The Real Victims of Prejudice.

 

I am a big fan of the Coen brothers. And MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare play. But I have never bothered to see Joel Coen’s 2021 MacBeth. I dislike resettings and modernizations of Shakespeare plays. At best, it seems a gimmick. And messing with the Shakespeare original is like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Coen’s MacBeth made MacBeth a black man—an absurdity in 11th century Scotland.

Why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, must C0oen choose this one in particular to do in blackface? Shakespeare sets most of his plays either in England, or in the romantic Mediterranean. At least in the latter case,  there are more legitimate places to plausibly put a sub-Saharan African character. Othello comes to mind—although of course a Moor is not a sub-Saharan African, the miscasting would not be so jarring. There is, by contrast,  only one Shakespeare play set ijn Scotland, and its uncanny Scottishness is integral to it. It is often referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”

So it seems pretty in-your-face and up-yours to Scotland to culturally appropriate its main character. 

I suspect this is an example of a larger and longstanding effort in the English-speaking world to devalue and to efface the Scottish and Irish and their cultures. 

Others have noticed what seems to be a recent prejudice against characters who are “ginger”: Green Gables is now being partly converted into a display of aboriginal culture. Disney recently turned the Littlest Mermaid black. There is a common wisecrack in England: “do gingers have souls?”

Red hair is especially characteristic of the Irish and Scottish. It is far less common almost everywhere else.

And the Irish and Scottish are insulted regularly. Although “the n-word” cannot be spoken, nor even the innocuous Eskimo or “redskin.” Yet the terms “hillbilly” and “redneck” sare in common use, and are unambiguously pejorative.

I recently read that the term “hillbilly” was originally a term for the Scots-Irish: “billies” because they supported William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. So, reputedly, is “redneck”: Scots-Irish Presbyterians wore red scarves to show their resistance to the imposed Anglican faith. 

And, of course, the actual people usually referred to as “rednecks” and “hillbillies” in the US are the Scots-Irish. Whose ancestors usually came to these shores as indentured servants, as term-limited slaves, driven out of Ireland and Scotland by clearances.

While blackface is prohibited in polite society, nobody objects to whiteface: the traditional clown makeup, supposed to show an ignorant yokel. Clowns also usually also have red hair. They are a parody of an Irishman or Scot. And you laugh at them, not with them.

The English, and the Anglosphere, always had a benevolent attitude to darker-skinned people: subSaharan Africans, East or South Asians, or Native Americans. As an island people, they could afford to; they had no natural enemies there. Yes, they used Africans as slaves; but they had convinced themselves they were doing this in the best interests of these poor primitives. They were like children; do adults usually hate their children?

Even Jews were little known in the British Isles, and so little thought of. The ancient enemy, and the ancestral hatreds, are reserved for the Scots and the Irish. They represented rival cultures in the home islands. Worst of all, they were Catholic. Or Presbyterians, who were also an ideological threat.

The old prejudices are stronger then ever now, and growing. Extravagant favours now granted to blacks, aboriginals, immigrants, can perhaps best be understood not as some newfound  tolerance, but a way to humiliate, efface, and keep down poor “whites”—that is, disproportionately, the Scots and the Irish.

Arguably, so, in its day, was slavery.