I find Avatar interesting on multiple levels, which I will examine in this article. These span across how the films expose – with painful clarity – the overwhelming disconnection of modern living, the films as spectacle and narrative, their colonial overtones, and the unusual religious aspects of the story. Spoilers throughout.

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The dream of Pandora

Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome, or PADS, is a real thing people experience after watching the film. Some viewers have even reported suicidal thoughts after coming out of the immersive world of Pandora and having to live on present-day Earth. I believe the depression doesn’t come from love for an invented alien planet however, but grief for our own planet; for all that we could (should) be, and our estrangement from that.

Pandora is ostensibly an allegory for Earth, and the Na’vi are blue stand-ins for homo sapiens. The otherworldly landscapes so skilfully animated are all inspired by Earth and your sexual attraction to the Na’vi (don’t deny it, we all feel it) is no accident: they were designed to be idealised humans. Yet beautiful though Pandora and its inhabitants are, the grief we feel comes from the central tenet of existence there: connection.

Avatar tapped into our deepest longing for a connected life: connected to the earth, to one another, to the other creatures, and to a spiritual higher power. Our longing is bone-deep yet barely recognised, so preoccupied are we in our daily lives with other pressing desires: wealth, status, power, or just surviving, for most of us – i.e. things that disconnect us.

We live in a post-pandemic age of extreme social isolation, where people are debating online whether it’s acceptable to ignore our friends and families’ texts because of “boundaries” and to “protect our peace” – as if peace were separate from our tribe (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it can be, and that is a tragedy). An app in China called “Are you dead?” made headlines recently after blowing up. Designed for people who live alone, the app addresses the worry that if they died, or something happened to them, nobody would notice for a long period of time. If you don’t check in on the app every two days, it will alert an emergency contact.

People are lonelier than ever. Third spaces are being priced out of existence. Online algorithms are alienating us further, creating discord with people we’d otherwise never even encounter in our “real” lives. We’re barely dating. Children swipe on screens rather than play together outside. We commune far less in shared religious or community activities. Any in-person events we do attend are a sea of phone screens, with people recording for an online community they prioritise over the people who are physically present.

We have to slave in the capitalist system simply to exist. We can’t eat or drink or wash unless we are earning money. We pay through the nose for housing. Costs of living are only rising. We must work jobs in artificial environments that damage our health, in order to be able to afford to treat the ill health that our jobs created. It is expensive and dehumanising to exist as a human being on planet Earth. The message we are told again and again is: you do not belong, and you are not good enough, unless you meet these specific (capitalist) conditions; unless you enact these actions that are basically meaningless (clocking in for a job at a corporation, wearing certain types of clothes), and entirely disconnected from earth and our essential natures. Most of our daily actions poison and damage our planet, our home. We consider ourselves separate from nature, something that we must dominate and extract from, failing to realise that this is the exact source of our misery. We are destroying ourselves because we are a part of nature, not apart from it.

Contrast this with Pandora: the Na’vi are of their earth, living in harmony with it. They don’t need clothes (just some decorative bras and loincloths in order to keep the film rating PG) and are all Olympic-level parkour freerunners with corresponding physiques. They don’t sit at desks, they don’t buy things, or hoard them. They run, ride, fly, climb all over with at most a bow strapped to their backs, because everything they need is all around them, free and accessible. They live in close-knit communities of multiple generations with a coherent form of governance, and have clear initiation paths to progress through in their society; no existential crises, no career path woes.

In fact, the Na’vi live in such deep connection with their surroundings that they can literally plug into it with their kurus, a kind of neural wire coming out the back of their head. They can connect to other creatures, such as horses and flying ikran, sharing a mind in order to ride them. They can connect to sacred trees, in which all the memories and spirits of their ancestors are stored. The trees themselves are constantly communicating, which is a phenomenon that happens on earth with mycelium networks. And they can connect their kurus to one another in holy, emotional, spiritual union (more on that later).

The final scene of Fire and Ash shows Spider, an orphan and literal alien all his life, at the centre of a huge connected tribe of Na’vi in the afterlife, finally accepted and integrated, both physically (being able to breathe the air, growing a kuru), and spiritually. This mirrors an image from the first film, when Jake is accepted into the Omatikaya clan.

Even for those of us with family and friends, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt a kind of sadness and desperate longing at this image. I noticed recently on a rewatch that in the above image, Tsu’tey, who had been hostile to Jake since their first meeting, is right behind him, holding his shoulders. Whatever petty differences that existed between them dissolved into the greater unity of the clan.

The true tragedy is that Pandora isn’t a fantasy. We could live like that – we probably did live something like that. But we don’t now. We live in a capitalist hellscape. Therein lies the pain. Pandora is Earth, and the Na’vi human beings. But unlike us, they live in harmony with their planet, not at odds with it. As my friend JayJay (currently residing in settler colony country Canada) put it: we get depressed watching Avatar because we realise that we live in the version where the bad guys won.

I’m not preaching from a high tower – or rather, from a yurt in the forest. I, like you, am a modern human being who has lived in man-made structures all her life. Not only that, I am an urbanite that barely knows how to camp. And I, too, feel that deep ache when I watch the Na’vi leaping around their forests or diving with their aquatic friends, and holding one another’s shoulders in an ever-extending web of oneness with their species, living and deceased.

Of course, for the film to be palatable, the blue humanoids still dominate their planet enough for us to feel comfortable: they ride the direhorses, the flying ikran, the sea creatures called ilus. The animals serve them. Big mammals with superior intelligence, such as the whale-like tulkun are their equals; their spiritual brothers and sisters, bonded to the sea communities like family. The world still centres around the humanoids, but in a much more integrated, peaceful way.

And there is still patriarchy in place, of course. We couldn’t get TOO radical – it’s still Hollywood, and Pandora was conceived in the mind of a North American man, after all. The tribes are led by men, with their wives taking the role of spiritual leaders (who, to be fair, are not subservient to their husbands). When he is initiated, Jake is told he can “choose a woman” from the clan. It is Jake himself who replies “this woman must choose me.” Thanks Jake, doing your bit for feminism on Pandora. In Fire and Ash, the formidable female clan leader Varang is reduced to Quaritch’s arm candy. The Na’vi do, however, worship a female deity called Eywa, akin to the idea of Gaia, the Great Mother Earth. More on that later.

A dream of true love

The love story at the centre of the first film between Neytiri and Jake also touches a raw spot in our society. I am uninterested in romance as a genre in general, mostly because it tends to reaffirm our society’s toxic patriarchal values, whether by reinforcing them or resisting them. Avatar 1 has been labelled “Pocahontas in space” and that’s not an entirely unfair claim, but it’s incomplete. While in the real-life story of Pocahontas, she gets taken by the white man back to the coloniser’s country, in Avatar, the coloniser becomes one of the Na’vi.

In our disenchanted, porn-saturated age of red-pillers and misandrists, swiping on for-profit dating apps looking for situationships, we are cynical about merely dating, let alone finding true love. Avatar presents an alternative. The Na’vi mate for life and, significantly, they connect their minds and souls, as well as their bodies, by connecting their kurus.

I think, sunk though we are in disillusionment, deep down this kind of romantic love is what most of humankind craves. Some of us are jaded to the point of disbelieving its existence. But it would be nice. A lifelong, soul-deep, beautiful love bond, in the context of a tribe, a community with cohesive identity and structure, living in harmony on a gorgeous, abundant planet with which you share consciousness and life force? With no taxes? Sign me up.

At the end of film 1, Neytiri sees Jake’s human form. It’s the first time they both see each other with their real eyes. They do not say “I love you”, though the love they share is apparent – they say the recurring key phrase in the Avatar films: “I see you”.

Also, as a side note, Na’vi are much larger than human beings, and in his human form Jake is wheelchair-bound, so he is just a weak, helpless little pink thing. And warrioress Neytiri still loves him. She literally passed the test of “would you still love me if I were a worm?” That’s real seeing. In our social media-era obsession with appearances and evaluating people on a list of attributes that say nothing about who they are (appearance, salary, height, whatever), we are not really seeing each other. We don’t really want to.

Religion is real on Pandora

Avatar is unique in that on Pandora, religion is more than a culture or practise of faith; it is an objective truth. There is actual evidence of their goddess Eywa’s existence, and of the afterlife. When Na’vi die, their consciousness is uploaded into Eywa, where they live forever.

This takes the all-encompassing connections on Pandora to the next level. The Na’vi are not just in tune with nature, and not just spiritual: their goddess is real the way that gravity is real, and they can call on her for miracles. They transferred Jake’s consciousness from his human body to his avatar by calling upon Eywa. They can connect their kurus to certain holy trees and interact with people who have passed away. We actually see Eywa in the latest film – which I was not on board with, by the way. I preferred Eywa as a concept, or a spirit present in all of nature, not a giant Na’vi giving bombastic side-eye.

I suppose Eywa is the major contributor to Na’vi society’s relative peace and harmony. Imagine if all of Earth agreed on the same religion because we had evidence of it being true, and that goddess gave us real, tangible messages and signs of Her will.

Of course, that makes film 3’s new antagonist all the more terrifying: Varang doesn’t believe in Eywa and cuts people’s kurus, which cuts off their ability to connect to Eywa, an unimaginable transgression. She also connects her kuru to others’ to overpower and torture them, a deep violation.

Thus far, the villains had always been alien humans out to exploit Pandora’s natural resources. The introduction of Varang and her Ash people, who raid and murder other Na’vi, seems to contradict that. I am not sure where they’ll take this character, but I think that maybe we will discover that her home was destroyed because of human interference. I bet the humans were testing a bomb or something, which led to the “natural” disaster that devastated her homeland, for which she blames Eywa. If films four and five ever get made, we’ll find out if I’m right in the next decade or so.

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Avatar as storytelling

There’s no questioning that the world-building in the Avatar franchise is phenomenal. I’m not much of a fantasy or sci-fi buff so I don’t have deep examples for comparison, only the obvious ones like Dune, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, which are rough equivalents in their scale and ambition (invented languages, cultures, creatures, etc).

The visuals are unparalleled – shoutout to my friend Igz who is one of the lead animators. There’s no doubt that the performance capture and animation are world-class, top of the game.

However, the Avatar films as narratives – as in, the scripts themselves… that is another matter. As is so often the case in Hollywood, the cheapest aspect of a film – its script – got the least investment. It might be cheapest, but it’s the most important for storytelling. No amount of impressive visual effects and good acting (which Avatar has, for the most part) can compensate for a sub-par script.

In my opinion, Avatar the original film was just fine as it was. The subsequent films, though they have fun new characters, world-building, and the novel idea of avatar Quaritch and human son Spider, add little to nothing new, story-wise. In fact, they create more narrative frustration than satisfaction. Avatar 1 was the best in the franchise, in terms of storytelling. They sent the homo sapiens packing, Jake got to be one of the People, the arc was complete. It was tight, cohesive, and satisfactory.

The most common criticism of Avatars 2 and 3 are that they are repetitive. It is the same story arc as the first, with slightly different characters and settings. The third film in particular I found repetitious, predictable, and quite boring, story-wise. It’s no coincidence that the first film, though by no means a short film, has the shortest runtime of the three; minimal bloat.

