Don’t be too happy about Riz Ahmed’s Emmy

Aina Khan

The  69th annual Emmy Awards last night were all about Riz Ahmed: a working-class lad from London became the first actor of Asian and Muslim descent to take home the Emmy for best actor, for his role as Nasir Khan from the HBO drama The Night Of.

Only a week after the sixteenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, it feels particularly noteworthy that a man whose chances of being "randomly" searched in any airport in the Western world remain sky-high was instead bestowed with a shimmering, golden trophy.

Against a frightening backdrop of Islamophobia, where Muslims in the UK experience a nightmarish reality mirroring that of the protagonist played by Ahmed — what with a 326 per cent increase in anti-Islamophobic attacks and recently acid attacks to boot — this was a real victory.

Riz Ahmed is the glass ceiling-shattering actor who has finally started to transcend "diversity", that pithy word that tastes like ashes in the mouths of those starving for stories that echo their lived realities. And yet for some obscure reason, the Midas touch Riz Ahmed possesses across the pond doesn't seem to be casting a spell on British directors in the UK.

He should be lifting Baftas instead of Emmys on home soil, inspiring a generation of young British creatives to dare to dream beyond typecast roles that imprison them in the lines of a demographic tick-box. Instead, he is (rightfully) basking in the messianic glow of his success in the United States, because of a UK film industry that is - to paraphrase the American hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco - "all white everything", and a stale TV landscape obsessed with a conveyer belt of period dramas.

Apart from a handful of shows that have protagonists of colour at the helm such as Luther or Undercover, the same tiresome two-dimensional roles of servant, racially abused victim, loveable sidekick or brooding villain are being regurgitated time and time again, and it's become the cause of a mass exodus of British talent to the US. The likes of John Boyega, Archie Punjabi, Idris Elba, and Cush Jumbo, to name but a few, have realised that their stars will rise higher on the other side of the sky - and it's our loss.

British actress Thandie Newton said herself that period drama roles are limiting opportunities for actors from minority backgrounds. Champions of meritocracy who will decry this is as a call for injecting imagined BME faces into period dramas where minority faces didn't exist because of our obsession with the politically correct, golden ticket of "representation" need only look to David Olusoga's 'Black History of Britain' to learn that black people have existed in the UK for centuries. But even then, who wants to be cast as the racially abused tokenistic character again and again? British TV needs more imagination.

Ahmed's meteoric rise by no means heralds the arrival of a colour-blind film industry that is in fact allergic to melanin. He said himself in a keynote speech for Channel 4 on the lack of diversity in the British film industry at the Houses of Parliament that we cannot whitewash (or dare I say brown-wash) the structural issues in the film industry by trumpeting success stories such as his, which are the exception rather than the rule.

One knight in shining armour is not a panacea to the pervasive issue of representation. In the British film industry alone, only five per cent of those working in the UK creative industries on and off screen come from minority backgrounds, compared with 12.5 per cent of the total population. Only 1.5 per cent of directors for TV dramas are from BAME backgrounds.

In a post-Brexit world teetering towards the "alt-right", more is at stake than just entertaining an audience of millennials with frustratingly short attention spans. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie said, there is a danger in this single narrative that amputates large swathes of minority communities from the national narrative of who we are.

For one thing, it doesn't sell. Despite the dearth of roles for minority actors, diversity in the film industry is a goldmine yet to be tapped. A study commissioned by culture minister Sajid Javed found that if BAME professionals were given promotions on par with their white counterparts, it could add £24bn to our economy each year.

If we do not champion and support talent like Riz Ahmed, make sure they are visible on our screens as fully-fleshed characters and not shallow caricatures of an entire race, we risk losing a generation of young people to the gaping chasm of vacuous debates on integration and to extremism in all its plurality. The creative industries can be a catalyst for positive change. We need only look to how grime artists helped politicise the 16-24 year-old electorate in the 2017 general elections with the #Grime4Corbyn campaign.

There is a power in story-telling that allows us to relate to experiences that aren't our own. It not only nurtures empathy, but it breaks that steel-fortified echo chamber so many of us are locked into either online or at home. The arts, if used correctly, are the perfect vehicle to shift the narrative. If I can relate to the sophomoric angst of Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls — a ginger-haired, freckle-faced American teenager whose experiences are a world away from that of a British Muslim Pakistani woman like myself - then surely there is also universality in my own story.

Last night was the night of Riz Ahmed, when a brown London lad who should have been lost to the dismal drumbeat of diversity metamorphosed from typecast terrorist into a bona fide actor. At the risk of sounding possessive and patriotic, Ahmed should have lifted that trophy at home, here in the UK. But until the British film industry starts turning those wheels of change for sincere representation and not tokenistic diversity, that won't be happening any time soon.

By arrangement with the Independent