Critics on critics: Leila Latif and Ellen E. Jones

Leila Latif: How has the reaction to the book been so far?

Ellen E. Jones: I anticipated it being more confrontational, but people seem to be on their best behaviour. I occasionally do interviews where it’s obvious that the person understands the topic and we can develop the ideas in interesting ways, but sometimes it’s clear they don’t really know what I’m talking about.

LL: I was surprised recently by the number of people who had never heard of ‘magical negroes’.

EEJ: That, or ‘misogynoir’ – I have to explain quite a lot. Many haven’t encountered the idea that ‘diversity’ at a surface level might not be the end of the conversation; that all we need to do is give a few more opportunities to actors of colour and we’re all good. Part of the reason I wrote the book is because a lot of people haven’t encountered the idea that race is a social construct. People want to contain racism in the manageable form – the stereotypical racist in the antebellum South, or a National Front thug – and not contend with how it’s embedded in systems we’re benefiting from or complicit in. They can call themselves anti-racist very proudly, but that doesn’t go any further than not saying the N-word.

LL: Should language evolve? When, say, Michaela Coel spoke at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2018, she purposefully didn’t use buzz words because she thought people get numbed by them. Instead of ‘racist’ she’d say ‘thoughtlessness’. Or ‘under-represented people’ became ‘misfits’.

EEJ: I understand that, but we need the specific language. You have to be able to describe the problem before you can solve it. Language that is both descriptive and communicates a base level of respect for other people is important. I do like to fight for it. I’m a journalist and language is important.

LL: But it does seem through the dominance of African American cinema globally and American terminology, you risk buying into the framework of their specific oppressors.

EEJ: I hear a lot of white people accusing anti-racist activists in the UK of thoughtlessly appropriating the context of racism in the US to our struggle here. What they really mean is that racism doesn’t exist in the UK because it’s not of the kind we see in American movies. There’s obviously a distinction, but the history is significantly linked via colonialism. It may be different, but it still exists. 

LL: Britain does seem to have a less sophisticated understanding of it. Just after Cynthia Erivo was announced as vice-president of Rada earlier this year and an old clip emerged of her talking about feeling a bit freaked out when she was touring Sister Act in Sunderland, people in the UK criticised her for being elitist. It seemed nobody twigged the discomfort outside of diverse spaces that happens to queer Black women…

EEJ: Yet it was immediately obvious to me. I’ve had the experience of growing up in London, which is very diverse and where my presence is more welcome. So going to places in my early twenties where they’ve never seen Black people before and stare at you is uncomfortable. I think so many of the people who accused her of being anti-regional just had no concept of that. Maybe the more cynical contingent were like: “Let me leap on this to further my agenda and shut down a Black woman talking about their experience.”

LL: So it’s great that in 2024 Erivo is Rada’s vice-president, and there are more Black films and TV… but this idea of, “We did it!” is frustrating.

EEJ: Yes. “What more do you want?” I certainly see that in our industry, and I want people to get past thinking of diversity as something they do for other people as a charitable act, rather than seeing it as something they stand to benefit from. At a basic level, a more diverse film and TV industry means better films and television. It means more original films and television; it means a wider pool of talent. It means more thorough self-reflection in the art and more rigorous filmmaking.
It allows them to exercise the empathy muscle just as those of us who’ve been historically marginalised do when we go to the cinema. That’s the great power of film and television. When we start thinking about it as something that enriches everybody’s experience and see there are also lots of commercial incentives to connect with different audience groups, you’ll get rid of that attitude of ‘one person in and we’re done’.

LL: Donald Glover has said Tina Fey told him he was hired on 30 Rock [2006-13] as part of that sort of box-ticking exercise.

EEJ: That period in liberal American comedy was very complacent about race because Obama was in the White House and blackface was on 30 Rock numerous times. It’s a great show but one of the things I wanted to do with the book is challenge people out of that complacency – reminding them there was blackface on television and other kinds of racism very recently and some of it continues to this day. Unless we look it in the boot-polished eye, we can’t move on.

LL: I agree, but I understand people’s reluctance to sully memories of art they love. Even myself, with an icon like Sidney Poitier, I want to acknowledge respectability politics, but sometimes it feels like that’s diminishing his legacy.

EEJ: It’s not Poitier’s fault, it’s the system’s fault. People are put in positions where in order to get ahead and do something culturally important, they have to work within the system which is demeaning or oppressing other people. I want people to have more nuanced conversations because it’s not just that blackface is in bad taste, but also that dehumanising and demeaning mass entertainment has a direct effect on Black people’s rights. It leads to knee-jerk criminalisation of Black people; it affects the educational standards in communities of colour. This isn’t just a matter of good taste, good comedy or opportunities for filmmakers of colour. It’s about how we absorb and perpetuate these attitudes in real people’s lives.