But we don’t care. I mean, I care – but not enough to stop me watching and loving the films. Because, as this one YouTuber aptly put it, the Avatar films are immersive events; theme park rides disguised as movies. Pure escapism. I wouldn’t say that of the first one, but it’s definitely true of films 2 and 3. I still cry at the emotional scenes, am still moved by some of the better performances, I still get swept up in the action sequences. There are moments I really love in the scripts. But post-Avatar 1, they are not great feats of storytelling. They’re a holiday from real life, though not without the real world’s politics, projections, and problems.

What we all want is to go back to Pandora. James Cameron could have created six-hour-long ambient films just exploring Pandora and we would be sat.

The coloniser white saviour wet dream

We have to go there, my friends. In the Avatar films, the coloniser is always centred. But what were we expecting? Its creator is a white North American man. He is a coloniser. He has “demon blood”. James Cameron has been explicit about Avatar’s overt criticisms of colonisation, imperialism, capitalist corporations, etc. It’s clear the Omatikaya are a kind of amalgamation of Native American and African tribes. His story is sympathetic to the indigenous people, but will never centre them.

In Avatar 1, we get to explore the side of the coloniser, and feel bad about it, while being Jake Sully (the viewer’s avatar), and being absolved of it. It’s the ultimate white coloniser wet dream: not only do you get to be the white saviour, being accepted and even idolised by the natives – you get to become one of them. Literally. You get to inhabit their beautiful black blue bodies, Get Out-style, while retaining your mind and without having to do any real soul-searching. Because you’re innocent, of course. You are Good.

But there’s more! Not only do you get to be Na’vi, accepted and idolised by them – you get to RULE them! Toruk Makto, and finally clan chief. Sure, it was a mantle unwillingly taken up by Jake (it would have been gauche and unlikeable of him to be too eager to dominate), but his nevertheless. Jake didn’t deliberately steal the woman promised to clan chief Tsu’tey and only killed said chief at his own insistence… he did it all apologetically. But make no mistake – a white coloniser came in, in cahoots with the evil alien invaders, and then took over the native clan. It just… doesn’t look so good when you put it like that, does it? Justice for Tsu’tey.

Imagine you were an indigenous Na’vi, living in peace and connection on Pandora for generations, and some alien invader came from the species that is destroying your planet, and not only gets to become one of you, but occupies the most revered positions in your society? And his alien child (Kiri) gets special powers from your deity?? Only a coloniser could come up with that.

Fire and Ash took centring the coloniser to the next level. Spider’s breathing Pandora’s air, growing a kuru, and finally joining all the Na’vi, living and dead, in Eywa meant that one needn’t even bother with an avatar anymore. No need to cosplay the indigenous, you can just be your white pink-ass self and still be centred. Their deity will pull out all the stops to save you, while native Na’vi are killed in droves.

The fact that Neteyam dies and Spider gets to live says it all. I am still not over that. Neteyam, the eldest and best of Jake’s children, who inherited more Na’vi than human DNA (native number of fingers, no human eyebrows), who is well-behaved and respectful, as close to a pureblood Na’vi as a child of Jake’s can be, dies to save a fucking HUMAN BEING. AGAIN.

Meanwhile, Jake’s other son Lo’ak, who is much more human-like in his appearance as well as behaviour (shown in his repeatedly flouting the Metkayina customs) is set up to be the next protagonist. This supports the argument that the films are repetitions of the first. Lo’ak is the new Jake. I suppose Tsireya is the next Neytiri: a pure Na’vi love interest who can teach Lo’ak the Way of Water. Broken record much?

No visas on Pandora

In the second film, to protect his family from the human RDA and the vengeful Quaritch, Jake decides to take his family and flee their forest home to hide out in far-away watery regions. They become refugees.

Jake’s family seeks asylum with the Metkayina clan, requesting uturu, which is a kind of cultural convention providing sanctuary to those in need. Despite some (justified) reticence from the clan chief’s wife, they are taken in. No applications needed, Jake can just rock up.

It reminds me of how as a British passport holder I can rock up to any number of countries around the world and enter with a visa granted on the spot. I always took this privilege for granted when I was younger, until I made friends as an undergraduate with fellow students from countries whose passports are not quite so powerful. The interrogations they encountered at the borders of European countries, the endless paperwork and hoops and exorbitant fees to justify their existence shook me awake.

We Brits have had more of a taste of this post-Brexit, with our mobility around Europe hamstrung, but our experience is still incomparable with those of passport holders of other nations. The Imperium prevails.

The most profitable anti-capitalist film ever made

The Avatar films (well, the sequels) are far from perfect in their writing, but the world of Pandora is too seductive, its characters too much fun. Avatar Quaritch is a hoot, and very clearly going to get a redemption arc. Apparently it is planned in future films for the Na’vi to come to Earth, which… I just… no comment.

The greatest irony is that these films, which have very in-your-face anti-capitalist, pro-environmental messaging, are multi-billion-dollar-making capitalist turbo engines. The series is the highest-grossing franchise in history; Avatar 1 is the highest-grossing film of ALL TIME, and Way of Water sits at number 3. The three films collectively have made over $6 billion to date. Avatar is a love letter to nature made by the machine. It is capitalism’s most beautiful self-critique.

For those who feel PADS, let me just say: I see you. While I didn’t spiral into a full-blown depression, re-watching the Avatar films recently really got me thinking (if the four thousand words of this article didn’t already hint at that). But there’s no reason these films can’t be harnessed for inspiration, rather than depression.

I have started using the term earthling, because this encompasses not only human beings, but everything on this planet, including the animals, plants, mycelium, rocks... It is helping me see that we are not separate from one another. We are all perfectly designed for our Earth. We all belong here, and need do nothing to justify our existences here. We don’t need to colonise another planet because we have a perfectly functional one, provided we can stop ourselves killing it, and therefore ourselves.

I started swimming again directly after rewatching The Way of Water, and have started spending more time in nature. We are never in surplus of reminders about the importance and sanctity of our planet. If the initial pang of desolation that Pandora provokes can pave a path to deeper connection to our home, our essential natures, and to one another, then that is surely a positive.

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Here’s footage of me being being tossed like a salad in my chair at a 4DX screening of Fire And Ash.

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The Classics reign supreme

Though it was a long time ago, the classical world is still very much a modern-day fixation. The much-hyped upcoming movie adaptation of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan and stacked with a cast resembling Hollywood’s own Mount Olympus, is but the latest in a long line of films inspired by the Classics.

This fascination transcends media format and demographics, from swords-and-sandals Hollywood epics dripping with testosterone (Gladiator II being the most recent), to novels retelling myth from a female perspective (the prototype being the novel Circe by Madeleine Miller, also derived from The Odyssey). Indeed myth retellings are popular, ranging from adult fiction to Percy Jackson, to cartoons, and even musical theatre (Hadestown and Epic – also about The Odyssey). I considered making a list of recent Classics-based books, films, and TV series but that would be a ridiculously long list.

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It isn’t exclusive to the arts, either. Stoicism, an ancient philosophy, has the bros in a chokehold. Modern democracy is attributed to the ancient Athenians. Much of Western civilisation and culture is credited to Classical Antiquity, such as astrology, theatre, and much more. And the Roman Empire, as social media revealed in 2023, is seemingly ever-present in men’s minds.

It’s not a modern phenomenon; we stand at the end of a long Western tradition that has revered Ancient Greece and Rome in all arenas throughout the ages, from the Renaissance to Nazi Germany, to now. If you look for them, I have a sneaky feeling you’ll find that the Classics are, actually, all around.

A quick definition: what exactly do I mean by the Classics?

Classical Civilisation, Classics, Classical Antiquity… these are all interchangeable terms used to describe the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. This covers a panoply of disciplines, including archaeology, languages (mostly Latin and Ancient Greek), history, literature, mythology, art, philosophy, politics… the list goes on.

My own fascination with Classical Antiquity, particularly its mythology, began as early as primary school, when I produced an illustrated series on all of Hercules’ twelve labours (which was later displayed on the classroom wall). The memory is vague, but I do recall a warmth in my chest, a sensation of curiosity and enchantment: a passion was brewing.

As a teenager I had well-worn DVDs of two films that were big in the early 2000s: Troy and 300. Both films would be placed in the same genre – “swords and sandals”. Yet Troy and 300, if we want to be really accurate, are stories about vastly different things. Troy is based on The Iliad, an epic poem written around 700BC about a war that may or may not have happened five centuries before that, involving gods and magic, in what is now modern day Turkey.

300 is based on a real historical event (the battle of Thermopylae) that happened in 480BC in what is now modern day Greece. OK, they’re both about Greeks at war but putting the two together is like conflating a princess fairytale with a biography of Princess Diana.

I make this distinction to illustrate my credentials as a Classics scholar, having done my bachelor degree in Classical & Archaeological studies. That didn’t stop me from being obsessed with these two Hollywood films, butcher though they may the source material. But for the hoi polloi, it’s all one and the same, really. The subtleties matter little for a culture that likes to fetishise and revere the ancient world, details be damned.

I myself have a complex and conflicted connection to the Classics: a combination of devotion so deep that part of my identity is tied up in them, and a critical consciousness that won’t let me prostrate myself before them.

Elitism and prestige signalling

As a (former) Classics scholar, I have had to examine my own relationship to the field and its association with elitism, and even white supremacy (more on that later). Why is Latin taught mainly in private schools? Ancient Greek is even rarer. The fact that I even knew what Classics was in order to pursue a degree in it was already a clear marker of my own privilege – I started Latin at the age of 11 at the private secondary school I attended (on scholarship; I was poor, but clever).

When I was 17 years old, while studying Classical Civilisation at A-level, I attended a joint Oxford-Cambridge open day at Oxford University for those interested in studying Classics. By this time I had left private education and was attending a bog-standard state sixth-form college. Yet even with my private school experience, I was struck by the next level of posh that surrounded us. I was part of a small contingent of multi-ethnic, awkward teenagers. There were no other people of colour around. All us young prospective applicants were gathered in a hall for some talks, then they opened the floor for questions. For some reason, all I can remember of the students from the other schools was that they seemed to be mostly boys wearing either dress shirts or polo shirts. Perhaps because these were the only ones who raised their hands to ask questions, which they did with aplomb and grandeur, complete with plummy accents and sweeping arm gestures. I almost felt like I was at the theatre.

Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the UK and hardcore toff, studied Classics at Oxford, and has been known to speak Latin or Ancient Greek during debates and speeches. Why would he do this? Because displaying knowledge of the Classics has great cultural capital; it confers authority and gravitas. Reciting Latin and Greek are markers of intelligence, learning, and superiority. You don’t understand? Plebeian!

Indeed, on one such occasion in which Johnson recited at length the opening of The Iliad in Ancient Greek, Classicist George Conor points out: “this show was about Johnson, not the Iliad. If it was about the wondrousness of the lines, why not do it in English? … And this, I think, is the big issue: it was about exclusivity. It was about the speaker appearing to have power over the audience, a perfect storm of intellectual ego and deferential spectators, and it is exactly the kind of situation Johnson has been groomed for - a chance to exhibit his expensive education to people who do not understand what he is saying, and thus cannot participate in the pleasure of the poetry, and to convey the impression of intelligence. (Most - let’s be frank - can’t even tell if he’s making any mistakes)…. the reality is that Classics, to him, is a way of pointing out other people’s ignorance, and his own superiority.”

