The “Whites” Who Loved Me: How Bridgerton Facilitates Digital Lynching

Abstract

Although the opening series of Bridgerton, a nineteenth-century mixed romance, was celebrated for the casting of Black characters, its use of white–Black inter-marriage is part of UK–US storytelling traditions that treat mixed relationships as worthy of screentime only if they involve a white person—what Derrick Bell in 1980 coined as ‘interest convergence’: when Black people are only allowed to progress with the interests of white peoples. Discussing Bridgerton as part of a wider anti-Black brand of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion [EDI], this paper argues that the way its Black characters are used and abused on screen is like a digital lynching. Here, white characters use Black people (i.e., to give them children) while simultaneously keeping them mentally dependent on the white family. While there is not a physical death, the place of Black partners in this so-called alt-London is nothing short of a zombification of Black humans. Additionally, this paper encourages readers to think about how the near-exclusive use of white-centring mixed love as representative of all mixed romance is racist. In other words, even in fantasy, Black men are written out of Blackness, forced to take on the culture of their partner. As this “fantasy” occurs in a world “made white” by colonialism, characters like Simon Bassett and Marina Thompson do not “pass” for white, but their world is one where few “see” colour except when Black folks upset white spaces. Those who choose not to “see” are most in fear of losing power, as novelist Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination “it requires hard work not to see”.

1. Introduction

Over the past several years, I have found it hard to ignore the ways in which Black men are emasculated in UK–US media when written opposite white woman love interests. The first part of this paper’s title is not only a parody of the Bond film (Gilbert 1977) but refers to how the “white female gaze” (Connolly 2018) has increasing become a lens through which Black men are seen on screen. In shows like Regency period dramas, it is crudely like monarchs and their “groom of the stool”, employed to wipe royal arseholes. Put another way, in HBO’s Game of Thrones Jaime Lannister jokes about the king’s closest adviser: “The King shits and the Hand wipes” (Lord Snow 2011). In Bridgerton, it appears that the role of Black characters is to cater to the lives of white folks. Notably, as the exclusive deployment of Black–white love matches as a sign of racial progress in series one speaks to how in this “welcoming” Regency London, marriage is another way colonial violence operates.

Black spouses in this not so alt-Regency become the “embodied property” of white people and families (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Their experiences in those families are studies of psychological terror. For example, Simon Bassett’s own childhood trauma is dismissed by his wife Daphne Bridgerton, because she wants a child—he is a hired Black penis,1 where she also sexually assaults2 Simon forcing him “…to ejaculate inside of her even though he doesn’t want to have children” (Lynn 2024). Simon, although rich, is not protected from Bridgerton white terrorism, much in the same way Marina Thompson endures microaggressions from Lady Featherington who effectively sells her to Sir Philip to avoid a scandal that would occur following the birth of Marina’s child out of wedlock.

The second part of the title “How Bridgerton Facilitates Digital Lynching” speaks to how Shondland Productions alongside creator Chris Van Dusen and Shonda Rhimes has used the small number of Black characters as commodities (at least in series one, Ahmed and Swan 2006) to gain viewers, while the aesthetics of ballrooms, gowns, and “niceness” (Daniels 2021; DiAngelo 2021) in explicit absence of the Atlantic Slave Trade, allows the show’s white characters to use Regency civilities to conduct a palatable daylight lynching. In popular media, we see characters lynched (i.e., hanged from trees in Hollywood slave trade films) while in real life the executions of Black civilians by racist police have been normalised (AFLO. the Poet and Priss Nash 2022)—melanin as spice (Hooks 1992, p. 21).

What I mean by melanin as spice is that violent anti-Black in policing and elsewhere in society, may even be a white trauma response that spiralled from how white folks treated each other years before the Atlantic Trade. The introduction of high numbers of Black people into white societies added a new variable [spice] “livening up the dull dish” (Hooks 1992, p. 21) of white-on-white terror—how macabre! After all, in Medieval England terrifying punishment systems were normal where the public often saw the severed limbs of their neighbours alongside disembowelled corpses (Tuchman 1978, p. 135)—very Game of Thrones. As Resmaa Menakem (2017) tells us, “Common punishments in New World English colonies were similar to the punishments meted out in England” (p. 61).

In the same ways that many Black people have inherited trauma from our ancestors, do many white folks experience intergenerational terror? Put another way, in our quests for liberating the oppressed, that must also come from freeing the oppressor too. The late archbishop Desmond Tutu believed settler colonial state Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians had allowed the Israelis to become dehumanised. As he further says, “Part of my own concern for what is happening there is in fact not what is happening to the Palestinians, but it is what the Israelis are doing to themselves. When you go to those checkpoints and you see these young soldiers behaving abominably badly, they are not aware when you carry out dehumanising policies, whether you like or not, those policies dehumanise the perpetrator” (Feinstein 2022, pp. 03:32–04:03).

Modern policing, like in those “New World English colonies”, zombify Black people treated as hollow shells, also rendered so by narrative-making media. Very much the case, because the logic of these daylight lynchings by police is softened up for the liberal lens of mainstream television platforms. Bridgerton’s participation in digital lynching allows the body to remain in view [diversity] while anything that makes these characters “different” or humanly Black is written out. For example, consider how adding Black men in a white Regency changes the character in removing many perceived obstacles in a world of empire. Bridgerton’s diversification of the Regency allows viewers to consume Blackness as a commodity without having to deal with the issues of colonial racism and empire that facilitated the making of Victorian Britain (Hall et al. 2014)—although Black treatment under white families in the series is the “boomerang of empire” or colonial violence at home (Koram 2022). This allows viewers to forget characters like Simon are “space invaders” into white spaces (Puwar 2004, p. 1). As a Black man, Bridgerton’s Black characters obsessed with white people is uncomfortable viewing and imitates a dystopian society, where Black sexuality is something to be consumed, commodified, and weaponised, especially by white womanhood.3

