"Adolescence" Does Not Make Any Political Statement About Race

And that's what white identity politicians are angry about.

Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

This essay contains spoilers

"I really hope this is a drama that suggests that Jamie is like this because of a whole number of complicated factors" said creator of the miniseries Adolescence, Jack Thorne.

Alas. In the realm of the online Culture Wars, that was a naive hope.

Like many people, I heard about the new drama miniseries via social media outrage. On the cesspool of a site that is X, I learned that Netflix had aired a piece of appalling anti-white propaganda. This is the flavour of it.

These claims are not true. Neither Rudakabana nor Sentamu killed a girl over online bullying and accusations of being an incel. Rudakabana was a spree killer motivated by sadistic enjoyment of such atrocities and Sentamu killed his ex-girlfriend’s friend after she embarrassed him. Both were 17. The (white) actor who played Jamie’s father was inspired to create the role and characters by news stories including one of a young boy stabbing a girl.*

This, and the fact that I quite enjoy psychological thrillers and crime dramas, decided me on watching it. On this score, it is quite unsatisfying. It is slow and dark and depressing and there is a lot of ambiguity and we don’t really get a deep understanding of the main character’s thought processes or a conclusion. We don’t know what happens to Jamie and whether he will receive a lengthy prison sentence or what the hopes are for his rehabilitation. Many commenters described it as ‘boring’ and I suspect this is because they were hoping for a plot twist that would make it clear that we were to regard this boy as unambiguously evil or redeem him in some way.

Adolescence begins by invoking our sympathy for Jamie. We are presented with a small and skinny 13-year-old boy on the cusp of adolescence. At this age, the producers had the choice to show us a child or a man-in-development and they chose to present us with a child. Boys have their most rapid growth spurt between 12 and 16, develop significant muscle mass and strength between 12 and 15 and start to gain facial hair most commonly between 13 and 16. Owen Cooper, the actor playing Jamie, is not yet at this stage of development. He is shown wetting himself in fear when police break down the door, sobbing in the police car, undergoing intrusive physical examinations and appearing generally very small and vulnerable next to police officers and his burly father. Viewers are encouraged to hope that this is all some terrible misunderstanding and Jamie will be exonerated until the end of Episode One where we learn that CCTV footage has captured him stabbing a teenage girl to death.

In Episode Two we are shown Jamie’s chaotic and violent school environment and the vicious online social environment in which he mostly operates. The investigating police officer, DI Bascombe, is revealed as being deeply oblivious to this youth culture and needing to have it explained to him by his own son that the online comments he had been receiving from his victim, Katie, were not friendly but that he and his friends were being bullied and mocked as sexually unattractive ‘incels’. In Episode Three, we are shown Jamie’s psychological state in a meeting with his psychologist and see him veering from an insecure child desperate to be liked to a resentful and raging young man who has absorbed incel culture (but seemingly not until after having been accused of being one). Jamie does not appear to appreciate that his actions have real world consequences and have resulted in the death of a young girl. In Episode Four, we see his loving and stable family and the impact of Jamie’s actions on them and his parents’ self-recriminations. Jamie’s father is shown to lose his temper but also restrain himself from committing violence against youths who have vandalised his van and his parents deplore their own ignorance in assuming that he was safe because he was always in his room on his computer.

My own political thoughts on watching it were that it would tie into two messages but I have not been seeing either of these make a significant showing on social media.

Firstly, Adolescence encapsulates the oft-cited Margaret Atwood quote. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Often this is cited to make light of the denigration of men and justify bad behaviour on the part of women who gratuitously insult men for unchosen physical characteristics like baldness, shorter stature or perceived unattractiveness or whose ‘go to’ response to any disagreement is to accuse the dissenter of being a virgin, being unable to attract women, living in his mother’s basement or having a neckbeard or small penis. It implies that men have no grounds to object to body shaming or sexualised insults as women are largely understood to have, because women are far more likely to be murdered by men than the other way round. This is, of course, terrible ethical reasoning, but it is true that women are in far more physical danger from male rage than men are from female rage and consequently, the rise of misogynistic subcultures are more immediately and urgently alarming. Feminists have made this point on X, but mostly in response to people claiming that the bullying and mockery of Jamie by Katie was somehow morally equivalent to him stabbing her to death.

Secondly, Adolescence could, I thought, be seen as unduly sympathetic to Jamie because he is white by ‘anti-racist’ activists. They frequently claim that whenever a shocking act of violence is committed by a black man or boy, this is decreed to be evidence that black people are all violent and whenever it is committed by a South Asian man or boy, it is assumed to be a terrorist attack, while a white man or boy committing such an act is more likely to be regarded as an individual and questions about his mental health and circumstances raised as potentially mitigating the offence. There is certainly truth in this within white identitarian circles and we see it in the posts above where people identify Rudakabana and Sentamu as typifying the murderers of women while ignoring individuals like Jake Davison and Kyle Clifford. However, this is also seen working in reverse with different cherry-picking and motivated reasoning and is currently a topic of furious argument in relation to guidance from the Sentencing Council that would see the individual circumstances of Britons of racial minority reviewed more carefully before sentencing than those of white Brits. I have not yet seen anybody arguing that the character of Jamie has been treated too sympathetically because of his race suggesting that, if anybody is, it is buried under all the posts claiming that the drama is anti-white propaganda.