So much of our Western culture derives from the Classics, including the language you are reading right now. English, and many other European languages, can trace the etymology of swathes of their vocabulary to Latin and/or Greek. I can’t deny that my own classical education, though I graduated over ten years ago now, has a certain cachet, in general society; it gives the appearance of being deeply cultured. I, however, would abhor using it in the performative and exclusionary way that Johnson has. Cringe.

Whitewashed marble

Did you know that those beautiful, clean, austere white marble statues that constitute one of the most potent, and instantly-recognisable symbols of the classical world… were actually painted multicolour?

The temples, too.

The paint didn’t survive the centuries, stripped away to the white marble underneath, but these works of art were never meant to look the way that we see them today. The Ancients didn’t see what we see: they saw something rather different.

It’s not exactly a secret; there have been recreations, based on scientific analysis of pigment residues on artefacts, of what the pieces might have originally looked like, and a whole exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on ancient polychromy. Yet the misconception persists. There hasn’t been a great effort to correct this whitewashed marble image, and some argue that it is deliberate. It certainly wasn’t accidental: there are plenty of analyses out there, which point to the Renaissance, and influential figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo being instrumental in promulgating this whitewashed marble fallacy.

Boris Johnson is not the only politician to use the Classics to bolster his image: Hitler and the Nazis also appropriated the Ancients to push their Aryan race agenda, as did Mussolini in fascist Italy. It all fit with a classist, elitist view of whiteness in contrast to colour. Goethe wrote in Theory of Colors: “savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors.”

You only have to look at the architecture for the seat of power in the United States, aptly named The White House, to see how neo-classical is shorthand for power: Ionic columns, portico and pediment, all pure white, on the north façade.

This is a perfect metaphor for how the Classics have been stripped and appropriated to fit a desired image of the Ancients. The blank marble canvases, if you will, for projections of certain agendas that have nothing to do with accuracy or truth.

Classical Greece and Rome became the origin stories of all that is good in Western identity – almost a moral shorthand. Never mind that both societies perpetuated slavery, child marriage, sexism, and all kinds of other things that would be seen as aberrations in modern Western society. But look at the beautiful timeless marbles! Their mythology is so archetypal and cool! (Though if you actually study the surviving texts, you’ll see a lot of it was pretty messed up) Their philosophy was so advanced and still applicable today! (Also mind-blowingly misogynistic and racist).

It’s a slippery slope from appreciation, to appropriating the Classics to support white supremacy, when proper knowledge and critical thinking isn’t put in place. There is real danger in treating the Classics as timeless, neutral, or elevated, as opposed to what they simply are: products of a past civilisation. Their continued presence in our modern consciousness is largely because we insist on it. They aren’t just loved – they are leveraged, and we would all do well to be aware of that.

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Misconceptions and stereotypes

At the same time my eye twitches a little when popular culture gets things “wrong”. I can let it slide if someone confuses the Greek and Latin names for the gods (Zeus/Jupiter, Aphrodite/Venus) – totally understandable. But I confess that sometimes the pedantic academic in me rises up, clutching her pearls (from the sea of Propontis) and adjusting her spectacles in outrage, at what are (in my opinion) more egregious and irresponsible errors.

I tried watching the first Percy Jackson film but I switched it off when a character said she was the “daughter of Athena”. Athena, the virgin goddess? A hard no from me.

Another silly example is in The Lonely Island’s music video for 3 Way (The Golden Rule) when they reference homosexuality with the lyrics:

This rule dates back (the golden rule)
To Ancient Greece
Talkin’ about Caesar

I know this is a spoof song, not meant to be serious, but Caesar was a Latin name and title for a ruler in Ancient Rome, nothing to do with Ancient Greece 😭.

Talking of homosexuality; it’s something that many people assume was commonplace in Ancient Greece, as if it were some sort of gay utopia. The truth (as with most things) is more complicated than that. It probably warrants its own article, but suffice to say that it’s not all that helpful to project our modern conceptions of sexuality onto a past society that was very different to ours. One thing that they did have in common with us, however, was misogyny. The “passive” party in a male-male relationship was generally seen as the lower one, as that was “feminine”, and there are very few records about same-sex female relationships. Sigh.

Going back to Classics inaccuracies in popular media, perhaps a more alarming example is the representation of Persians in 300, which sparked outrage in Iran. I found an entire paper written about how the portrayal of Persians in the film is orientalist and American propaganda against Iran. To be fair, the film is based on a graphic novel, whose intention I’m not sure was to be historically accurate. Do we really believe that Spartan soldiers actually looked like this?

Nevertheless, the anti-Persian concerns are real. No piece of media exists in a vacuum, and 300 forms part of a long tradition of orientalism, all the more concerning for the film’s huge popularity. Though the film is a highly stylised piece of semi-fiction, it does nevertheless purport to recount a real historical event, with real historical figures, but in highly unrealistic, and often offensive, ways.

Inspiration and projection

I’m conscious that I’m not outside this discourse. As I’ve already demonstrated, I am not above a layman’s enjoyment of media that bastardises the Classics.

In addition, I draw heavily from the Classics in my own work, including in the historical novel I’ve written Archipelago. It’s set in Victorian times, but the characters go to Greece for goodness’ sake. There’s a character who is a Classics professor, and I even drop in some Ancient Greek (I couldn’t help myself). Then there are much more subtle references to classical works that I’d be very impressed if anyone catches.

Self-indulgent Easter eggs aside, the book also explores the origins of archaeology – the backbone of Classics scholarship – and its emergence from tomb raiding and looting of ancient sites. Who decides who gets which artefacts, where they are housed, and how they are interpreted? Who gets to own history, basically?

A more unhinged example is the radio drama-comedy I created (and co-starred in) during my Creative Writing Master’s degree. Modern Gods tells the story of four Greek gods who descend to earth and try to live undetected amongst the mortals, posing as students at the University of Edinburgh (naturally, as that was where I was at the time). You can still find it – listen here, if you dare, and you can judge my performance as the goddess Athena.

Of course for this piece I took great liberties in imagining the comportment of the Olympian gods in modern times. But what would be accurate, anyway? Therein lies the problem: there is no definitive source. There is no Greek equivalent of a holy text like The Bible (and even that is contested and open to interpretation); the Greek gods were archetypes, symbols, freely interpreted by the Greeks themselves.

I think it’s common nowadays to see, for example, the goddess Athena as a symbol of female power: one of the most popular and well-known deities, she was the goddess of wisdom and war strategy, and even more highly respected than her male counterpart, Ares, the god of War, who was not well-liked. But she could also be seen as the ultimate symbol of misogyny: born from her father’s head, with no mother and sworn to virginity, she remains pure and untainted by female concerns such as motherhood. She is loyal only to the male and masculine.

In the story of Orestes, an unhappy Greek man who was forced to kill his mother in order to avenge his father (whom his mother murdered), Athena sets up the first human jury for his trial. When the jury is split 50/50 between which parent Orestes owes loyalty to, Athena casts the deciding vote in favour of the father, as she always honoured men above women. She was an entirely un-relatable ancient pick-me girl, basically. The opposite of a girl’s girl. Or rather, a male invention to uphold patriarchy. Yes, it really is that deep.

Not to pick on Athena. The crimes of men, both gods and mortals and those in between, in Greek mythology are too many to enumerate. You don’t have to dig too deep into the stories to see that they were mostly rapists, murderers, and cheats, who treated the women in their lives abominably.

There is an entire field of study in Classics concerning feminist analysis of mythology. This would warrant its own article; my undergraduate thesis was all about the mythological figure of Atalanta, who on the surface seemed like a feminist icon: the fastest runner in the world, and skilled virgin huntress and warrior who could give the great male heroes a run for their money. I was drawn to her as an unusual female figure in a mythological tradition that was otherwise dominated by male heroes. Deep-diving into the development of her myth was fascinating, though ultimately somewhat depressing because of course, the reality was misogynistic. A culture’s myths will but reflect its belief systems, after all.

Knowledge complicates reverence

So where does this leave me – us?

As with all things, it’s complicated. I recognise that my classical education has given me an ability to decode much of what I encounter in the West: the references, the languages, the tradition, are everywhere I look. Yet my studies have also made me acutely aware of how political, messy, and changeable the classical tradition is, too.

One thing doesn’t exclude the other. I still love the Classics. I look back with great fondness and nostalgia on my years as an undergraduate, spending hours buried in ancient texts in the library, poring over old mythology and poetry, debating in seminars, listening to my lecturers expound on classical theory. It was exactly what young Gen Z’ers obsessed with Dark Academia imagine it to be.

In recent years, though, I find my lens on the world (both classical and modern) widening and becoming more colourful. As if the stark white marble statues of notable figures and temples of knowledge in my mind are starting to be coloured in and fleshed out, polychromy-style, with a more expansive perspective that is less Euro-centric.

My Classics education remains ingrained. I’ll be the first to point out that togas were a garment worn only by Roman noblemen on specific occasions, not a white piece of cloth denoting “Ancient Greeks”. I’ll happily rattle off endless tales from mythology, just say the word. They’ll probably be the bedtime stories I tell my children (though that might give them nightmares).

But we should all stay woke: the Classics aren’t neutral. Engagement requires thoughtful care and awareness, not blind worship. The Ancients themselves were also human beings, fallible and flawed, products of their time, and not nearly as white as their surviving marble busts would have you believe (look up Roman emperor Septimius Severus).

I’ll no doubt watch the new Odyssey film when it comes out, though the white, blond, 5’10” Matt Damon playing the short, Greek Odysseus with an American accent is like a knife to the chest… but alas, that is the life of a Classicist. It’s a free-for-all when interpreting the Classics, and always has been.

Support my work

There are many exciting things about the film Sinners; I could talk at length about the music, the history, the allegory, the commentary on colonialism and religion, the film’s technical accomplishments, the meticulous research and references…

But as a Chinese girl who grew up and lives in Europe, the thing that hit closest to home was the Chow family. Sinners takes place in segregated 1930’s Mississippi and the Chows are a Chinese family who run two grocery stores across the road from one another: one for black customers, and one for white customers.

This was the first time in my life that I have seen Chinese characters in a period piece that didn’t speak with Chinese accents. These characters are actually relatable; they speak with heavy southern American accents and are clearly assimilated into the local culture, rather than the usual “othered” Chinese characters depicted in historical Hollywood films. And, most importantly, the Chows are embedded in the local black community.

This article covers my own personal experience as a Chinese person in both majority black and majority white spaces, the concept of being “politically black”, and explores both the hostility and deep kinship between black and yellow.

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The liminal space between black and white

As someone that is racialised but with light skin, I exist in a liminal space between black and white. Even though Mississippi in the 1930’s as portrayed in Sinners is quite far removed from my own life experience, it resonated deeply, as I have occupied that place between the two grocery stores my entire life.