What happens on screen is mirrored off-screen almost like a metafiction-adjacent situation. In November 2020, racist backlash to the UK Black Lives Matter movement came to a peak when British supermarket giant Sainsburys placed a Black family at the centre of their Christmas advert only to be met with racism on social media (Olutoye 2020). At the time, they were simply one of many institutions using the optics of diversity and inclusion for profit—since diversity as good for business has been well documented (Bhanot 2015; Hunt et al. 2018; Dixon-Fyle et al. 2020). Following “Sainsburys Gate”, many British Christmas ads pivoted to mixed4 pairings or families often pairing (but not always) Black boys/men with white and/or racially ambiguous girls/women. We might conclude other businesses saw public anti-Blackness against Sainsburys as bad for business, later pivoting to adverts using Black faces to appeal to “new” interests in diversity while also including a white person to appease the racist underbelly.

Although the highest mixed population in England and Wales is white–Black Caribbean at 0.9% (ONS 2021) and there is a long historical trail of mixed heritage experiences dating back to at least Tudor Britain (Nubia 2019, pp. 15–36), many businesses knowing that “diversity” sells are unwilling to deal with racist backlash that comes with advocating for Black staff. That pivot in 2021 represents a societal bias towards how well Black people align themselves with white spaces, from families to more suspect affiliations like Empire Honours (Ventour-Griffiths 2023). This pervades with many high-profile celebrities of Black African or Caribbean heritage who have one white parent, who are then “called in” when programmes want to do a “Black story”.

Proximity to white places, spaces, and people seem to be the litmus test for having mixed unions and people on screen—evident in recent British advertising practices following the 2020 protests. Many chains participated, including but not limited to food shops Marks and Spencers (2021, 2024), Morrisons (2021), and Lidl (2022). Further to high-street retailers like John Lewis department store (2021), Argos (2022), Very.co.uk (2022), Hobbycraft (2022), and Fussy (2022), as well as US coffee giant Starbucks (Grossi 2020) and social media company Meta Quest (2022).

Between November 2020 and December 2021, US streaming company Netflix released the period romance drama Bridgerton—set in the 1810s—based on the original books by Julia Quinn, which deviates from the books casting Black actors opposite white love interests. Netflix, joining what had gone on in advertising, went on to make two series where Black and Asian characters ended up married to white people in a programme that was originally celebrated for Black visibility. At the crux of it, Bridgerton shows that those who benefit most from diversity are white women (Bhopal and Henderson 2019; Rae 2023) and Bridgerton is filled with them. In the words of sociologist Jesse Daniels (2021), “…affirmative action has moved white women into a structural position in which they share more in common with white men than they do with Black or Latina women” (p. 10).

Series one’s focus on the love stories of Simon (a Black man) and Daphne (a white woman) came to dominate public discourse (Hussain 2021). Moreover, since the general public are still more likely to see Black–white mixed couples in US advertising, for example, than a Black couple (Ponder 2024), the white-centring of mixed relationships observed in Bridgerton is a mirror of the media culture that produced it (Block 2021). Especially given that the white-centring of mixed romance occurs in many films, TV shows (discussed in Vanity of Vanities) as well as advertising. The visual aesthetic of having mixed families has taken precedence over authenticity—visibility over representation. Netflix thus casted Black actors for series one in hope that they could show a mixed fantasy upheld by white characters. And this occurs in a world where racism and violent capitalist structures of bloodlines and inheritance clearly hold sway on people’s relationships with one another. In the words of London author Chimène Suleyman, “The spattering of black people have just been props to the white people from the beginning. Completely servantile regardless of rank. How did nobody making this pick up on the glaringly obvious?” (Chimene Suleyman (@chimenesuleyman) 2021).

This paper uses the term “whiteness” to describe the everyday violence of the broader white supremacist system. Bridgerton as part of the wider Hollywood machine is one tenet of many enforcing that system by using the mythmaking of popular cultural storytelling to send messages. Focused on series one as part of a wider Hollywood industrial complex, this paper argues Bridgerton is one text that frames Black desirability upheld by proximity to white spaces, faces, and places.

2. Vanity of Vanities

For much of history, the term “hegemony” was used to describe physical domination often through military intervention and geopolitics (Tom Nicholas 2017). But in more recent times, it has developed to include notions of control beyond the physical sphere like in the arts. Antonio Gramsci’s (1929) “cultural hegemony”, then, came to analyse how culture may be used to show how the ruling class dominate in a capitalist society. It is in that frame that shows like Bridgerton exist as part of a mythmaking machinery that centralises white people in mixed romance. Nylah Burton (2022) writes, “The way interracial relationships are talked about in the West—especially in media, entertainment, and social media—is often reductive and harmful. In these discussions, the focus is usually on interracial relationships between non-white people and white people, so whiteness is constantly centred and anything outside of that is ‘othered’”.

If we think about how nothing gets made in Hollywood or the British media industry without going through several hands, it is possible to see the superficial diversity of mixed romance in texts from Bridgerton to Dear White People and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande as a near accurate representation of what the upper echelons of the UK–US media industries think about them. In the case of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Hyde 2022), Nancy hires a male sex worker who is racialised as Black5 and uses him to experience her deepest fantasies and as a vessel to help her escape an identity crisis. It is eerily like writer Courttia Newland’s experience of a weaponised white-woman privilege at work:

“Many years after, as the fallout from Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour rippled and spread, and the #MeToo movement rose … I was reminded of my first experience in the media, of negative experiences involving white women from childhood to the present day and of events that happened to friends, or have occurred within the wider diasporic black community. And, although it’s obvious that none of my … experiences come … close to the heinous crimes of rape and enforced sexual harassment committed globally by men, I have seen white privilege used by women as an oppressive tool far too many times to believe there should not be the same level of accountability”.

