Black Lives Matter in London, June 2020: Patrick Hutchinson, instant celebrity, and changing discourses of race and class in British media

Abstract

Registering the apparent popular success of the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring and summer of 2020, this essay investigates how and how far BLM’s critique of racist institutions and demands for the full recognition of black subjectivity penetrated mainstream British media.It focuses on the mediation of Patrick Hutchinson, a black personal trainer propelled into instant celebrity in the wake of counter-protests against Black Lives Matter in London, in June 2020. Hutchinson was hailed as a ‘[black] national hero’ after being shown rescuing a white counter-protester, but in ways that initially recuperated BLM for a white-centred cultural politics. First, Hutchinson’s heroism was often presented in terms of his assumed transcendence of or disaffiliation from racial identity. Second, in the context of media representations of the right-wing backlash against BLM, Hutchinson’s heroism was part of a wider discourse of race, class and masculinity, in which he was contrasted with Bryn Male (his rescuee) and Andrew Banks, a couple of abject figures identified with white working-class masculinity. The public shaming of Male and Banks constituted only a strategic withdrawal of white privilege, leaving white-centred judicial, policing, and political institutions unchallenged.In the longer term however Hutchinson and his associates have been able to foreground the centrality of black political traditions and identities to civil society. Starting with interviews with UK television’s Channel Four News, subsequently widely disseminated across different media, Hutchinson has been able to parlay his instant celebrity into a multifaceted activism that penetrates outside the celebrity spectacle into cultural, political, and educational spheres.

Keywords:

• race
• class
• masculinity
• Black Lives Matter
• Patrick Hutchinson
• celebrity
• activism
• news media

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following who have significantly contributed to this work by sharing ideas and/or commenting on earlier drafts: Imruh Bakari, Neil Ewen, Carol Smith, and the anonymous readers at Celebrity Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 2019 Arbuthnot attracted some criticism for initially refusing to recuse herself from presiding over the hearings concerning the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Shortly after the Banks case, in October 2020, she was appointed to the High Court.

2. For example, one Philip Laing, a student caught urinating on the war memorial in Sheffield city centre in 2009, was presented as a highly individuated member of a middle-class family, whose education, potential career, and parents’ occupations, were all not only cited as mitigating factors in his legal defence (and successfully so, as he escaped a custodial sentence), but also reported in detail (Wainwright 26 November 2009).

3. In comparison with mainstream celebrity, see the work of organisations such as Black Cultural Archives, the national heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain (Black Cultural Archives, 2020).

4. That hybridity is also evident on the Black Lives Matter website, which mixes a ‘traditional’ emphasis on community resistance with an explicitly intersectional framing of identity formation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jude Davies

Jude Davies The formative influences on Jude Davies's work were the accounts of the 'cultural politics of difference' advanced by Cornel West, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy and others, and situationist interventions in mediated spectacle. His attempts at critical analysis of white racial identities underpin articles and books such as Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film (1997) [co-author], Diana, A Cultural History: Gender, 'Race', Nation and the People's Princess (2001), and Controversies: Falling Down (2013). Davies is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Winchester, where he contributes to teaching in the Graduate School, the School of Media and Film, and the Department of English, Creative Writing, and American Studies.