My proximity to whiteness affords me privilege. My light skin places me higher on the heinous hierarchy of white supremacy. Deeply ingrained in this is the idea of the “model minority”. I have heard white people expound about it in my presence: the Chinese are acceptable immigrants because we don’t commit crimes, we are academic high-achievers, we open businesses, work hard… we keep our heads down and our mouths shut, basically. We are perceived as non-threatening and innocuous; weak, even. Supply Chinese food and stay out of sight.

Implicit in this is the mostly unspoken (though sometimes explicitly expressed) contrast to the opposite; the “wrong” kind of immigrant or ethnic minority in the West. In other words: blacks.

This privilege all hangs on the indulgence of white people, of course, because I am not white, and at any moment can be put in my place with an off-colour comment, a racist micro-aggression, or all-out slur. The privilege is tenuous and conditional, dependent on my ability to assimilate as much as possible to white culture, and/or allow myself to be seen as an exotic curiosity.

So the Chows in the film are permitted to serve whites in their white grocery shop; but there is no question about whether they are a part of the white community. They are friends with the Smokestack twins, they help run the juke joint, and their ancestors appear alongside the African ones during that scene in which the ancestors and descendants are invoked.

The only Chinese kid in my (black) ends

I grew up in an underprivileged area of South London, and my neighbourhood was (and still is to this day, in spite of heavy gentrification) very black. Apart from my Chinese family, almost everyone else around me was black. My early years were heavily shaped by both British-African and British-Caribbean culture.

Black people taught me to dance. Dance is a huge part of my life, and though over the years I have trained in various styles, my earliest forays into movement and rhythm were with black folk. I have a memory from primary school of the older girls lining us younger girls up in the playground and making us do body rolls. The soundtrack to my childhood was UK garage and R&B. Kids would perform Ghetto Superstar in school assembly; we’d dance to Sisqo’s Thong Song in the playground. It was all I knew.

My primary school was over 90% black, with a couple of white kids peppered in, and me. At school I became sensitised to issues within the black community, such as colourism, decades before I learned the terms for them. All I knew was the lighter-skinned kids tore into the darker-skinned ones with a brutality that exceeded even their racism toward me.

Because oh boy did I experience racism. Some of the most vicious racism I have experienced, was in my early childhood. I was a minority amongst a black majority and the kids jumped on that difference to pick on me. I learned that aggression was a shortcut to respect, developed an attitude as a shield (complete with neck rolls), and became accustomed to confrontation. But my best protection was my wit and quick tongue; the kids loved a good “cuss” – what we would call a diss. They would circle around two adversaries like the audience of a rap battle, waiting to hoot and finger slap at the burns, the more creative the better. Apart from academically, it was the only other thing I could excel in.

Confused by Caucasian hair

When it was time to go to secondary school, I was yanked unceremoniously out of this environment and tossed into the most contrasting world imaginable.

I was awarded a fully-funded place in a prestigious private girls’ school, and suddenly my world went from urban, poor, and black, to upper-middle-class and extremely white. To this day my accent swerves from posh private school girl to… not quite a “Jafaican” accent (aka Multicultural London English), but something with more glottal stops (and before you ask, I do pronounce the Ts in “bottle of water”, but I might say “wha’?” and “nah”).

Black people’s hair is a well-known contentious topic, being both taboo and the object of fascination and often ill-mannered, non-consensual touching. In my childhood I mostly saw Asian hair (of course, my own), and afro hair. All the different styles and configurations of afro hair were normal to me, from elaborate beaded braids to natural ‘fros, to Nike ticks shaved onto heads.

So when I arrived at this predominantly white girls’ school, I was astonished by the hair. I would sit in class or assembly and stare at the backs of their heads: all shades of blonde, brunette, and red – some even had natural highlights! Fascinating.

Needless to say there were hardly any black people at this school. Once a white classmate said to me, straight up, no irony: “I’m not attracted to blacks.” I was too stunned to speak (and I was an outspoken, confrontational teenager). We were about thirteen years old at the time.

Is it a coincidence that the only friend I’ve retained from that school is a black girl?

Indeed, the poisonous, racist things that people have spouted about black people in front of me – casually, matter-of-factly – has shocked me over the years. Things they would never dare to say had a black person been present. And my objections have often been met with confusion – why is this Asian so concerned with defending black people? Especially when we’re telling her she’s better. We’re paying her a compliment!

It truly turns my stomach.

Being “politically black”

Earlier this year I had the great privilege to meet the legendary Lady Phyl, founder of UK Black Pride. When I expressed my hesitation to attend Black Pride as a non-black person, she explained that I am “politically black”. I hadn’t been familiar with the term, but my research tells me it was coined in Britain to encompass all non-white people who experience discrimination. It’s a bit of a contested term, and not one that I use frequently, but I find it a useful concept.

Because my solidarity with black people isn’t driven by a desire to signal virtue or be an activist: it’s born from shared experiences and challenges – from being “politically black”. Though our experiences can diverge significantly, a black person will always understand me better than a white person will. That’s not to dunk on my very cherished white friends: it’s just a fact.

The experience of being racialised in the West, as a member of the global majority, is something a white person cannot understand (and often has no wish to). I will always identify more with my black sisters and brothers. For all our Asian proximity to whiteness and the privileges it might dangle before us, and much as some of us Asians might try to delude ourselves otherwise, we will never be white, and will never be accepted as such.

Race relations

Many Asians can be indifferent at best – and hostile at worst – toward matters of race. They are satisfied with our relative privilege and the pat on the head we get as the “model minority”, happy to play along and not kick up a fuss. God forbid we shine a light on our Otherness. Yes, we might face prejudice, but not as much as brown and black people, for the most part. Many sadly will step on darker-skinned folk in order to climb a little higher on the ladder of white supremacy. In addition, colourism is rife in a lot of Asian cultures that value pale skin, and there is some pretty egregious racism toward darker-skinned peoples.

But we are not immune. While overt racism towards black people is generally taboo, racism towards Asians is often not taken seriously. This is in part because of the model minority myth, and also because we are less visible in general: in the media, politics, popular culture, etc. But the prejudice and violence toward Asians is and always has been there. Just look up Yellow Peril. Plus, legislation goes way back, such as the USA’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (yes, that was the actual name of the law) and the UK Home Office in 1946 deporting thousands of Chinese seamen who had served in World War II and had families in England. Not to mention the various other forms of racism that Asians are subject to.

So there is just as much solidarity as there is division between our two groups, and there have always been Asians fighting the good fight. Present at the assassination of Malcolm X was his friend Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American activist, who cradled his head in her lap as he lay wounded. This image has always been powerful and upsetting and moving for me, as I feel like it illustrates how I feel sometimes, witnessing the violence inflicted on my black sisters and brothers and often not being able to do much more than (metaphorically) cradle their heads.

What can I do with my relative privilege? I am viewed as less threatening, which means I have the luxury of being able to pop off at racists in a way that black women cannot, lest they be deemed an Angry Black Woman. I have shouted profanities at a white man on the metro who was making racist comments to my black friend, and all I got were a few looks – that is privilege. I refuse to let things slide when people say anti-black things or fetishise black people in my presence, which they often seem to insist on doing. Is it enough? Probably not.

Back in black

(These headers are risky, I know. It’s another great song, though.)

Barcelona, and Spain in general, is not the most melanated place. Racism here is cartoonish and in-your-face, toward all people of the global majority. They refer to South Asian-run supermarkets as “pakis” and Chinese-run shops as “chinos” and medical professionals will tell me to my face that my name can’t be Teresa.

Recently things seem to have come full circle. I happened to stumble into a black community here in Barcelona, and now and then I find myself like little Teresa in primary school: the only Chinese person amongst a sea of black faces, and honestly, it feels like home.

But let’s not get things twisted. I’m no Ch*gga, nor afflicted with Jungle Fever; much of my social circle at this point in my life isn’t black (it’s a kaleidoscope of all colours, happily). But there is something cozy and familiar about black community, at least for me. Yet I am sensitive to the fact that I am not black; I have a friend who runs an African Society here and despite her invitations I am always a little hesitant to attend their events, knowing that the space is not primarily for me and my presence merely lowers the net levels of melanin. But then where else will I find black music and people with rhythm?

I think the most important thing for me to bear in mind while occupying space in those events is maintaining my awareness and humility – unlike a white girl who once got on stage at one of these events and told a room of people from the African diaspora that they needed to reevaluate their ideas of race and ethnicity. I wanted so much to dress her down, but I felt there didn’t need to be even more non-black voices pontificating in that space. Or maybe it would have been a show of solidarity. It can be tricky.

There are nuances and some messiness, but at the end of the day, like Grace and Bo Chow in Sinners, we are allies. We are family. And Sinners was the first Hollywood film I’ve seen (apart maybe from Rush Hour) to depict that beautiful black and yellow kinship.

Buy me a coffee

I was sat as usual in my home office in Barcelona, mid-way through some task for my remote job. It was a bright day, and the already-strong springtime sunshine beat through the window onto my desk. Suddenly, my monitor went black.

Power outages are not an entirely unusual event in my building, and the power comes back after a few short minutes.

Only this time it didn’t.

I had a meeting with my manager scheduled for 1pm, so I tried hot-spotting my phone, but my Internet data was also down. I couldn’t get through to any of my colleagues.

Sighing at the prospect of having to leave my house, I reluctantly packed my things and hauled ass out the door, thinking to go to the local library or a cafe for their WiFi.

I live in the heart of Eixample, one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in the city. If you’ve seen photos of Barcelona from the sky, it’s the grid-shaped part, teeming with businesses packed into every block, lining every street, with people living in the flats piled on top. When I reached street level, I realised the entire block was down. The shopfronts were dark, and people were standing, staring around aimlessly. The library was in darkness, too.

By some miracle, despite my failing 4G, a WhatsApp came through from my friend Jo, who lives two blocks away, asking if my electricity cut out. So it seemed the entire neighbourhood was affected. I glanced at my watch: 12:55pm. I wasn’t going to make this 1 o’clock meeting on time.

Then an SMS (remember those?) came through from my manager in Málaga, saying that for some reason her electricity and Internet weren’t working, and that she’d try and find a café for our meeting. Needless to say, she would not be successful, and that meeting never happened.

I found Jo in the library, where bizarrely the WiFi was still working, though the lights and air conditioning had shut down. People were sat around, tapping away at their laptops in the dark as if nothing had happened.

The news was reporting that the power cut was happening across the entire country, plus Portugal, Andorra, and parts of France. This was unprecedented.

A rush for emergency supplies

What to do? We could not get in contact with anyone, messages were not delivering. We were probably going to get kicked out of the library soon, if only for our nonstop whispering.

Our next move was to go to one of the many local Chinese-run bazaars (these are all over Spain and they sell general household goods) to get some emergency candles. It felt strange to be doing that when the sun was blazing overhead, but who knew how long the power would be out for?

So into the dark depths of the bazar we plunged, phone torches aloft, in search of non-electrical light sources. As we queued to pay, the savvy staff were placing all the torches they had in stock at the front of the store, which were immediately snatched up. Of course the card machines were not working so Jo and I had to scrape together the little cash we had on our persons to buy some candles and a little torch.