(Newland 2019)

Courttia Newland’s experience in Britain is almost like an extended metaphor for the ways Hollywood emasculates Black men on screen via the unnuanced writing of mixed relationships with white women. While there is no problem with Black men and white women dating, courting, and having relationships as they have been doing so for centuries, the calibre of writing is much to be desired in many screen representations. Why is it that the film and television industry write Black men purely for the sexual gratification of white women? This came to a peak in 2020 with Daphne’s sexual assault of Simon in Bridgerton, while 3000 Years of Longing (Miller 2022) uses Tilda Swinton to play literary scholar Alithea Binnie who can have three wishes from Idris Elba’s “Djinn” the “Magical Negro”—a term popularised by Spike Lee to describe films like The Green Mile (Darabont 1999) and The Legend of Baggar Vance (Redford 2000). George Miller’s film is a magical fantasy of a troubled white woman who has lost her way and uses a “magical” Black man to fulfil her desires, culminating in her sexual awakening.

In 2023, Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light showed how Black men continue to be the sex objects of white women. Olivia Colman’s Hilary, a duty manager at a cinema in Margate, forms an unlikely relationship with her employee Stephen played by Michael Ward who is of Jamaican origin. Empire of Light (2023) is framed as a story about the power of human connection in the era of the UK hate-group National Front, while at the same time, like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), there is an (in)visible arc of white women using Black men to fulfil their fantasies. A similar claim was made with the Netflix series Lupin starring Omar Sy when the show was critiqued for its erasure of Black women (Ollennu 2021; Bailey 2021). The white-centring of mixed unions that pervades Bridgerton’s “post-racial” fantasy exists as a wider issue including older shows like Master of None, Dear White People, Modern Family, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and most infamously Olivia Pope and Fitz Grant in ABC’s Scandal (Buggs and Russell 2019, pp. 87–112). Beyond the Black–white pairing, the first two series of Master of None (Ansari and Yang 2015, 2017) followed Indian-American Dev (also played by creator-executive producer Aziz Ansari) where his main love interests were white women Rachel Silva and Francesca. In Dear White People (Simien 2017), activist Sam is the lead in this university-based comedy–drama about the Black–white racial dynamics on a white-majority campus. Her crises of identity are key throughout the show since she presents as Black although has a white dad. Meanwhile, her Black friends give her grief about having a secret white boyfriend Gabe.

Like Marina in Bridgerton, Dear White People [DWP] fails Black women. It renders misogynoir invisible in a world where anti-Black racism clearly exists. DWP’s spotlighting of police violence focuses on Black men’s experience although Black women experience it equally. Black women’s survivor stories are talked about less and when the show introduces a storyline about rape, it focuses on a white woman, Muffy (Schelenz and Vondermaßen 2021). Like Bridgerton, the specifics of Black women’s inner worlds are overlooked in favour of men and maintaining fantasies—sometimes both. Scandal’s Olivia Pope, political fixer, and the POTUS’ mistress has low racial confidence and spends most episodes fixing white messes in the same way Lady Danbury plays matchmaker. Olivia was sent off to boarding school as a child, presumably a white institution, and then attended Princeton University for her undergraduate (Scandal Wiki 2025). It does not take much to realise how proximity to historically white spaces, institutions, and structures where there are not many Black people can result in identity crises (Touré 2012; Altise 2021; Ventour-Griffiths 2024a). Bridgerton’s Marina is looked up and down by Lord Rutledge considering her as an “investment” and goes on to ask her to show him her teeth (Affair with Honour, 31:40–32:00)—rather like a slave auction. In 1813 London, chattel enslavement would continue for a further twenty years. Her experience in this scene joins those described later about the microaggressions she is subjected to on arriving into the Featherington household pregnant while Black.

In both Dear White People and Scandal, we see pre-Bridgerton contexts for white-centred mixed relationships that date all the way back to Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura’s interracial kiss in Star Trek (Plato’s Stepchildren 1968, 42:54–43:00). Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago in Brooklyn Nine Nine (New Captain 2015) alongside Jay Pritchett and Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in Modern Family (Written in the Stars 2018) give a frame for white men with Latina women. In Black-ish, Junior, whose dad is Black and mother is Black-mixed, brings his girlfriend home to meet his parents—a white girl called Hilary, who is also a Republican (Elephant in the Room 2015).

American storytelling has always been a site of testing the taboos of white supremacy. During the 1960s, the Hays Code made it illegal for a Black men and white women to be intimate on screen described under the Motion Picture Production Association (1949) within US Jim Crow laws. For example, cast in Island in the Sun (Rossen 1957) opposite white American star Joan Fontaine, the late actor Harry Belafonte further describes the racist segregation processes of film:

“A Black man kissing a white woman on screen in America? […] When romance is most expected, we were required to bypass that fact. We were not by law permitted … We were watched with great attention to make sure that we were doing nothing that would offend Southern sensibilities of white America and as a consequence, [Joan Fontaine] and I never … had a genuine romance on screen. […] Many of us were continually inventing ways to defy the rules of prejudice. […] When I handed her the coconut, it was my rebellion to the idea that we couldn’t kiss, to find a way to do it as sexually and as seductively … to make it fill the absence of a kiss and making sure that the audience would get it. And it would be a hard moment to edit that out and … the coconut, turn it slightly for the camera’s benefit, so that my lips would come to … the same place that her lips had been. … it kind of sent the message … that we were having an orgasm. It was a delightful moment…”.

