The intent of this article is to not cause offense. I fully support the aim to have greater levels of representation across all sectors and workplaces, not least of all Film & Television. This is simply an attempt to encourage an open and nuanced debate about DEI schemes as they currently operate within British Film & TV, as well as issues surrounding class and positive discrimination.
I’ve experienced positive discrimination, or positive action, or affirmative action, or diversity, or whatever term you want to use to describe the act of favouring one person over another in the workplace based on certain favoured characteristics. I’m not looking for sympathy, nor do I want to present myself as somehow a victim of cruel, woke politics. I just think it’s time, as a progressive, 30-something cis white male, that we are able to openly discuss what has become common practice in the British Film & TV industry…
Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Diversity and representation is a good thing. In the Film & TV industry especially, ensuring there is a well-balanced mix of workers from different ethnic, gender, religious and cultural backgrounds is both fair, just and necessary in order to build a better, more cohesive society. However, most diversity schemes in this industry, as they currently operate, often achieve the opposite.
There is little change in the socio-economic backgrounds of the people at the very top; it’s certainly not fair to detach professional reward from merit and hard work; and society becomes far less cohesive when otherwise allies are suddenly pitted against one another, while the people who have always been at the top remain at the top. The result of such practises, I fear, excluding the loss of talent that could’ve been, is that more and more people will invariably be pushed into the arms of very right-wing, overtly racist political forces.
Diversity and the act of punishing so-called ‘white privilege’ has become largely hegemonic amongst many liberal corporations and their upper managements (note: not left-wing, but liberal). Ironically enough, nearly all of these people are themselves white – the difference between them and I being that they’re mostly in the twilight of their careers, enjoying relatively comfy, well-paid jobs that they were able to climb the career ladder to without the quasi-discriminatory policies they’ve now introduced to constrain their younger counterparts.
Why is it that the sins of a colonial Britain that these people barely know the history of are suddenly thrust upon the shoulders of the young who are largely more progressive than they ever were anyway? Who decided that this generation – Millennials, Gen Z – should be the ones to carry such a burden? Was that a democratic decision? And are the managers promoting and enacting these sorts of schemes sacrificing their jobs and careers in the name of diversity and tackling white privilege? I think not.
Anyone who works in the Film & TV industry knows that it’s predominately segregated by wealth. In fact, according to one study, just 7.9% of working-class people in the UK work in the creative industries overall. Those at the top are almost always from privately-educated upper class families who either have wealth or access to wealth via elite networks. And this is precisely the problem with most diversity schemes: none of that changes. Indeed, if anything, these schemes directly benefit this ‘ruling elite’ because a focus on race and other factors means attention is diverted away from them and their forever monopoly of our industries. It’s divide and rule at its most basic.
From what I can see, ‘diversity’ is mostly a way by which liberals and elites – for different reasons – can avoid talking about the more pertinent problem: class.
Of course race, gender, sexuality, disability and a host of other prejudiced characteristics feed into structures of oppression – but without acknowledging the primary mechanism of oppression within our society, class, we simply perpetuate the existing socio-economic hierarchy with some slightly different window dressing. Not only does class lie at the heart of all capitalist societies, it also commonly intersects with things such as gender and ethnicity, making it a more effective barometer to measure discrimination and oppression.
Positive discrimination is, itself, an oxymoron, which is perhaps why it’s been so swiftly replaced with other 'softer' terms. But discrimination, no matter how you dress it up, is ultimately discrimination, while the root of the rot within the Film and TV industry - and Western societies more broadly - remains perfectly intact.
Without acknowledging class, in my view, diversity schemes are contrary to natural justice, promote only superficial changes within hierarchies of oppression, and have the very real potential to inflame racial tensions to the point in which the far-right could quite easily take advantage of younger white working and middle class people who are losing out in yet another aspect of their contemporary lives.
In this time of crisis, both on the global political scale and within the British Film & TV industry, we should be looking to build solidarity and unity between people – not further entrench divisions.
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