Jo’s flat, by the mercy of god, has a gas cooker. I invited myself over to camp out until the power came back, whenever that might be. The streets were busier than usual, but most people seemed relaxed. We were beginning to have apocalyptic fears thoughts about looting and wild behaviour, but that seemed a way away. The sun shone overhead and people were sat at bar terraces, drinking and chatting.

Nothing terrible was happening, some of the traffic lights were still functional, but it was the not knowing that was playing on our minds. Just what was going on, and when would it all be fixed?

Back at Jo’s place, her live-in boyfriend Juan was nowhere to be found. As if to add to our feelings of disquiet, the door was double-locked, something he apparently never does. Why did he do that?

Child’s play for a Venezuelan

When Juan did return home, he cheerfully brandished a shopping bag from Mercadona, Spain’s favourite supermarket, saying the card machines were working there and he’d stocked up on “essentials”: lemons, tinned tuna, and peanut butter.

While Jo and I were quietly having polite English meltdowns, Juan was blasé. He is from Venezuela – a country-wide power cut was hardly something to be phased about. Still, he had indeed double-locked the door in case looting and wild behaviour kicked off.

“This has never happened to me in my life before,” Jo observed. “I am very privileged.”

In the following days I would hear about how Barcelona friends from other countries had been entirely unfazed. A Filipino buddy said countrywide blackouts happen often because of typhoons. A Ukrainian friend told me that she had carried on her day as normal, knowing in the case of any missile attacks to go shelter in the metro.

Um, excuse me, what?

We Europeans are soft and untrained for hardship. Whenever there is a problem or a crisis, I can typically expect the Latino/a in the room to be the calmest and most capable. My TikTok feed (when I got reconnected) was full of Latinos living in Spain poking fun at the panic and lack of survival skills of the Spaniards during the temporary outage.

Indeed, the idea of a power cut lasting more than a few minutes had never entered my mind. In my experience, power cuts are much more common here in Spain than the UK (their safety requirements don’t seem quite as stringent), and, after a few years here, I truly thought that I was toughening up to harsher conditions. Practically third-world trained.

But let’s be honest – I’m just a pampered city princess, a cosseted city slicker, an urban fairy who feels unmoored if I forget my eye cream for one night, who gets funny about walking around indoors without house slippers, and who has a breakdown every August when it gets too hot.

Separated, together

So the three of us prepared to hunker down and ride out this apagón together, however long it would last.

I made a trip back home to collect the food melting in my freezer and some overnight essentials. But walking the busier-than-usual streets of my neighbourhood, observing people standing around, sent me spiralling into existential angst.

There was of course the classic wonder at how in cities we are surrounded by so many people, yet utterly disconnected. I could make more physical contact with a stranger during a crowded metro ride than I do with some of my closest friends in a year, and yet have zero connection to that stranger.

Now, during this moment of crisis, I was struck more than ever by our metropolitan isolation.

As I looked around at my fellow humans on the street I thought: who needs help here? Someone might need my help, just one person, and it could be something I could very easily do. Maybe an old lady needs her shopping carried up two flights of stairs. Maybe someone just needs their baby held for a few minutes while they sorted out their supplies. Things that would cost me nothing, that would be water off my back. But how am I to know? Should I stop every person I pass in the street, checking if there is something I could help them with?

What a sad state we live in.

When I got back to my building I didn’t knock on any of my neighbours’ doors. Not for lack of caring, but for fear of freaking someone out. I felt infinitely grateful to have friends living nearby (who also happened to have a gas cooker), not always a given in the city.

Of course we couldn’t text or call anyone, or even knock on their doors as the apartment building intercom systems are electric. Jo was trying to get through to her brother, who has a newborn, and eventually went to his house to shout up at his balcony. His doors were closed and he never emerged; thankfully all was well with him, we found out later. Jo left her balcony doors open in case any of her other friends showed up in need of aid. We speculated on how we would have got in touch if her text message hadn’t managed to get through to me at just the right moment.

This wasn’t a gentle wake up call. We were being slapped in the face by our reliance on electricity and telecommunications in the rudest way possible.

My mind ranged over how things might unravel if the outage dragged on. We had all already agreed that going out after dark was off the table. For Juan it was the danger of the darkness. For me it was the thought of not being able to even call emergency services, no cameras, no accountability. Anything could happen. People are attacked regularly even under normal circumstances. It struck me that civility and order were held together by a very fragile web of systems that we assume will always hold; and one major part had just gone offline.

A forced unplugging

Once emergency measures had been put in place (battery-powered fairy lights brought out, perishable food cooked, etc) and we had checked on others to the best of our ability, there wasn’t much else left to do but wait.

We sat around and chatted, something we do often anyway, only we weren’t able to do random fact-checks online whenever a question arose. We sat around and read books for a while. I took a nap. It was kind of nice.

Upsetting though the situation was, I had been looking forward to having an early night for once, undisturbed by the blue light of my phone screen. Perhaps I would finally reset my circadian rhythm to be in tune with the sun. Alas, that was not to be.

We had just sat down to dinner, at around 8:30pm, when Juan suddenly pointed to the corridor and uttered one word, like a prophetic revelation: “Light.”

I whipped my head around: the TV standby light flickered on; an electronic female voice declared, “Connecting to bluetooth device”. Cheers erupted out on the street.

We hurried to the balcony overlooking the main road. Though our view was largely obscured by trees, we could see neighbours on their terraces looking around, bemused, and hear the jubilant claps and whooping all over the block. I joined in, with a cry of “Gracias a dios!” to the sky.

Though the electricity seemed to be back, there was still no Internet. So we were still technically unplugged, just with lights.

At around 11pm, while we were playing a board game, Juan, our ever-alert scout, glanced at his smartwatch: he had received a message. We all lunged for our phones to see if we had recovered Internet access. The router was restarting and it seemed a weak 4G signal was coming through. We were back online, if intermittently.

I confess to being a little disappointed. No candlelit bedtime reading. No enforced offline early bedtime.

Back to normal, or something like it

By the next day, things were returning slowly to normalcy. Electric power was back but connectivity was less cooperative. The day before felt like a dream – a random blip in our reality. The illusion had reset, but nothing felt quite right.

Jo and I were unable to properly get back to work because of ongoing connection issues. I returned home, but we agreed to meet again that evening. It felt too soon to just carry on life as normal; we needed some kind of debrief or winding down from the trauma.

Back in my building, I took the stairs. I wasn’t going to risk getting stuck in an elevator just yet. At home, as I went to plug in my phone to charge in my home office, I gazed at my set-up, with its small series of cables and extension plugs and thought… I’ll never take this for granted ever again.

Unless something like this happens again, I imagine within a month I’ll have forgotten all about it.

Help me keep the lights on!

Scary things are happening in the United States right now. Its people have many reasons to be worried: an increasingly fascist administration, a collapsing economy, gun violence, the list goes on...

But the country’s elites, those who hold all the wealth and power, fear only one thing: the people. Specifically, the people rallying together to stand up against their oppressors.

Luigi Mangione and his large following of supporters are the embodiment of that fear.

Four months on from his arrest, Luigi’s case, already highly politicised from the start, is spiralling into a spectacle of such flagrant injustice that it borders on satire. Mainstream media “reporting” on the case has been largely a state-sanctioned smear campaign. Salacious rumour-mongering and heavy-handed statements made by public figures have further distorted the discourse.

Each new development (I will go into them) seems designed less to uphold law and order and more to condemn and discredit; not just Luigi, but the very idea of public dissent. Due process and presumption of innocence, every citizen’s right, are markedly absent.

In short: it’s a public scapegoating and a warning to the populace to stay in line. The people see him as a saviour, the powerful see him as a danger. And with recent renewed threats of the death penalty, all of this is making Luigi Mangione into a modern martyr.

The chaos is happening on two fronts: the legal case proceedings (of which there are three), and the public court of opinion (i.e. the media circus that surrounds the case).

In this piece I will cover

• Key events, starting with Luigi’s arrest

• How the prosecution is acting in bad faith

• The spectacle being made of Luigi in the media

• The ways the public are supporting Luigi

• What it all means (probably)

It’s gonna be a bumpy ride. Trigger warning for those who are allergic to injustice.

Let’s start from the beginning.

A very dangerous murder

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was always more than a random act of violence. The words “deny”, “defend”, and “depose” on the bullet shell casings found at the scene of the crime have become a mantra for Americans who oppose their country’s exploitative health insurance industry. If people are getting bankrupted by their health insurance, others must be getting rich off their ruin. People like Thompson.

The days following Thompson’s murder saw the rich panicking, and the general public watching with glee. “Wanted” posters of other healthcare CEOs went up around New York city, while CEOs had their webpages and LinkedIn profiles taken down.

Nobody seemed to mourn Thompson. Some openly celebrated his murder; one redditor said, in reference to the CCTV footage of the shooting: “Watching Brian Thompson crawling on the ground healed something in me”. Others condemned the murder, but expressed understanding and even sympathy for the shooter, who became an instant folk hero.

The matter of healthcare even transcended political divides, proving itself a truly bipartisan issue when Ben Shapiro’s own followers turned against him for criticising the murder of Thompson. People on both left and right were expressing their open dissent for the status quo, to the point of condoning, or at least excusing, murder.

A botched arrest

We’ve all seen the photo of Luigi during his arrest in a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on 9 December 2024, and we’ve all seen the various surveillance images of the suspected shooter in New York. We’ve probably all puzzled over how they all look like different people, and wondered how the images, which are blurry and/or show a man with most of his face covered, could have been used to identify someone.

A rather salacious tell-all article run in New York Magazine about Jessica Tisch, the nepo baby NYPD Commissioner, revealed the movements of law enforcement immediately after the shooting: “Tisch had authorized the department to throw everything at finding the shooter: drones, canines, scuba divers, hundreds of detectives and beat cops”. She also scoured social media looking for someone “hot enough to be the guy in the surveillance footage.”

It goes without saying that had the murdered person not been the CEO of a multi-billion dollar health insurance company (however little his death was mourned by the public) the NYPD would not have pulled out all the stops to find the killer. How many people are murdered in New York city in a week? How many of those get anything close to this kind of attention?

The article also reveals how it was a priority for Tisch to catch the suspected shooter before the “Feds” – the federal authorities, which are separate to the state-level NYPD. It became a race to make the arrest, and the case has since become a turf war between the NYDP and the Feds, with both pressing separate sets of charges.

Shortly after his arrest, Luigi took on Pennsylvania lawyer Thomas Dickie as his defense attorney. On 13 March, Dickey filed a pretrial omnibus motion in PA that shed light on the events of Luigi’s arrest, which had up till then been shrouded in mystery.

It was strange that Luigi’s arrest (the result of a McDonald’s employee supposedly recognising his face and calling 911) happened in a public place, yet there was no footage captured by onlookers. People manage to film during hurricanes and floods, yet nobody in that McDonald's took even a snap of the arrest in the most high-profile murder case of the moment? We’ve still seen no police bodycam footage, either. Only that one photo that went viral for its incongruous glamour.