(Black Hollywood 2016, pp. 12:30–15:05)

Even during the years of these social taboos, it is not incidental that these interracial high points of popular culture were between Black men and white women. Hollywood was still controlling the lens even at points of micro-activism. As Shannon Sullivan (2015) reiterates, “As long as both white master and [B]lack slave observed the appropriate rules of address and gestural codes of behaviour—etiquette is a code that binds both the dominant and subordinate, after all—then significant social distances could be maintained in the midst of intimate physical proximities” (p. 27). The British film and TV industry held similar sensibilities about Black men and white women where Earl Cameron opposite leading lady Susan Shaw in Pool of London (Dearden 1951) told of a similar experience to Harry Belafonte: “We built up a type of romance, but we never even kissed”, said Earl. “We never got that far” (Black Hollywood ctd, 16:58–17:00).

Decisions made to present Black characters only as love-worthy when in proximity to white spaces and places are problematic. Journalist–scholar Dalia Gebrial’s (2017) essay “Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love” examines the codes of engagement that enable people into and out of love-worthiness: “Embedded within the constituent discourses of love—of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment—are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love’s work”. Averil Clarke (2011) in Inequalities of Love looks at how educated Black women face difficulties seeking marriage and romance compared to non-Black women such as white and Hispanic women. Psychologist-social media influencer Han Ren also said

“So, most … probably think ‘I’m just attracted to who I’m attracted to’… but really where did you learn what … features are attractive? I think this is … relevant for us BIPOC especially, both for examining our own beauty standards like what Eurocentric beauty standards we are hold ourselves up to and also for being a little more critical about the types of characteristics we are attracted to in other people”.

(Han Ren (@drhanren) 2023, TikTok)

Considering how diversity also drives profits (Bhanot 2015), it has now become currency. Placing white people at the centre of that may just be a calculated power move where white gatekeepers may see mixed unions between Black and other racially minoritised peoples as risk, even though these unions are completely real! For example, consider the global Blindian Project that celebrates the unions between Black and South Asian people (BBC 2020). Simon’s experience of sexual violence near the end of Bridgerton series one may be an implicit way the racist media keeps Black people compliant and dependent, with many viewers dependent on the mainstream to “represent” them. While there are independent Black filmmakers producing work that affirms Black people, those stories do not make it to the masses. Some examples are Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul (Ebo 2022), and Nanny (Jusu 2022), further to Rye Lane (Allen-Miller 2022), while Nigeria’s Nollywood is also producing work. Concurrently, The Woman King (Prince-Blythewood 2022) was the first Hollywood mainstream production about the Dahomey Kingdom, while The Little Mermaid (2023) romanticised the eighteenth-century Caribbean away from being a region ravaged by colonial violence into a utopian post-racial fantasy (Ventour-Griffiths 2024b).

3. The Spectacularisation of Everything

To some viewers, one attraction of Bridgerton might be exactly the focus of this article’s main criticism: the existence of Black characters in a Regency where racism is a moot point. It has become obvious that characters written in ways where race largely is not central to their character fit today’s inclusive casting models better than those where whiteness is key to the story (Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) 2022). Julia Quinn’s novels are about white elites whose relationships to one another are purely economic—an exclusive class where white racial identity and rights to property were inextricable (Harris 1993, p. 1714). In Bridgerton’s world modelled on early Victorian capitalism, there is no fantasy to be experienced (Cottom 2021). And even with the allure of Black inclusion, there is no version of capitalism that is not somehow racial in nature (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in: Gap Filosofico (@gapfilosofico) n.d.), which also implicating The Ton into debates of sexualised racial capital (Gebrial 2017; Han Ren (@drhanren) 2023).

Casting Black characters in a Regency programme where racialisation and racism clearly matter in that world feeds into blinkered perceptions of the past that uphold the status quo. Bridgerton greenlights this erasure through presenting Black access to the upper echelons via marriage to white people, while interracial relationships between Black and others not racialised as white remain manifestly absent (Burton 2022). Traditions of “inclusive casting” practices, like with race and gender, can be traced back to the nineteenth century when several theatre adaptations of Jane Austen’s work used all-women casts (Looser 2017). Meanwhile, American actor Ira Aldridge (coming to England at 17) in the 1840s was the first Black actor to play “white roles” in England (Williams 2007; Wilcox 2016). There are multiple types of casting in period dramas. Amanda-Rae Prescott writes:

“There have been three6 paths traditionally towards increasing diversity …: (1) blind casting ([AKA] racebending), where Black and POC actors play traditionally white characters adding original Black characters to existing fictional works, and (2) Own Voices, where Black and POC writers share their own stories. These two are not mutually exclusive, but, in … British period drama, the former is more frequently used, as the bedrock of the genre is adapting … novels and plays by white authors”.

(Prescott 2020)

However, are Bridgerton’s casting practices inclusive? Series one of ITV’s Sandition (Davies 2019) and The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Collins 2022) remain shining examples of writing racism into Regency period dramas in a racially literate way and succeeded where Bridgerton ultimately lacks. Both also show the mechanics of empire that existed at the centre of mixed unions in a Regency context. Simon and Marina are Black characters living in Regency London at a time of empire, but they were not originally written as “Black characters”. There are moments where this shines through like Lady Featherington playing a Regency karen—but it is not explicit.

The whiteness of mixed unions illustrates how Netflix grabs viewers with the illusion of progress even while inter-marriage has existed for centuries. And the political choice to use mixed romance as “spectacle” to gain viewers (DeBord 1967) not only effects period drama but is contingent on a media landscape that continues to do the same in advertising. In the words of Guy DeBord, “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has … been materialized” (DeBord 1967, p. 7).

4. Some Kinda Black

Contrary to social media discourse saying Bridgerton is a post-racial utopia, this is a world where racism exists. One of the reasons why many Black viewers enjoy Bridgerton is because it offers an escape from a racist reality through a half-baked fantasy of Regency history where racism is not an explicit problem. Executive producer Shonda Rhimes says “I think we’re unapologetically romantic. This is pure escapism. And that is something I think we could all us right now” (Valentini 2020). Her long-time collaborator and executive producer Gus Van Dusen further promised a show of multiracial equality, or “escapism” but “The escapism that Bridgerton promises, then, is one that asks viewers to ignore white supremacy’s sway over Black and Brown lives, particularly in the period it depicts” (Kafantaris et al. 2021).

