Is noticing somebody’s skin colour an important factor in addressing your privilege, or is noticing race itself racist? And should white actors ever play a character whose historical and/or geographical context suggests that they should be played by people of colour? I ask, because people who have been watching the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have noticed that there are lots of global majority actors playing roles that — back in the distant past of Series 1 — would have been played by white actors. Should people have noticed that? And should historical accuracy have a part to play? It certainly used to be the case that only racists noticed race, but then racists started trying to disguise themselves by not noticing race, which made not noticing race racist again.

As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.

First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist. 

Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing

The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?

I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.

Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both —  without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.

As I was walking past a Wetherspoons pub, I heard a gammon say that Wolf Hall’s casting of family members with differing skin tones was distracting, and it was hard to remember who was supposed to be in which biological family. Wolf Hall director, Peter Kosminsky, laughs off this racist argument, and has chided viewers who are looking for “lookalikes”, adding: “We cast the best actors we could to convey, in our opinion, the essence of the role.” So colour-blind casting is about representation, but now Kosminsky reveals that colour-blind casting is also about trying to make the programme the absolute best it can be, because in the gnostic religion we all share, nobody sees the physical anymore. Can you imagine any director worth their salt trying to find actors who look like the people they are supposed to be playing, as opposed to basing their selection on the similarities of their souls? I think the real tragedy is that Kosminsky wasn’t brave enough to try gender-blind and age-blind casting too. Jane Seymour being portrayed by an old Asian man could have added a unique twist to the story.

Holding contradictory arguments in your head at the same time is hard, but just remember that non-progressives simply aren’t intelligent enough to do this. All that said, don’t you dare think about casting white people to play ethnic minorities. That really would be racist.