It has been well-publicised that Luigi was arrested with a backpack conveniently full of incriminating evidence, including a 3D printed gun and handwritten document, erroneously branded a manifesto. The choice of the word manifesto, as Dickey points out in the motion, was made by a police officer. The word since spread like wildfire, and has been hugely damaging, fuelling the perception of guilt.

Anyway, the police are known to plant evidence, so plenty of people are not convinced of the supposed evidence found on Luigi’s person. Indeed, many have thrown doubt on the authenticity of the document, comparing its clunky writing style to Luigi’s, which is markedly different.

In addition, according to Dickey’s motion, Luigi was unlawfully detained for 17 minutes without having his Miranda rights read to him. He then was told he was “not in custody”, despite being backed up against a wall by up to ten police officers, and having been frisked and had his ID and belongings taken from him.

The police officers also unlawfully opened items that were found on Luigi, including using a knife to open a sealed package, all without a search warrant; highly illegal.

I won’t go into everything, but Luigi had all manner of rights violated that day. You can read the entire motion here. Finally he was arrested for the crime of providing police with a fake ID.

All of these fumbles have given Dickey grounds to declare Luigi’s arrest unlawful, and any “evidence” obtained from this unlawful arrest “fruit of the poisonous tree”. In the motion he requests the suppression of this “evidence”, meaning it would be inadmissible in court.

An assumption of guilt

Let’s not forget that at the time of writing, Luigi is still a suspect – albeit the main suspect – for the shooting. But since the moment of his arrest, there have been no great efforts to use the word “alleged”, with many people simply referring to him as the shooter.

The staged perp walk on 19 December 2024 in New York (where Luigi was extradited from Pennsylvania) was a transparent attempt to project the impression of guilt. Bafflingly, the New York mayor Eric Adams was in attendance, and made a statement to the press: “I want to look him in the eye and state that 'you carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that this, the people of New York, love’.”

Unhinged words, especially from a man who was himself indicted earlier that year on charges of corruption. As Luigi’s New York lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo (aka KFA), stated at a court hearing on 23 December: “the mayor should know more than anyone of the presumption of innocence that he too is afforded when he [is] dealing with his own issues. And frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione.”

Aside from taking part in the perp walk, mayor Eric Adams also found time to get into, as KFA put it, “full hair and makeup” (or just makeup I suppose, as he’s got no hair on his head) to give an interview for a documentary about Luigi. More on that later.

The charges against Adams have since been dropped. Seven prosecutors resigned in protest.

Of course, it’s no secret that the term “justice” system is a misnomer. It’s more a system to protect the wealthy and well-connected, and if you’re neither of those things… well, good luck. There’s supposed to be due process to protect you, but as we are seeing in Luigi’s case, that can’t be taken for granted, and anything could happen.

A muddled and messy legal battle

As Luigi was being extradited to New York to face state charges there, his lawyers were asked by the press if the “Feds were stealing the case?” This turned out to be exactly what happened.

Currently Luigi and his team of lawyers (including Thomas Dickey in Pennsylvania and KFA in New York) are facing off against three sets of charges: from the state of Pennsylvania, the state of New York, and the Feds.

They include forgery, criminal possession of a weapon, and murder in the first and second degree. But the ones that have drawn the most attention are the NY state charge of “terrorism” and the federal charges of “stalking” and, most significantly of all, “Murder through use of a firearm”. The last is a capital offense, meaning it is eligible for the death penalty.

As KFA said in a statement on 18 December 2024: “The federal government's reported decision to pile on top of an already overcharged first-degree murder and state terror case is highly unusual and raises serious constitutional and statutory double jeopardy concerns.”

Most people agree these charges are excessive. Terrorism? Who is feeling terrorised? Exploitative healthcare CEOs maybe… Mass school shooters (a crime much more akin to terrorism that killing one man) are not treated nearly as harshly. Even serial killers rarely get executed in the US.

There was much furore recently when Pam Bondi, the United States Attorney General, released a statement directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi – even though he hasn’t yet been indicted by the Feds. This was also part of a wider drive in the Trump administration to promote the death penalty, which… I’m not even going to go into that here. KFA released a powerful statement in response, which included these two bangers:

“While claiming to protect against murder, the federal government moves to commit the pre-meditated, state-sponsored murder of Luigi. By doing this, they are defending the broken, immoral, and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people.”

“This is a corrupt web of government dysfunction and one-upmanship. Luigi is caught in a high-stakes game of tug-of-war between state and federal prosecutors, except the trophy is a young man’s life.”

KFA has since filed a motion to preclude the government from seeking the death penalty. In this hard-hitting motion, she calls out Pam Bondi’s using her statements about Luigi to launch a new Instagram account, as well as the breaching of death penalty protocol, and many other factors – I recommend a read.

The whole matter caused a lot of upset amongst Luigi supporters but, as the death penalty had always been on the table, nothing much had materially changed. Nothing except a flurry of new donations that poured in to the GiveSendGo fund set up to help Luigi with his legal fees.

Indeed, the only consolation for Luigi supporters is that each time another injustice is inflicted on him, it always triggers a boost in donations.

A case of missing evidence

Luigi was arraigned in New York by state prosecutors on 23 December 2024. On 21 March 2025 KFA filed a motion demanding missing evidence from the prosecution, including witness statements and 130 pages of grand jury testimony. Full discovery was supposed to be handed over within 20 days of the arraignment; 88 days had passed when she filed her motion. Now at the time of writing, over 111 days have passed.

The federal prosecution also wanted to prevent Luigi having access to a laptop to view the evidence in his own case; evidence that is, to use the state prosecutor’s words, “voluminous” – over 2 terrabytes, or 15,000 pages. A laptop for viewing evidence is a normal request that Luigi’s fellow famous inmate Diddy was granted. In a letter to the court on 26 March, KFA goes into it – read it if you want a breakdown of all the ways the prosecution are acting up. More on this later.

During my research I watched a YouTube video on the matter of missing discovery, and found this in the comments section:

If there is watertight evidence that proves Luigi to be the shooter, the case is in the bag for the prosecution. They have nothing to worry about. Either way, they are legally required to hand over that discovery. What possible motive could they have for not complying with this legal requirement? The only one I can think of is that the “evidence” is insufficient, if not non-existent, and the only recourse they have left is to mess around and attempt to make the defense’s job harder. It’s a classic tactic of a losing party: you can’t win through honest means, so you try to rattle your opponent instead.

In a statement made to the press on 21 February, after a court hearing, KFA said that she was shocked to see a documentary on HBO about Luigi, featuring the Chief of Detectives and New York City Mayor discussing evidence, police paperwork, and forensics that she herself had not yet seen. The prosecution were leaking evidence to the media and Luigi’s lawyers were learning about it by watching HBO?

KFA made her statement outside the courthouse in which she had shortly beforehand been cut off by the judge and unable to make all the remarks she wished to. Luigi was present at that hearing, and was escorted with his usual entourage of armed guards, in shackles and a bulletproof vest.

Why the vest, which KFA described as a “very serious vest”? Luigi had never been put in a bulletproof vest up till that point. During this court appearance he was visible to the public for seconds, while going in and out of the courtroom. Given the crowds of Luigi supporters inside and outside the court, an attack seemed unlikely.

Neither did it appear that Luigi’s wellbeing was a top priority to the authorities; during his December perp walk, in which he was exposed for a considerably longer amount of time out in the bitingly cold New York air, he didn’t even get a jacket, let alone a bulletproof vest.

Let’s be real: the purpose of the bulletproof vest was to project an image of Luigi as dangerous. Unfortunately for them, as with everything else they dress him in, it just ended up looking like haute couture.

KFA also requested Luigi’s shackles be removed in the courtroom, as he had thus far been compliant and well-behaved. The judge initially agreed, but then changed his mind after conferring with the prosecution. KFA had to help Luigi to drink water, as his cuffed hands were shackled to his waist.

Luigi’s shackled ankles became another iconic image, setting the Internet ablaze. A TikTok artist was inspired to create a painting of it, titled The System is Broken, and after much demand, began selling prints, with 15% of the profits going toward Luigi’s legal fund. Over $200 has been donated from this so far.

A strategy of delay, deflect, distract

So we’ve established that the prosecution have been missing their legal deadlines by quite significant degrees. Because of the delay in receiving discovery, KFA requested an extension to file motions, which the prosecution tried to block in a letter to the court on 25 March.

In the same letter, the prosecution attempt to claim that Luigi is a danger to witnesses (from prison?) and that he was getting “special treatment” as he was allowed to change into normal clothes for his court appearances. This is a very normal thing for defendants appearing in court, but they deemed it “accommodation for defendant’s fashion needs”. They claim Luigi’s green sweater on his 21 February court appearance “fanned the flames of public attention” and even cite a Fox News(!) article headlined Luigi Mangione winks at supporters with green sweater under bulletproof vest. The pettiness is unmatched.

The letter also complains of two heart-shaped notes (see image below) that were smuggled into Luigi’s socks that day, to support their claim of “special treatment” and his being a “danger”. One of these notes (the one on the right) was addressed to someone called “Joan”. KFA had to deal with this in her response letter on 26 March, saying, "The District Attorney’s Office ostensibly realized the innocent nature of this event, and that it was not a genuine danger or concern, as they did not bother to alert the Court at the time.”

Just summarising that nonsense was exasperating and boring for me. What a waste of everyone’s time. At least Karen managed to throw in some shade in her letter: "Most respectfully, perhaps if the District Attorney’s Office focused more on their statutory obligations and Mr. Mangione’s constitutional rights—and less on the color of Mr. Mangione’s sweater at the court appearance (notably, one of the prosecutors also wore green to court) and whether or not he chose not to wear socks—the prosecutors would have been able to timely meet their discovery obligations.”

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Meanwhile, Luigi’s lawyers were not even permitted access to him before and after that public court appearance – so much for “special treatment”. Every delay and ounce of energy expended by the defense addressing silly things like heart-shaped notes in socks is racking up Luigi’s legal bill and distracting us all from the actual issue at hand. If the evidence against Luigi were so compelling, it would be an open-and-shut case, and there would surely be no need to play stupid games of deflection like this.

One thing is for sure: the prosecution is playing dirty.

A media circus

This entire case has been sensationalised from the very beginning, and Luigi has become an object of public fascination. Understandable, given the political nature of the killing, and because he is such an unlikely and attractive suspect. He seems for all intents and purposes to be a golden boy who may or may not have decided to sacrifice himself for the greater good. A difficult figure to vilify – but that hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from trying.

A rumour started in early March that Luigi had filmed and starred in up to 20 “cinema-style” porn videos. This was swiftly shot down by KFA: “Hopefully everyone realizes these are fake and not Luigi.” I don’t think many people actually believed it, and even if it were true, it hardly has any bearing on his case. Either way, as this TikTok primer on media literacy explains, the damage was done. Luigi was being compared to the character Patrick Bateman from America Psycho; the subconscious programming was at work. And it was yet another ludicrous distraction in a very serious ongoing legal battle.

There have been to date four documentaries made about Luigi, one of which was produced and launched within days of his arrest. Another, as mentioned earlier, revealed evidence to the public before it was handed over to his lawyers.