Bridgerton’s escapism is one where Simon the Duke is the Jane Austen-adjacent surrogate Mr. Darcy giving a Black face of capitalistic exploitation. Daphne Bridgerton is written as the “diamond of the season” talked about as the most eligible and beautiful woman chosen by (Black) Queen Charlotte for marriage. Simon is written as her love interest, rather problematically. While mixed unions have been happening for centuries, the fantasy Netflix imagines is one of “multiracial equality” where the individualism of capitalism is enforced with a Black face. In the words of Guilaine Kinouani (2021), “Black excellence is linked to the idea of transcendence … [it] is of course exclusionary and arguably reproduces materialistic takes of what success looks like. It fundamentally centres whiteness as the kid to impress” (p. 162).

Nothing about Bridgerton’s diversity is progressive but offers a narrative of Black success only as possible with the success of white people—what legal scholar Derrick Bell (1980) called interest-convergence: “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites” (p. 523). On one hand there is a conversation about “diversity” in historical period dramas, while on the other Bridgerton illustrates how due to having Regency capitalism “without racism”, the writers’ process and thus production were racially illiterate from the very beginning. Capitalism cannot exist without racism:

“[I]t can be affirmed without reservations that … white racism which came to pervade the world was an integral part of … capitalist … production ... Occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European[s] … enslaved … for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited ... Oppression of African[s] on purely racial grounds accompanied … and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons”.

(Rodney 1972, pp. 88–89)

Creative choices were made to vindicate Bridgerton from explicit in-world debates of enslavement by offering progress via in-text plots of white-centring mixed relationships and a Black face of nineteenth century. This, existing in a world that has been framed in a post-enslavement moment and a “post-racial” existence feels written to confuse, allowing Black characters to exist in Regency London without racism-related issues. At the same time, it employs nineteenth-century cultures of inheritance and bloodlines made by British slave economies in the Caribbean. After all, Lady Danbury’s conversation with Simon about Charlotte’s marriage to white George III is a point that shows the existence of racism in a society “once divided by colour” (Art of the Swoon, 20:22–21:03), later developed in prequel Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Also, in Bridgerton series one boxer Will Mondrich reveals his father was enslaved in the American South (Ocean’s Apart, 28:36–28:48). Such examples implicate every plot and action in the Bridgerton-verse into the dynamics of power that underpin the British Empire. But the explicit absence of racialisation in that “fantasy” has framed characters like Simon as “honorary” white folks (Bonilla-Silva 2004).

This odd notion of being “honorary white people” is something the West Indies cricket team experienced in 1982–83 as part of the “Rebel Tour” that went to play in apartheid South Africa during a global boycott (Stevan Riley 2010, 65:02–68:00). Viv Richards, who boycotted the tour, said “One of the things on the table was whilst there, you gonna be an “honorary” white. How can a Black man be an honorary white man?” (67:00–67:10). Seventeen players gave credibility to the apartheid regime and, while there, were treated as “honorary” white men. Michael Holding reflected:

“What is wrong with the colour of my skin? […] Why should anyone tell me I got to be an honorary anything apart from what I am? These guys have sold out having … accepted … honorary white. If they paid them enough money they would be willing to accept chains on their ankles. I was disgusted”.

(67:14–67:34)

Netflix’s “reimagining” of the colonial Regency allows Simon to meet the position of “honorary” white for most of the programme because “Whiteness is not a color at all, but a set of power relations” (Mills 1997, p. 127). Simon Bassett is best friends with supporting character Anthony Bridgerton—they were at school together. However, when Simon starts dating Anthony’s sister Daphne (Diamond of the First Water 2020), they have a falling out. Subsequent encounters (discussed later) remind us how in a Regency world, Black people—even rich ones—only have temporary access to whiteness. Simon has a reputation for his extra-curricular sexual pastimes in brothels and Anthony knows this from their lifelong friendship. Further to Daphne being unofficially engaged to another of Anthony’s friends Nigel Berbrook, Daphne is unaware—patriarchy as an agreement between chums. Simon did not know either (Shock and Delight, 12:59–13:22). While Nigel has a similar reputation, Anthony chooses to ignore it. “He is never seen going in and out of brothels … I even know where he’s been these past few weeks” (Shock and Delight, 13:55–14:00). Simon later kisses Daphne and Anthony then challenges him to a duel to defend her honour when he refuses to marry her (An Affair with Honour, 05:20–06:00).

Anthony’s “protection” of his sister revisits how Black men now and in the Regency were seen through racist ideas of sexuality that bell hooks writes in We Real Cool (2004) as “bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon” (pp. 74–75). Men like Simon came to be stereotyped by whiteness as “super-predators” in the 80s and 90s (DuVernay 2016, 28:38–30:00), following enslavement and Jim Crow where the “Black Brute” caricature framed Black men as always in wanting to rape white women (Pilgrim 2000). “He dishonours you, sister … and me and the very Bridgerton name”, says Anthony when Simon refuses to marry her. (An Affair with Honour 37:44–49). Meanwhile, films like The Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) and books such as To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee 1960) reiterate how Black men were seen as sexual threats to white women that white men were “required” to “protect” them from. For example, in 1955when Carolyn Bryant Donham lied about Emmett Till’s alleged catcall leading to his lynching by her relatives (Equality Justice Initiative 2017).

