A BRIDGERTON TOO FAR?

Cultural appropriation or cultural welfare?

by Colin Liddell

Last Xmas—and the one before that—it all seemed to be about how many Blacks were in Xmas ads. This Xmas I've been seeing a lot of social media chatter about Bridegrton a Netflix series about Regency England that inserts incongruous Black characters into the period (England 1811-1820) in the same way that Hamilton the musical did for the American Revolutionary period. Just to be clear, I haven't watched it, won't watch it, haven't got a Netflix subscription, and have no intention of getting one. Frankly I'd rather watch NHK documentaries about how to make tofu than subject myself to the latest cultural outpourings from America and its cultural colonies.

But I know enough about Bridgerton to know what's going on. Plus, I know enough about human psychology and the nationalist right to know how crappy their critique of Xmas ads and Bridgerton is.

Essentially the Alt-Right position here is one of emotional butthurt over the sacred cultural artifacts of their race (i.e. Sainsbury's ads and "empowered women" costume dramas) being tainted and "Blacked" by the liberal scum (of a "certain ethnicity," of course) who are "literally" rubbing their faces in it, etc, etc. The term "cultural appropriation" also crops up.

I don't think I'm straw-manning when I say this, or that it sounds something like this:

"We are so butthurt."
"Our culture is being erased because we are weak as fuck."
"They control everything, while we control nothing."
"Our faces are literally being rubbed in faeces (and because we are as weak as fuck there is fuck all we can do about it except to say 'fuck fuck fuck')."

There, that is most of what I am hearing from the retarded, Jew-obsessed, metapolitically impotent rump Alt-Right (and much else of the nationalist and Dissident Right).

Is that the kind of movement you want to be part of? Does anybody want to be part of it, besides self-ghettoizing, self-castrating, victimology addicts? Of course not.

I can remember when the old Alt-Right was still capable of delivering up potent and deeply disturbing critiques of the globohomo order instead of just "Look how triggered and offended I am (grift, grift)" 

So, what is the correct response to this Bridgerton sort of thing?

Well, many years ago I coined the phrase "Cultural Welfarism" in this article (ORPHAN “ANNIE” AND THE CULTURAL WELFARISM OF BLACK AMERICA), and expanded on it a little in this video:

The point here is that Blacks are put into White roles because they—sadly (if you choose to be empathetic)—suffer from "extreme cultural poverty."

Implicit in this is the idea that they should have their own healthy, independent culture, while Whites/ Europeans/ British people should have theirs.

The alternative is to go along with these historically inaccurate globohomo racial mashups that alienate everyone and trigger something I call "sub-racism," which I first broached in this article: SUB-RACISM: THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED:

The great irony is that the only truly race-blind people likely to exist are those who live in racially homogeneous societies, where they do not come into contact with other races. But the racial diversity that is imposed in the Western Cosmopolitan Society means that race is never forgotten. It is all around us, all the time. It is in the very air we breathe. But we are told to breathe silently and keep a secret that everybody knows. We must ignore the elephant in the room and even repress our perception of it until the elephant becomes invisible. This is the climate of "sub-racism." But like so much in modern society, the existence of something as big as "sub-racism" also presents many opportunities for the entrepreneurial or attention-hungry. Playing to people's "sub-racism" is an instant ticket to get noticed, sell something, get a message across, or make a career.

This takes us back to the Xmas ads and the massive over-representation, not just of non-Whites (a category which also includes East Asians, South Asians, Middle Easterners, Aborigines, etc.), but more specifically of Afro-Caribbean Blacks, especially Black males. 

What we are seeing here, once we strip out a bit of disturbing White cucking, is essentially a cheap psychological trick to instil a hint of fear, discomfort, or dissonance into otherwise heart-warming supermarket ads and garish and shallow costume dramas in order to trigger attention and a bastardised form of interest. 

Mediocre content in an age of sensory overload, like our own, needs to struggle, scratch, and bite at the psych of the average person to get itself noticed, and the most effective way to do that, it seems, is the incongruous Black man. Advertisers know this, and so do Netflix producers. 

Rather than crying about "muh cultural appropriation," a more effective way to critique this phenomenon is to explain that the so-called "inclusion" and "Black empowerment" is essentially just an attempt to trigger mild racial racial shock among Whites based on "out-group discomfort" (the photographic negative of "in-group preference"). This is the spice they are cooking with, the fire they are playing with. 

With this line of attack you stand a chance of getting through to Leftists, Liberals, and normie Conservatives, and unnerving them, instead of allowing them to laugh at how feeble and butthurt you are that the supposed "precious purity" of your "cultural icons" has been sullied, something which becomes even more ludicrous if you happen to look like one of these fine Alt-Right specimens:

The kind of "cultural purists" who are most
upset by Blacks in Netflix costume dramas

Bridgerton is a particularly good example with which to make these points and others, because unlike the musical Hamilton, which incongruously inserted Blacks into arguably the most noble and elevated period of American history, Bridgerton has revealed its inherent (and unavoidable) Left-wing "racism of low expectations" by incongruously inserting Blacks into one of the worst periods of British history.

Of all the eras of White British history into which they could have inserted Blacks (Tudor, War of the Roses, Cromwellian, etc., etc.) they chose to insert them into the Regency Period—literally a time of vacuous, self-absorbed bling, corpulent dandyism, and worthless egoism.

Really, what are these "woke" writers and TV producers really trying to say about Blacks

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Colin Liddell was the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and is the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).