Minorities’ Lives Are Not Entertainment

all illustrations by Phoebe Thomas

In art school I was told that film and media had finally opened its doors to minorities like me. In hindsight, I wish I could slap my past self and tell him to become a teacher. Representation in the arts can only ever be a good thing, and it is happening, but that which gets funding or attention only comes in certain forms. There is a maddening demand for so-called timely or socially conscious work. Don’t get me wrong, there are important things to discuss about the minority experience in the UK, but most of it is incredibly boring.

Putting it bluntly, the work I am referring to is trauma porn – a writing cliche that relies on the real-life suffering of minorities to inject quick shock into a piece of media, whether for clicks or for clout. Consider, for example, in film and TV about South Asians. We either have to be victims of racism and xenophobia or we must be victims of the conservatism of our own. In short: if you are a minority, then you must suffer. Nothing new will be said about your life, no mention of those confusing little moments that make up existence. At best, after being forced to endure the violent throes of white supremacy, you’ll be given a tacked-on happy ending before the crowd leaves their seats. Hell, maybe a white person will even save you. 

To live in the western world as an outsider is full of contradictions. You belong or do not belong based on fickle public opinion. But these banal stories highlight how mainstream audiences are fed narratives devoid of nuance and uncomfortable truths about the minority experience. 

Certain crowds are quite smug about platforming minority voices, and the narratives they champion only serve to assuage cultural guilt (usually within the middle class). The first purpose is to tell the audience that their media consumption makes them socially conscious simply by association – we are what we consume. The second is to reassure the audience they’re good people and to congratulate them for not personally goose stepping down the market street. Both of these functions readily ignore the fact that the audience may rarely deal with, or be respectful to, the very real people from which trauma porn plucks its narrative shock. This type of art extracts from our lives, takes what it likes, feeds it to the masses, and leaves us with the half-chewed seconds thinking we’ll be grateful we got a seat at the table.

This limiting cycle only perpetuates what kinds of stories minorities are allowed to tell when we’re apparently having our moment. While minorities’ stories were once a rarity in mainstream media, they are now just commodities that the majority can manipulate to further their own careers and cultural capital. I’ve had other South Asian artists tell me, “Just make a project about colonialism and they’ll fund it.” The British Empire’s shadow is a long one. I still personally reckon with complicated clashes between my heritage and the country I call home, I’m sure many others like me do as well. But now I’m expected to trade that in for some short term success? For a commission?

On one side there’s the discomfort of realising many minorities like yourself are beginning to sell their trauma, but there’s the greater discomfort of white people trying to benefit off of you. At many a film school student house party, the whitest man alive has suggested that I co-write a satire about race with him. Utterly brazen. We’d have half a beer in someone’s garden, then the idea would be presented as if they were some creative wunderkind doing me a favour. Then they’d inevitably suggest that it should be “edgy” – a euphemism, I suspect, meaning unrelentingly racist.

The more I have tried to break into the industry the greater this pressure to become a stereotype has become. But I’m not every cliche that you’d imagine me to be. I have more to speak about than hate crimes, cultural confusion, and oppression. At a time where people would have you believe minorities can “speak their truth”, we in fact have found ourselves in a deeply transactional dynamic with the white, middle class, cis-het audience. If you want to make it as a creative, whether queer, working class or a different race, you have to consider what the masses want. I’m scared the masses don’t want me – they want my trauma.