Taking Bridgerton’s world to be a society built by the machinery of whiteness founded by empire (Martinot 2010), Simon’s status as an “honorary white” is diminished when he chooses to date his best friend’s sister. Anthony’s responsibilities to his sister also revisit how as the head of the family, he also sees his sisters as his own property—an ideology that transitioned into the twentieth century. For example, one of the reasons for the 1919 white terror campaigns (like in UK cities Liverpool and Cardiff) was the inferiority complex many white men experienced when white women chose Black or Asian partners. As historian–author Carina Ray (2009) further discussed how the sexual jealousy observed by commentators like policymakers and the wider popular news media:

“… suggests that, in addition to job competition, anxieties over race and sex played an important role in the move towards proposing repatriation as an appropriate solution to the social and economic problems deemed responsible for the riots”.

(p. 631)

The 1919 white terror campaigns may also be argued to be a white male, racist fear of Black sexuality: “bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon” (Hooks 2004, pp. 74–75), while these white men at the same time saw white women as their own property. Although Black men had been engaged in romantic and domestic relationships with white women since at least the Georgian and then Victorian periods (Olusoga 2016, p. 210), marriages like Simon and Daphne’s clashed with white supremacist rules against racial mixing. With Simon as the show’s capitalist being allowed into and out of whiteness, Daphne’s later sexual assault of him is not as a “Black character” but problematically an honorary white man due to his near lack of racial burden. In the words of Richard Dyer (1997) from his book White: “We [white people] will speak of … the blackness or Chineseness of friends, neighbours, colleagues, … or clients, and it may be in the most genuine or friendly manner, but we don’t mention the whiteness of white people we know” (p. 2).

Lack of explicit reference to Simon’s colour does not mean it is not there, nor does his money shield him from Regency racism. He never wanted children due to his own childhood trauma and wanted to spite his father by not producing an heir (Shock and Delight, 56:42–58:00). Simon Bassett Sr. cared more for producing a male heir than his wife’s health and ultimately Simon’s mother the Duchess of Hastings, Sarah Bassett, died from childbirth7 (Shock and Delight, 01:00–02:00). Daphne ignores Simon’s request because she “wants” a baby. Through the writers’ room and production, her dismissing Simon’s request shows how racial microaggression leads to racialised sexual assault via white female privilege in a world where white women may be more likely to be believed than Black men (Ware 1992). Simon’s “production” of a child against his will shows viewers how Black agency is commodified under white female desire. Anthony’s previous threats against Simon are the preamble rendering Black masculinity a “menace” to white womanhood (Hooks 2004, p. 74). Put another way, Daphne’s sexual assault of Simon imitates the racialised dynamics between the white daughters of white male enslavers and enslaved Black men:

“I have seen myself the master of a such a household whose head was bowed down in shame; for it was known in the neighbourhood that his daughter had selected one of the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first grandchild. […] She selected the most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised with less fear of exposure”.

(Jacobs 1861, p. 48)

What Bridgerton shows is how the colonial imagery of “buck-breaking” is reimagined even in fantasy—publicly punishing enslaved Black men that did in cases include rape and other forms of sexual violence as form of humiliation. Through Daphne and Anthony’s treatment of Simon, Netflix depicts how Black men are seen in the colonial imagination and how white male authoritarianism combined with white female victimhood “…shaped the image of the Mandingo and transformed the bodies of enslaved Black men into animalistic beasts in desperate need of taming” (Landell 2023, pp. 217–18). Anthony’s disciplining of Simon set the trap; Daphne sprung the trap with sexual violence importing the colonial logic of buck-breaking into Regency London. Africans kidnapped from the continent were not enslaved until they were mentally enslaved on the ships and on plantations—and even then, many resisted. Enslaved people are not born, they are made. Daphne’s buck-breaking of Simon imitates that mental colonisation of the mind (Wa Thiong’o 1986), compounded by his own childhood trauma of abuse inflicted by his father (Cockersell 2018). Simon and Daphne’s relationship presented as love is misleading. It is coercive control. Evan Stark writes: “Coercive control shares general elements with other capture or course-of-conduct crimes such as kidnapping, stalking, and harassment, including the facts that it is ongoing and its perpetrators use various means to hurt, humiliate, intimidate, exploit, isolate, and dominate their victims. Like hostages, victims of coercive control are frequently deprived of money, food, access to communication or transportation, and other survival resources even as they are cut off from family, friends, and other supports” (Stark 2009, p. 6).

For Black men, The Ton is an open-air plantation. Much in the same way, white male enslavers raped enslaved Black women to produce children as labour (Morgan 2004; Hartman 2008; Turner 2017; Morgan 2021), Daphne’s buck-breaking of Simon was a psychological tool to keep him compliant. However, their children will carry the “Bassett” name; Simon has no living relatives, and the series has no Black community to speak of—even in fantasy. Daphne’s treatment of Simon is a digital lynching—the body lives, the mind dies. Netflix’s alt-Britain is a white nation where he is treated by the Bridgertons in the colonial logics of enslavement—a mental slavery imposed through cultural norms of marriage and its expectations. Marriage between Black and white people here continues that logic but with a liberal air where “…rights in property are contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race” (Harris 1993, p. 1714). The way Black spouses are manoeuvred. Thus is the embodied, sexualised racial capital of white people and families.

5. Capital R Racism

By exporting the physical idea of chattel enslavement off-screen, Netflix manipulates viewers into thinking it does not exist. For example, as Stephanie Hanus (2023) informs us, although “… the inclusion of Black and Brown [people] in historically set productions may allow for implicit critiques, these critiques are not sufficient when slavery is so overtly ignored otherwise”. However, it is probable that families like the Bridgertons made their money through the British sugar economies in the Caribbean. When British enslavement was abolished by 1838, half of the compensation payout that went to the enslavers (not enslaved) went to the nearly 3000 “absentee enslavers” in Britain (Hall et al. 2014, p. 1; University College London [UCL] n.d.). Economics historians would describe absentees as those managing plantations and enslaved people psychologically and geographically removed from the sites of terror thousands of miles away. For Bridgerton fans willing to endure the growing pains of anti-racism, they might see how Cheryl Harris’ synthesis on whiteness as property fits into Bridgerton’s wealthy lifestyles upheld by the colonial terrorism of plantation enslavement in Britain’s slave colonies in the Caribbean (Young 2017). Here, it is notable that the country estates depicted in the television series are likely fictionalisations of places and spaces connected to successful slave compensation claims (Huxtable et al. 2020, p. 5).

