Love Island Final 2020, When Visions Collide
by Pushkin Acacia, 8 April 2020

This article aims to unpick items of mental health concern in young black people.
During relatively normal times before the Covid19 global lockdown, we had the final of Love Island 2020 on ITV2. Aired on 23th February, the show was part of a reality television series watched by many young, and not so young people.

The show enjoyed high viewer ratings, including me and my teenage sons, ostensibly examining the cults of beauty, youth and materialism – also modern relationships. The questions on the mind of the viewer were always, which boy would get-off with which girl, how, would they last, and why?

This article seeks to neither focus on, nor overlook, the over-sexualisation of the events and activities in the series. Here we examine the hidden racial politics, through the lens of this final episode – what tensions result from the contrasts of ethnicities in what is, a Euro-American ethno-centrism?

Firstly, what does it mean, when one set of traditional leaders, in this case, politicians and bureaucrats, have set and re-asserted an isolationist vision? Examples of this vision include:
• a Bristol school penalising a black child for wearing his hair in a naturalistic style, three or four weeks ago,
• the Windrush Scandal, a year ago,
• London buses carrying adverts about deporting migrants characterised as typifying benefits cheats, a couple of years ago.
Secondly, and schizophrenically, another set of elites in the media, broadcasting a hypocritical vision through the Love Island 2020 series, featuring many dual- and multiple-heritage pairings and couplings of beautiful young men and women.

This subversion of white ethno-centricity signalled by the set of elites representing TV media, in the most sensationalised of ways, made for near compulsive viewing. The winners were a blonde couple, Paige and Fin, with runners-up being a mixed coupling, Siannice and Luke. As we watched, we fleetingly reflected on the real-life dichotomous Royal dual-heritage couple Harry and Megan, comfort-destroyed by other media elites, so that they quit country and family.

At page 87 in his 2014 book, The Establishment, Owen Jones says of British media: “Rather than provide an honest view of British society, media organisations relish hunting down extreme examples that might be used to tap into widespread prejudices and insecurities – and in doing so work in tandem with the political consensus.”

Thus, the ethnically mixed couplings in the final show is clearly only suggestive of a subversion of the basic ethnocentric rules first stated by traditional leaders and bureaucrats, not a true subversion of our ethno-centricity.

The blandished cults of youth, materialism and beauty are there, but so too in the background is the central predominant, overriding theme of white ethno-centricity – a theme which remains indigestible, un-reconstructed and two-dimensional in view of the normative vision pre-set by traditional leaders. This vision remains un-examined for its applicability to the show (moreover, any attempt at re-examination or analysis would seem at odds in context of a show presented as light entertainment).

On the ethno-centric construct led by UK traditional leaders , Akala in his book titled Natives at page 87 says: “Euro-America’s ability to dominate black people has not been read as one more chapter in a long history of human exploitation and domination, but rather as a permanent racial superiority and inferiority.”

Thus, the indigestibility is a feature that both reflects the substance of Akala’s comment, and in reality invokes a kind of fascination in viewers, gazing on. This same fascination applies to the central character in one of Shakespeare’s plays, Othello.

In the play we meet Othello, a stranger living precariously in the Venetian culture. He is desired to continue to perform as the most successful general defending the city. However, that he is a stranger of foreign birth, means he never quite fits despite being a role-model.

Othello enjoys great personal authority which wins him some concessions – a white wife. Despite his strengths, Othello, remains in a strategically vulnerable position unless the rules of his engagement are changed – but he doesn’t live to see such a day.

Similarly, in Love Island, owing to the visions already set forth by the traditional leaders, there is no real way to receive these clashing images other than with a fascination. Regardless of their beauty, youth and sheer physical appeal the non-white males paired-off and again re-coupled with the equally beautiful young females remain a jarring fascination – why?

Unless traditional leaders openly undertake a process to raise the social status of black people through debate, consensus-building, consultation, or referendum for constitutional approval, they remain outsiders – it is more profoundly so, because the existence of this dilemma is never overtly raised or addressed.

Instead what the media, our informal educators, have given us is a political language to render this absurdity hidden, victimless and guiltless. Provided we invoke this political language we can avoid schizoid feelings that reach us in living in this hostile reality. Political phrases like “fraud” when we mean “theft”, “ethnic cleansing” when we mean “mass exterminations”, “assassination” when we mean “murder”, allow brutality to go entirely obscured from conscious view.

In Euro-America we are taught by relentless media that we have certain taboo subjects, e.g. classism, politics, patriarchy, nudity, sex, death. But the real taboos are things we have to use political language to engage with because their reality make us feel schizoid – mentally ill. The temptation is to allow the intoxicants of the cults of beauty, youth, materialism to wash over us. But beneath that, remaining vaguely traceable, is our dichotomous fascination at these colliding social visions in the Love Island 2020 final.