LL: I thought American Fiction [2023] was so great at depicting how narrow the perception of Blackness still is, and how awards shows love art about people of colour suffering.

EEJ: The only way in which Black people were depicted at all in a sort of awards-level film would be as slaves or servants… Hattie McDaniel or Chief Dan George or Anna May Wong, who respectively were essentially standing alone as movie stars of colour at a time when the roles available were so narrow. Yet what’s magnificent about them in films like Gone with the Wind [1939] or Little Big Man [1970] is that you see the constraints put upon them by the writing and the genre conventions, but simultaneously you see their charisma and talent. They bring a sort of defiant humanity to it.

LL: Director Barry Jenkins asked his Black friends and family about making The Underground Railroad [2021] and they all said, “Please don’t!” I think Black audiences can differ from white audiences in what they want to see and reward.

EEJ: It’s the same for most journalists of colour. There’s a reluctance to write about race at all in case you’re stuck writing about it for the rest of your life – and you want to do other things too. But at the same time it’s important and you care about it. I found writing this book fascinating, but behind every book or film about race or TV show about a person of colour, there’s a lot of additional labour. Filmmakers and writers have to mediate how the film’s going to play with white audiences, Black audiences, mixed audiences, liberals and conservatives. It’s as Toni Morrison said: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

LL: A professor of African American studies recently shared his frustration about the assumption that Black writing and filmmaking is always autobiographical.

EEJ: You see that in music criticism as well. Grime was criminalised because if a young Black man tells a story about some criminal activity, [it’s assumed] he must be talking from his own personal experience. Whereas if Johnny Cash tells a story about murdering a woman, he’s obviously being creative. But I guess an anxiety in myself that I’ve had to overcome in writing the book and talking about the book is asking whether I, as a light-skinned, mixed-race person, had the experiences to talk about racism? There’s cultural cachet which comes with being the oppressed group sometimes and people want to kind of muscle in on that, so that’s a legitimate concern. But we really have to resist this conflation of being anti-racist with Blackness. It’s everybody’s problem to solve, particularly the white people benefiting from it.

LL: There’s always concern about taking a more worthy person’s seat at the table. I’ve had a lot of privilege, but in journalism, imposter syndrome sets in when I’m positioned as the voice of the marginalised.

EEJ: The important thing is to be aware of it. Director Ngozi Onwurah says something I really relate to in that she used to feel like the acceptable face of Blackness for the BBC. In contrast to if a big Black bloke with dreads was trying to pitch documentaries; she was a light-skinned, mixed-race woman and that gave her access. But it also allows the institution to say that they’re doing something without too much change or discomfort. I grew up on a council estate, but I had various privileges. I go on about going to Cambridge University, not because I’m showing off but because I want people to know what I’ve had access to that got me to this position. Cambridge teaches you how to participate in this system. You’re learning a new language, and there’s a confidence you acquire from seeing behind the curtain. 

LL: It’s funny that you became adept at making these institutions feel comfortable with you, and then wrote a book that asks them to have uncomfortable conversations.

EEJ: The deeper you get in the system, the more you realise quite how unjust it is. Working in national newspapers and seeing how many people there were the son of someone important, or how a lot of the hot young ‘outsider’ directors have parents in the film industry – we have to talk about class in conjunction with race to develop an understanding of oppressions other than the ones that directly affect us.

LL: Even now, having succeeded in this industry – are there misconceptions about you? 

EEJ: I had a lovely childhood and an advantage in growing up in a multicultural place with people from all around the world and different class backgrounds. Part of the book addresses the misconception that if you grew up in a little village and went to a private school, you should feel sorry for someone like me. No. It’s the other way around. I feel sorry for you. It’s funny, we don’t talk enough about that as film critics: how you bring in personal life experiences every time you view a film. There was a recent film where there was a gender divide in the reviews, and that dynamic seemed to me quite obvious. If you understand and appreciate it, it makes the film more interesting. But if I said that to any male critic, I think they’d be hugely offended. The problem is, for many of us, our whole identities are politicised. So every time I speak for women or for people of colour or for working-class people, that’s seen as political, while a white middle-class man’s personal experiences are seen as neutral.

LL: When I hated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [2017], I felt the assumption was that it was because of my race, rather than that it fell apart in the third act.

EEJ: Your opinion gets de-legitimised because the opinion of a Black woman must be biased, even though there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion. The only thing we can do is to acknowledge our biases, be upfront about them, and then the reader or the audience can take it in that context and filter it through their own systems of truth.