In Bridgerton, this capitalist class is not only white but Black and Brown too.8 With the addition of Kate Sharma in series two, she too comes to benefit from the Bridgerton’s fortune arguably made through the misery of enslavement. Nicky Mondrich, the son of Will and Alice Mondrich, inherits the Baron of Kent title from his white great-aunt Lady Kent (Out of the Shadows, 25:23–30)—we are never told how these characters made their money. Bridgerton tells stories of rich families but never how they acquired their wealth, very much in the colonial afterlife of Jane Austen. As film critic Carolyn Hinds tweeted, “[…] If the slave trade doesn’t exist how are they obtaining their wealth? Magic?” (Carolyn Hinds (@CarrieCnh12) 2024). The fact Bridgerton has some Black characters is of no consequences when Georgian London had Black aristocrats (Hsiao 2020). American novelist Vanessa Riley (n.d.) shows a growing Black working- and middle-class, while people like George Bridgetower, enslaver Nathaniel Wells and Chief Justice Mansfield’s biracial niece Dido Elizabeth Belle, navigated the ivory towers of the great and the good of the white establishment.

Simon inheriting his estate “Clyvedon Castle” matters little when absentee enslavement included a few Black enslavers. For example, consider Nathaniel Wells born enslaved on the Caribbean island of St Kitts to enslaver William Wells and enslaved woman Juggy (Legacies of British Slavery [LBS] 2024). When he was nine years old, he was sent to be educated in England (Bernard 2011). In 1794, William died leaving Nathaniel three plantations and an est. £120,000—millions today (Legacies of British Slavery [LBS] 2024). He also bought Piercefield House (in 1802), becoming Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1818 (Legacies of British Slavery [LBS] 2024).

His life shows how the profits of chattel enslavement went into the hands of white people, through his children (Legacies of British Slavery [LBS] 2024) who may have looked more like their mothers than father and over successive generations just like many Black Victorians, and the Black Georgians—became white (Norton 1999; Davies 1999; King et al. 2007; Olusoga 2016).

6. Digital Lynching

Much in that same way, Marina Thompson is married off to white Philip Crane by the end of series one later having his children. At the beginning of series one, she is introduced to viewers as the poorer distant relative of Lord Featherington and is later forced to marry a wealthy white man for “protection”. However, from her very arrival in London, she like Simon is forced to see value in herself by her associations with white people and white families. Like Simon, she is subject to the rules of empire but differently—she is a poor Black woman.9 Yet, her arrival is in direct competition with the Featherington daughters whom Lady Featherington knows are not as conventionally beautiful or well-mannered in the eyes of polite society. For example, both her daughters are presented as brats allowed to act as they like while Thompson is pushed through the racist mill of “adultification” (Epstein et al. 2017; Davis and Marsh 2020) to uplift white womanhood and do the bidding of her white woman relatives (Ware 1992; Armstead 2021).

In-show mentions of race, racism, and enslavement implicate Marina’s experiences into a Regency context of misogynoir—of a child no less, as she arrives in London at seventeen years old. Simply put, adultification describes how children are denied access to notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability—usually discussed in contexts of Black girlhoods (Epstein et al. 2017). When it is later “found” that Marina arrived pregnant, Bridgerton’s creators reanimated the racist stereotypes of “hypersexual” Black girls in a Regency context of misogynoir (Bailey 2008, 2021). Such debates revisit wider societal stigma against unwed single mothers that persisted in Britain well into the 1970s (Thane 2011; Hauser 2016, pp. 115–35; Cohen 2017) further nuanced on the ‘intersectional’ grounds of race and gender- pregnant while Black (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins 1990). In the same years Marina was experiencing violent, racist microaggressions from white women, enslaved Black women were toiling in vegetable fields pregnant thousands of miles away (Sinanan 2020). Lady Featherington sees Marina through the same colonial logics as white masters and enslaved Black people. In the words of Rafia Zakaria,

“In this way, many wealthy British white women’s very first experience of freedom were caught up with the flexing of imperial superiority. Contrary to the customary slow slog of history, Britain’s empire had swelled rapidly through the nineteenth century, and British women had become citizens of empire. At a time when white women were still the legal property of their husbands, the opportunity to taste a little power … was evidently too tantalizing to resist, even though it meant subjugating others”.

(Zakaria 2022, p. 16)

The rigmarole of daily microaggressions from the white world transfers Lady Featherington’s colonial logic of Black inferiority upon Marina’s body. In a series where discourses of whiteness appear manifestly absent, a closer reading shows they are very present. Lady Featherington reinforces anti-Black stigma against single mothers again in the “Art of the Swoon” (28:30–30:10), taking Marina to a working-class neighbourhood to frighten her into giving up the baby. She then later tells her daughters Marina’s pregnancy is “catching” (Shock and Delight, 6:15–6:32). Marina’s prospects, thus, are presented as finding a “good white man” to save her from ruin. This is in direct opposition to how showrunners use the Black male penis as a sex object to liberate white women’s sexuality—as talked about earlier in relation to Simon and Daphne. Here, Marina framed as a ‘‘hypersexual” Black woman (Jewell 1993, p. 46) while Daphne always in “need” of saving, show how Black proximity to whiteness benefits white people more than Black, humanising white folks at Black expense (White 1985; LeFlouria 2015; Haley 2016; Snorton 2017; Armstead 2021). In short, under Bridgerton’s colonial racial order, white women sit above Black men and Black women while constructed as always in need of protection.

