents. Everyone in the world wants to move to countries you created. If they don’t respect the founders of these countries, then they should leave. I would be happy to see them go.

The British are a people too. They aren’t just a universal phantom group that anyone can become a part of. We were a great people for centuries. It was only recently that we started hating ourselves and we are the absolute last people in the world who should.

Courtney from Alabama is an Anglophile, wife, mother, and regular contributor to The Political Cesspool Radio Program.