Misha B: Too Black for X Factor?

It is without doubt the greatest cliché of the Black British experience. Grandparents told their children, our parents informed us, and now we as the next parental generation owe it to our children to firewall them against the inevitable with those immortal words; ‘Child! If you want to get on in this society you have to better than the rest’.

In those few words generations of Black people used a short hand to explain the seemingly irrational phenomena of racial prejudice. Parents knew that sooner rather than later their children needed to understand both the subtle and not so subtle phenomena of racial prejudice to avoid confronting your own frustration, anger and at worst questioning their own sanity.

Our society’s racial prejudice and its seemingly shocking irrationality was played out in front of 10 million viewers last night as The X Factor's most prodigious talent ever, Misha B, found herself once again amongst the least supported of all the six acts vying for the public’s vote.

Truth is that if Misha B was like most of the other contestants, good but not brilliant, the Black viewers might sense something was wrong, seeing her once again in the bottom two, but our default position would be not to utter a word of racial discontent. This denial occurs for two reasons: first, we ourselves  don’t want to believe that we can be judged in such a crude and  prejudiced way, and secondly, and equally important, we don’t want to upset White society’s sensibilities that they might be doing something wrong. We are also aware that if we are not careful, our frustration at voicing injustices becomes their outrage that we should ever suggest such a thing.

But watching and listening to Misha B alongside the other contestants goes way beyond the grey area that affords others the benefit of the doubt.

Misha B is so talented that even alongside the biggest selling female singer on the planet - Lady Gaga - who was a guest on the programme last night - her vocal range and power was on a par.

So why did the British public once again turn their back on Misha B? Writing in The Voice last week, comedian Gina Yashere confronted the elephant in the room head on: ‘ Misha B won’t win the X Factor ’, she said, ‘ because she’s too Black’.

It is difficult to argue that a key element of last night’s vote wasn’t about Misha B’s blackness. Last night we witnessed four embarrassed judges tip toeing around the ‘elephant in the room’. Louis Walsh rather pathetically offered that he had to vote for Kitty - the other contestant who received the least amount of votes because she was in his over 25 group. Tulisa and Kelly Rowland just ignored the issue, whilst Take That’s Gary Barlow made reference to something not being quite right. “Of all the contestants we have on this show”, he argued, “the first person any record producer would sign up is Misha B”. I’m sure that Black viewers like myself  breathed a collective sigh of relief after hearing Barlow’s comments.

These issues of latent racial prejudice in mainstream entertainment programmes are not new. One thinks back to Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty in Big Brother and Joanna Riley, the contestant on Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice. And while some of you may say, ‘get over it, its TV. It’s tabloid entertainment’, many Black people rightly worry about how much of these irrational judgments are being played out in job interviews or in our classrooms, or when young Black men are confronted by the police?

Our detractors will tell us we are consumed by this thought, and have a whole set of language to throw at us to keep us quiet, including, ‘You’ve got chip on your shoulder’, or ‘Stop playing the race card’. Fact is, the opposite is true, for reasons I’ve mentioned earlier we are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt.

Finally to those of you who say, ‘Well what about Leona Lewis, and Alexandra Burke, they won on these shows’. My answer to them is simply what are parents told us, ‘Child you’ve got to better much better,' but even then there is no guarantee.

Simon Woolley

Picture: Misha B