There is still a great deal of social messaging in Adolescence but it is much more universal and generational. We are clearly intended to see the issue as having been caused by the malign influence of the internet on youth, the ignorance of Gen X parents about this risk, the eternal problem of peer pressure and the failings of the school to manage and address these social environments. This does prevent it from being an easily consumed and satisfying story. The creators of it, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also plays Jamie’s father), are explicit about this. Graham says,

We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser, Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us,’ and what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.’

Thorne told the BBC

[This] could happen to anyone and that’s not saying anyone is capable of being Jamie. It’s about parents that didn't see him, a school system that let him down, and the ideas that he consumed.

The drama is full of these indicators that the creators want us to see their product as a depiction of the current ‘ordinary’ and it is very difficult to see how anybody could, in good faith, see it as ‘anti-white’ or even as a demonisation of boys, despite it being about social pressures on boys. We are presented with the most average British family one could imagine - a loving and stable but busy and naive upper working class Northern family with two children and no distinctive characteristics that anybody could point at to say, “That is the problem with those people. This could never happen to normal people.” The family is of the white majority but many of the other characters contributing to this unhealthy environment are not. Of his two friends who are also being bullied and responding in unhealthy ways, one of them is white and one black. The victim, Katie, is white, but her best friend, Jade, who also exhibits extreme anger and violence (although not fatal violence!) is black and she is indicated to have significant problems at home and to have received all of her emotional support from Katie. Jamie is shown to be a continuing threat to women, but also depicted as very vulnerable and a victim of social issues impacting boys generally. The DI, who is black, is seen to be equally oblivious to his own son navigating this minefield and to become aware that he is not communicating well with him and attempting to remedy this.

Adolescence could be criticised for being so explicitly about social issues rather than purely about the art of telling a compelling story, but hamfisted forays into social engineering are typically punished by failing to engage viewers. That Adolescence is the most popular drama series at this time tells us either that the creators have managed to create a compelling story in its own right as well as convey social issues or that the social issues are of interest to a significant number of people, or both. I suspect it is both.

Thorne is dissatisfied with the Prime Minister’s response to his drama which has focused on the need for better role models for boys. He said,

Role models obviously can have a huge impact on people. But truthfully, we've got to change the culture that they're consuming and the means by which our technology is facilitating this culture.

He urged the PM to urgently consider a smartphone ban in schools and a digital age of consent. Thorne, who is white, is also open about having a personal stake in this issue. Speaking to the BBC, he says that, while working on the series, he has been thinking deeply about how to ensure that he continues to communicate effectively with his own son, who is currently eight, and protect him from the negative impacts of social media. I would suggest that this parental anxiety comes through quite clearly in the drama which is frequently described as “A parent’s worst nightmare.” Many commenters who are frustrated by the interpretation of Adolescence as anti-white have pointed out that those making this claim have more commonly criticised TV media for neglecting issues that impact white working class boys. It seems very odd to them that a drama featuring a white working class family so sympathetically could be read in this way. This was addressed particularly well by comedian, Elliot Steel.

If you watched Adolescence and screamed it's been made as propaganda against white people, you are so indoctrinated in a culture war, you cannot be saved. These are the same people, by the way, who will watch a footballer take the knee and go "Why has everything got to be made about race? I thought you wanted more TV shows with white people in them?

This encapsulates the attitude at the core of this reaction. The problem is not that Adolescence is making a statement about race. It is that it is not making one. This is an issue for those culture warriors whose single focus is on race and immigration from the standpoint of white identity politics, and who cannot watch a TV drama without problematising it through that lens and finding ways to be outraged and victimised by it. It is not only destructive of any non-political enjoyment of a disturbing psychological thriller, but also gets in the way of any productive conversation about social issues impacting young people. Does Adolescence accurately reflect experiences of young people in current British society? If so, what is the best way to better understand and address these problems? Is it more likely to be empirical research, serious consideration and workable strategies for parents and schools or obsessing about racial identity politics and complaining that the drama was not about gang crime and immigration? This endless racial problematising and outrage-mongering is both toxic and tiresome in the way we have come to associate with the ‘woke’ whether on the left or right. I’m sure I am far from alone in wishing it would stop.

*Edit. I added this paragraph an hour after publishing when it became clear from the comments that some readers outside the UK did not know the details of the cases the drama has been falsely claimed to be based on and so would not automatically know this to be false from my description of the film.