All of this media coverage is tainting the potential jury pool for when this case actually goes to trial, which is what KFA has been saying since December: “there's a wealth of case law guaranteeing his right to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place”.

Anyone who has attempted to post about Luigi online will be aware of the intense censorship happening, too. Creators have had their content taken down for “inciting violence”, just by mentioning his name, and comments saying “Free Luigi” have been getting automatically banned.

All this for someone who is accused of a murder. Not convicted, not found guilty; the case hasn’t even gone to trial yet. It’s a freak show, and at the centre of it all is a man whose life is on the line.

A class traitor / A man of the people

Luigi, being a rich straight white male, was poised to become a Brian Thompson himself in the future. It is shocking for us to see someone who has all the privileges the world can bestow, being treated like someone who doesn't.

Whether Luigi actually did it or not doesn’t seem to be relevant to the powers that be. Law enforcement needed a scapegoat, quick, to maintain their public image. The rich and powerful want an example made of him. The blatantly unfair treatment and the smear campaigns are less about Luigi himself and more a message to the people. But it is making a martyr of Luigi – a dangerous game to play.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that Luigi and his supporters are the worst fears of the elite, embodied. That is why there have been so many efforts to discredit both Luigi and those who support him. We do not expend energy on attempting to suppress and discredit those who pose no threat. The more violations they throw his way, the more they show their own asses. They are scared.

But each transgression only serves to whip up more support for Luigi. He has been inundated with letters. He’s inspired protests, artwork, music, and, well, people like me, writing about his case from the other side of the globe. One only needs to have a quick scroll through the donor messages on his GiveSendGo fundraiser to see how firmly the people have taken his side. I have seen notes from people donating all their week’s tips, dropping in for regular donations, pouring in all they can afford; a flood of gestures big and small.

The messages are heartfelt, humorous, sad, ironic, indignant… They come from all kinds of people, not all of whom are in agreement about Luigi’s innocence. But they reflect the desperation and indignity that ordinary Americans suffer under their healthcare system, the love and admiration that Luigi has inspired, and the people’s demand for fairness and justice.

Sometimes, the fund total jumps up when a wealthier donor drops thousands, with the largest donation at the time of writing being $36,500. At present, the fund is at over $900k, inching toward the goal of $1 million by 6 May.

Whether Luigi is innocent or guilty has already been decided in the minds of many, but the trials have yet to begin. It will likely be a lengthy process, and the world is watching with interest.

In the meantime, Luigi has practically been canonised as a living saint amongst his supporters. And their devotion, no matter the underhanded tactics deployed by his opponents, looks unlikely to diminish.

Author’s note

This article is not a complete coverage of Luigi’s cases. There are many, many details that I have not been able to include. I encourage you to read the linked documents and Luigi’s lawyers’ official website for more info. My intention was to give a broad overview with a focus, of course, on how Luigi is being prejudiced.

I’ve exhausted myself writing this piece. I never imagined that one day I’d be trawling through American court documents and Daily Mail (yuck) articles to write about a murder suspect, but you never know where life takes you!

If you like my work, I’d love your support.

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Thanks so much for reading!

Adolescence, a four-part Netflix drama, has been blowing up the world over since its release in March 2025. The show explores the very prickly topics of masculinity and misogyny amongst youths, depicting the fallout from a 13-year-old boy’s murder of a girl classmate in a northern English town.

The series creator, Stephen Graham, has said in interviews that the inspiration behind the miniseries was recent real-life cases of teenage boys murdering girls. Adolescence has made such a cultural impact that it was mentioned in the UK parliament, and there are talks of screening it there and in schools.

In short, a fictional TV series has sparked more dialogue and generated more calls to action than real-life murders.

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Art can reach the uninterested and unaware

Art easily touches places that education and campaigning will struggle to reach. This is because art is experiential, rather than instructional. Of course the two can and should overlap (narrative is a very powerful tool in teaching). But it is a very different experience to attend a lecture about social issues, than to encounter a piece of art representing an experience, and feel it yourself.

Adolescence is a demonstration of how art can serve as a shortcut to awareness and consciousness for the masses, leapfrogging over sometimes Herculean efforts in public education, reporting, campaigning, publishing papers and books, and more. Don’t get me wrong, those things are important and must continue – they are doing their part, and will serve as resources for those who are triggered into awareness and action.

Yet a four-hour miniseries had the power to jolt a large number of people awake in one go, who might otherwise have remained unaware. In the case of Adolescence, they were parents. The show painted a stark picture of the chasm between what young people are seeing online and their own parents’ understanding of it, raising important concerns over the extent to which parents are responsible for their children’s online activities. Other aspects of parenting were also examined, including emotional neglect, and the modelling of certain behaviours and values. When young lives are increasingly being lost, through both murder and suicide, we can no longer afford to be complacent.

What stands out about Adolescence is its extreme realism – it does not feel dramatised or scripted, everything about it is naturalistic. I won’t go into how they achieved that, but you can find plenty of content about it (I recommend you do, it’s very interesting). Suffice to say that if you are from England, you can viscerally feel how true to life the show is.

I believe that this mix of Adolescence being fictional (fiction series do greater numbers on Netflix than documentaries) and yet so true to life (ironically, achieved through great artistry) is what made it such a gut-punch to viewers. The complex, highly combustible topics of masculinity and misogyny were rendered real and engaging, rather than preachy or didactic.

Whether we like it or not, more people are more likely to watch the series and engage with the subject matter than read a book about men’s violence toward women. Those books are important and necessary (I recommend Jackson Katz’s Every Man of course) but art is a shortcut. And it helps if the art has broad appeal, as Adolescence does: it’s on a popular streaming channel and is accessible enough to appeal to the masses, while being high-quality enough to be taken seriously as a piece of prestige art.

Another example of art being a shortcut to social change is the popular American sitcom series Will & Grace that aired in 1998–2006. It was the first US primetime TV show to have openly gay lead characters. Though Will & Grace wasn’t overtly a show about gays (it was about a flat share between gay lawyer Will and his best friend, heterosexual woman Grace), it is widely credited for improving public perception of LGBTQ+ people in the United States. I imagine it impacted people who would otherwise have had little to no engagement with anything LGBTQ-related.

In the years since, the representation of queer people in popular media has done wonders for normalising queer people and queer culture. The more something is normalised, the easier it is to assimilate it into a culture – for better or worse. Misogyny is also normalised, as is blaming women for the violence we experience. This attitude is ingrained, reinforced in myriad ways, and very difficult to uproot.

Art will make you feel

As I mentioned in my previous article, the most effective way to move people is not via our logic and reasoning, but our emotions. And art is for precisely that: evoking feelings.

Art, of course, takes many more forms than TV shows; that just happens to be a form of art/media that is very widely consumed. There are also countless ways that art and politics interlace, from subtle references to overt art activism, such as the works of street artist Banksy. But when it comes to shifting mass perception, the things that will appeal to the most people will naturally be the most effective.

Works of narrative fiction (films, series, books, etc.) are particularly useful for both spreading awareness about real-life issues in an accessible, even entertaining, way and also bringing these issues vividly to life in a relatively “safe” manner. Though hyperrealism in art can be almost as disturbing as real-life footage, it is not reality. Watching a death scene in a film is not the same as watching someone die live on camera for real, and indeed that would be censored.

Popular works of art also provide a linguistic shorthand for cultural phenomena. For example, The Handmaid’s Tale, the acclaimed novel by Margaret Atwood which was made even more popular when it was adapted by HBO into a TV series. Though a piece of fiction, in contemporary political discourse if you simply say “Handmaid’s Tale”, it’s understood that you are referring to the erosion of women’s rights and bodily autonomy, particularly in the USA.

With the recent proliferation of AI and fears about the future, all anyone needs to say is “I, Robot” and we understand the risk they are alluding to. And, of course, the concept of red pill/blue pill from the movie The Matrix has come to define the online manosphere, the ever-present and insidious influence behind the drama of Adolescence.

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is frequently referred to by supporters as “Katniss Everdeen”. Katniss is the rebel leader protagonist of the popular dystopian book and film series The Hunger Games, who leads the people of Panem (aka the United States) in a revolution against the corrupt and exploitative wealthy elites.

Art can help us make sense of real life, providing vivid reference points that help us to process events and envision what might be possible in the future.

Historical occurrences are brought to life when artwork is created about them. Statistics can be shocking and disheartening, but they are cold and difficult to get invested in personally. It’s the difference between reading that over 20 million soldiers died in World War II, and sobbing at the battleground death scene of Josh Hartnett’s character Danny in the arms of his best friend in the film Pearl Harbour (spoiler, sorry), and then imagining all the countless other men who died and left behind loved ones.

This example, as you might have guessed, is a personal one. Years ago, I encountered three pieces of art that impacted me deeply at a time when I was learning about the world wars at school: the song Travelin’ Soldier by The Chicks (about a solider in the Vietnam war), the stage play Journey’s End by R.C. Sheriff (about soldiers in World War I) and the film Pearl Harbour (about World War II).

These three works, which I encountered around the ages of 13-14, touched my adolescent heart and consciousness in a way no history class ever could. I suppose I was a sensitive teenager too, but my world was truly rocked for a while, as I grappled with the realities of war and death. Though I never experienced these things firsthand, I was shook, and I would never see things the same way again.

And I got there through experiencing art.

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Doing the work

Of course, a thorough grounding in critical thinking and media literacy must go hand-in-hand with consumption of art, in order to think critically about what is being represented, and be able to clock propaganda.

The Aeneid (19BC) for the uninitiated is a masterpiece of epic poetry, one of the great works of Latin literature by legendary poet Virgil. It was also a whopping great piece of Roman propaganda, commissioned by the Emperor Augustus, not to mention a pretty severe case of plagiarism of Homer.

In every film history course, the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation will be mentioned. It was a landmark in filmmaking – and also an extremely racist piece of propaganda, that was very influential and damaging.

It goes both ways – art can just as much be deployed for nefarious purposes as useful ones.

When I was at school (I’m a millennial), history class was less about learning historical facts and more a training in distinguishing between primary and secondary sources, and critical reading of both. I did an A-Level in Media Studies and my university studies hammered into me the importance of backing up claims and citing sources. But I am under no illusion that I am immune to propaganda, and more broadly speaking, media literacy is not a given.

The series Adolescence certainly has had its detractors, though I personally haven’t seen any that hold much water. There have been baffling discussions about the race of the boy protagonist, and knife crime, or complaints about not seeing the victim’s perspective. These indicate only that people missed the point of the show, which was about how a young boy can become radicalised to the point of committing murder. Once again, media literacy is not a given…

Can art also just be art?

For those looking to change the world, you would be wise to look to the arts, and deploy them alongside proper strategic branding for your cause. In a very out-of-touch move, government funding for the arts has been cut in the UK over the last few years. It might seem easy to dismiss art as non-essential, but that is a deeply unwise move.

To be clear, I am not promoting the idea that the sole purpose of art is to enact social change. As an artist myself, that is a horrendous thought. The act of creation is in many ways still a mysterious process, even to myself. I have my techniques and methods, but there is always something unpredictable, ungraspable, even spiritual, in the endeavour, too. At least for me. I feel many artists would agree.