In a show celebrated for its superficial employment of diversity, mixed unions are used as props for white families in a wider Hollywood machinery that uses the aesthetic of mixed relationships as currency. Marina marries white Philip Crane to protect herself from scandal while misogynoir was used as a plot device. Simultaneously, to save face with her white family members, the writers use Marina to belittle another Black woman—Madame Delacroix—threatening to “out” her fake accent to the rest of The Ton if she does not follow Lady Featherington’s requests (Swish, 20:34–21:00). Black characters are forced to act out anti-Blackness—unfortunately.

By the end of series one, Lady Danbury has been playing matchmaker for white families and is written in need of validation from white people as a desexualised “mammy” figure (Armstead 2021). She does not meet the usual stereotypes—e.g., “hearty laughter, wider grin” (Pilgrim 2000)—and has few Black friends other than Queen Charlotte, while also having no observable family of her own. Her brother Marcus Anderson is introduced in series three (Force of Nature 2024) and viewers later find out she was married young to Lord Herman Danbury and bore him four children (Gardens in Bloom, Queen Charlotte). Trapped in a domestically violent marriage, Marcus also told on her to their father when Lady Danbury tried to escape the night before her wedding (Romancing Mr Bridgerton, 50:40–57). One son, Dominic is introduced (Gardens in Bloom, Queen Charlotte) but it seems Lady Danbury subscribes value from chasing white people. Meanwhile, her brother Marcus is courting Violet Bridgerton. He is another example of how the currency of white-centred mixed relationships as a sign of progress is weaponised while questions of colonial racism remain sidelined to the background for a feel-good story.

Although these could be criticised as lapses in writing (Ventour-Griffiths 2024c: 99), perhaps they were designed this way to confuse media critics. Black people rarely appear in historical shows and on this occasion when they do, they become the objects of white people and the faces of capitalism—diversity as marketing (Ahmed and Swan 2006). Black desirability hence becomes a tool of white families to further their economic ventures: “embedded within the constituent discourses of love—of desirability, emotional labor, support and commitment—are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love’s work” (Gebrial 2017).

For Bridgerton’s leading characters, Black people (and Asian folks with the later inclusion of the Sharmas from series two) are the surrogate for capitalist extractive labour using them to “produce”. Amid The Ton’s landed families, Black people are devoured by inter-marriage as property (Harris 1993). On the surface, “inclusive” casting is positive, but it does not work in stories where “being white” holds in-world meaning. In executive producer Shonda Rhimes’ alleged fantasy universe where white characters in the original books became Black and Asian, they are subject to the rules of empire because Regency whiteness is not just about colour but in fact a set of power relations (Mills 1997, p. 127).

7. Conclusions

Seeing this paper’s title, some readers may think I have a background in comedy! Yet, beginning my scholarly career in spoken word poetry,10 I have often used political satire to make serious points. “The Whites Who Loved Me” is not only a play on the Bond film (Gilbert 1977) but a critique on new obsessions with “diversity” using mixed love as a currency (McClintock 1995) where knowledge made through Hollywood production works in close with that same society’s power relations (Foucault 1975, p. 27). In short, Black characters written in proximity to whiteness reflect modern power relations where, for many Black people to succeed in the global west (at least economically), we are required to play the game of whiteness to various levels. Bridgerton’s Black characters have no self-worth, and that is intentional writing—digitally lynched on the lawn! From Simon and Daphne to Lady Danbury playing matchmaker for white people, and Marina chasing Colin and later married to Sir Philip Crane, do the creators just dislike Black people?

But Bridgerton does not exist in a vacuum. Calls for more diversity in media following #OscarsSoWhite (in 2016), PeriodDramasSoWhite, and the more recent BLM Protests (in 2020) have become a source for historical productions to use the optics of diversity to further capitalist interests. Bridgerton’s erasure of chattel enslavement while using Black faces to sell a product is one example. But this is compounded by others like Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid (2023) as well as the diversification of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2022) for Netflix and the very enjoyable (yet problematic) Mister Malcolm’s List (2022) using Black and Brown faces in high places to also participate in colonial erasure.

Thinking about how Bridgerton’s main pull was more Black folks in period dramas, we must ask if its success is in part due to the ways Black folks want to “forget” our colonial past. “I am begging for Black women in particular to stop craving the history of our ancestors to be depicted as something it wasn’t as if it’s something to be ashamed of”, tweeted critic Carolyn Hinds. “Yes, our people were enslaved, and that’s not our or their shame to bear. It’s the shame of those who enslaved them” (@CarrieCnh12 Begging 2024). Yet there is no supply without demand. Black demands for fewer trauma stories may have helped produce the fertile ground for period dramas that use EDI to claim colonialism never happened. In the words of James Baldwin (1960), “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the Earth as though I had a right to be here”. Preoccupations with diversity and allyship have left a vacuum where creative re-imaginings of the past have offered possibilities of a Black History Skepticism in the same fascistic echo as Holocaust Denial (Lipstadt 1993).

My intervention about the white-centring of mixed relationships in contemporary media is not even the tip of the iceberg. Future works may want to look at the way shows like Bridgerton help rollback public critical thinking at the same time that there have been mass cuts in equalities provisions, notably executive orders made by Trump. “Whites” is an innovative contribution to that debate in a world where fascism is as much about what media the powerful want us to see as it is what they do not. The uncritical use of “inclusive casting” models will have lasting consequences for public memory and the future of the historical record effecting how we remember. Wendy Brown (2015) states, “Democracies are conceived as requiring technically skilled human capital, not educated participants…” (p. 177).