Some artists even describe themselves as not so much creator but vessel, through which the art manifests. The poet Ruth Stone would run to “catch” poems flying through the air in order to write them down. Michael Jackson famously said that when he had a good idea for a song he would try to record it ASAP, before God could give it to his rival, Prince.

So there is something ineffable about art, too. It is not merely a tool to be wielded in service of a political agenda.

Yet art and politics can never be completely separated. When skillfully realised and deployed, art has the power to shake the foundations of societies and change the world.

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Read part I of my series on social change here, which is about branding and perception of DEI and other social initiatives.

On his first day in office Trump signed an Executive Ordered titled "Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing”, which put all diversity staff on leave. It’s happening in the UK too, with nearly 4 in 10 employers saying we should “roll back DEI”. Trump plans to replace DEI with something called “Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence (MEI)”.

This isn’t an article about Trump, but he is the most in-your-face current example of how our approach to DEI up till now has backfired and failed to reach the very people (like Trump!) who need DEI training the most. Additionally, he is a case study of how powerful persuasion techniques can override logic, common sense, and well-intentioned initiatives like DEI. Yet he is also, in a backward way, modelling the solution.

I stand behind the concept of DEI, and am something of a social justice warrior. But if we hope to stand a chance, DEI and social justice issues need an overhaul in their branding, messaging, and positioning. In other words: their marketing.

The power of persuasion

I’ve got to hand it to him – Donald Trump has a formidable marketing team. It makes sense, as he’s a businessman first and foremost. His strategies for winning the 2016 presidential election are analysed in the book Win Bigly by Scott Adams, which explains how Trump leveraged his business and marketing acumen to get an edge over his politician opponents.

One method is Trump’s ability to coin iconic slogans that live rent-free in our minds – MAGA, Nasty Woman, Grab them by the p*ssy, and now, it seems, MEI. He is also adept at evoking simple-to-grasp and vivid images, such as The Wall. It's a masterclass in persuasion, and it won him the presidency – twice. We’ll come back to this.

My day job is in content marketing. All good marketers know that our most powerful technique is tapping into emotions in order to prompt an action. We are all, whether we care to admit it or not, driven by emotions, not logic. As a marketer, the more base the emotion you arouse, the more persuasive you can be. When you can invoke primal emotions like desire, fear, anger, sadness, joy, it is much easier to move people to action. They will then use their logic and reasoning to justify their decisions in retrospect.

It’s a much harder task to call upon people’s higher cognition and altruism. Marketers understand that we must appeal to our targets’ self interest.

DEI, and many social issues, are mostly presented in a way that petitions our rationality and higher natures. It’s more preach-y than persuasive. I sincerely wish that were enough, but we live in a world where a convicted felon is having his second run as President of the United States, so probably rationality isn’t the main driving force.

Worse, the discourse against DEI evokes powerful images: under-qualified people being given unfair advantages, leading to under-performance and even death. Injustice! Danger! Fear, disgust, anger… it’s a potent mix.

Are we going to continue doubling down on the same methods that got us here, or can we learn something?

The fundamental problem

My first “proper” job in London was on a prestigious graduate program at a large tech consulting company that prides itself on its diversity. I joined a cohort of 40-odd young people, all ambitious overachievers who had made it through the tough interview process. On my very first day, there were mutters from some of my male peers that there were so many women present because of “quotas”. Never mind that hiring quotas are illegal in the UK – the damage was done. The perception was that women didn’t deserve to be there, we’d just been given a leg up in the name of diversity.

At that same job we were all forced to take an in-person Unconscious Bias training session. The course facilitator was a straight white man who shared an anecdote about a gay colleague of his who didn’t feel comfortable bringing his partner to work functions. This facilitator then proceeded to express his surprise that in this day and age, his colleague would still feel that way. He said this in a DEI training session. That he was teaching.

In that same company, I once attended a session for the internal women’s network. One man rocked up to this meeting and informed us the existence of this network felt “aggressive” and “exclusionary”, and how he didn’t care about anyone’s gender. To be fair this was a number of years ago; I hope he, and men in general, have evolved since then. I doubt it. A Senior Manager that I knew personally rolled his eyes at the fact that he had to have a more diverse team. And on and on… I have more horror stories from other jobs, but I’ll stop there.

As a woman of colour who has been sexually harassed at work, and has experienced prejudice and racism her entire life, I am an active participant in women’s and LGBT+ groups. I 100% support independent organisations not affiliated with any particular employer; they are truly effective for building community, and providing support and opportunities to disadvantaged groups.

But DEI within companies? In my gut it has always made me cringe. Something about it just never sat right with me.

Don’t get me wrong, something is better than nothing. I’m sure DEI courses work to spread awareness and promote better behaviour in the workplace. I respect those who have dedicated their careers and/or spare time to making the world a better, more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place.

But we can’t deny that DEI training in the workplace has its issues. It’s often dismissed as a checkbox exercise, and is usually the first to get budgets slashed, as it’s seen as non-essential. It can come across as patronising and uninteresting for those who need it the most, and at worse can further alienate those whom it is trying to uplift.

The most fundamental problem with DEI training (which is the foundation for all of the above issues) is a branding one. It’s a perception issue.

Firstly, there is much confusion and misunderstanding about what DEI even is. I have trouble articulating it myself. Some people believe it reinforces prejudice. It can reek of insincerity and get people’s backs up, creating more resistance (an “aggressive” woman’s network, anyone?) This has made DEI a thorny, bothersome topic. Any marketing campaign that causes confusion, awkwardness, and potential reputation damage would be nixed immediately.

Secondly, I’m so sorry, but it’s just not cool. Like with workplace harassment training that is laughed at, DEI training is often seen as basic and patronising – necessary for only the most egregious, ignorant bigots who don’t know how to act. And who self-identifies that way? Let’s face it, there are too many people who think DEI is straight-up ridiculous. The branding is in tatters.

Nobody wants to be told how racist or sexist or homophobic they are, deep down inside. Nobody wants to be known as the Diversity Hire. Nobody wants their achievements to be attributed to DEI. Of course this isn’t fact, it’s perception, but we all know that perception is everything: far from uplifting oppressed groups it further discredits us – even Beyoncé isn’t safe it seems.

We all want to be associated with Meritocracy, Excellence, and Intelligence; especially in the capitalist workplace, an inherently competitive, hierarchical, and therefore exclusive place. Plus we’re all so busy – learning about DEI feels like another thing to add to the list of things to feel guilty about not doing.

Trying to teach fully grown adults in the workplace to address their own unconscious bias is too late. We can’t expect people to unravel decades’ worth of conditioning over the course of a two-hour workshop that they’ve been obliged to attend by their employer. Plus, the vulnerability required to undo profoundly and often unconsciously held biases is incompatible with the corporate environment.

However, these are the constraints that we are forced to work with, so let’s work with them – but let’s change up our approach. Before I present solutions, I need to first lay out some concepts that will help my proposal to make sense.

NB: I am going to be discussing DEI awareness training specifically, not other workplace DEI policies such as flexible hours for parents, or other workplace adjustments.

Naming and shaming

Over a decade ago Jackson Katz gave an iconic TED talk on the framing of gendered violence in common discourse. I highly recommend you watch the talk, it’s still painfully relevant today. In short, Katz says that the framing of gendered violence (sexual assault, domestic abuse, harassment, etc) as “women’s problems that some good men help out with” is incorrect. These are in fact men’s issues.

Seems obvious, when you think about it. Men are the ones perpetrating these acts in the majority of cases. But our tendency to focus on the victims renders the perpetrators almost invisible in the discourse about their own actions.

This framing makes the problem uninteresting, almost irrelevant to most men. They may express sympathy and even solidarity with women, but there is no place for them. They have been erased from the discourse on an issue that is in fact all about them.

In a similar way, DEI typically places the spotlight on the victims of inequity and exclusion, whether that be women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+, disabled people, working parents etc. While it is important to educate about the barriers people face so that we can all be more aware and sensitive in general, we are missing a foundational piece (more about that in the next section).

Aside from that, it’s also… unsexy. Again, I’m so sorry to express it this way, but even if we consciously embrace the principles of DEI, it’s just unappealing to think about exclusion. We don’t want to pity our colleagues, or to walk on eggshells around them. Neither do we want to self-identify as disadvantaged; I personally shrink from that, it smacks of disempowerment. In Win Bigly Scott Adams talks about the dangers of associating your brand with something off-putting, as it repels people on a subconscious level.

We all just want to feel good. Some of us are ready and willing to put ourselves through the discomfort of challenging our biases and breaking down our conditioning, but ALL of us want to feel good. Good marketing either makes you feel good or sells the promise of feeling good. DEI, in a way, sells the promise of making other people feel good. A worthwhile cause for sure, but remember what I said about self-interest? Cynical? Maybe. Still true, though.

A drastic reframe is needed if we want to engage everyone’s diffuse attention and inspire authentic interest and action, for real change.

We all need re-educating

The workplace isn’t an oasis, separated from society. Phenomena that we see play out in the workplace didn’t originate there. They are the natural outgrowth of a society that is profoundly unequal.

Therefore in DEI training we should be trying to impart an expansiveness of vision: a broader awareness of our world as a whole, and why things are the way they are. To place the workplace in its wider societal context. Rather than focussing on individual disadvantages, or pointing out ways that we might propagate inequality (bad us!), we need to teach history and sociology. We should have been taught these things properly at school but alas, such is the world, for now.

In my experience, most people aren’t out there trying to oppress others. What DEI training is trying to combat isn’t necessarily prejudice and bigotry: it’s ignorance, which is usually the root of prejudice and bigotry anyway, as well as apathy, defensiveness, and unintentional insensitivity and harm. This is already a powerful reframe, in my opinion. It’s still not great to think of oneself as ignorant, but it’s probably better than being evil.

As we never learned it properly at school, DEI training should be a primer in the history of colonisation, misogyny, white supremacy, and the myth of meritocracy. I.e. a history of the western world. And again, let’s keep the focus on the acts of oppression, rather than centring the struggles of the oppressed, and let’s also learn about oppressive systems and laws.

I heard this recently: “black history is white history”. It blew my mind. When we think of black history we tend to think, especially in regards to the USA, of slavery, the civil rights movements, and Black Lives Matter. That’s all very well and good, but if black people were/are oppressed, who’s doing the oppressing? Like with the previous example of gendered violence, black people’s problems are actually white people’s problems. When framed this way, suddenly it’s not enough to be a benign white person who doesn’t actively, consciously, or willingly oppress black people. Suddenly, it’s a part of your history, and your identity, too.

Rather than giving tips on how to enact inclusivity, this kind of contextual training will allow the message to sink in deeper because it explains the why – the deeper why – of the state of our society. Then we can trust professionals to reflect and draw their own conclusions about how to act at work, in an environment where everyone is informed; the opposite of patronising them.

We all labour under the condition of ignorance. I think most of us enjoy expanding our knowledge and deepening our understanding of the world, even if what we learn is unpleasant, so long as we feel enriched and empowered by it. Nobody wants to be told what to do, but everyone loves to feel smarter, more cultured, and more competent.

Remember what I said about Trump painting powerful pictures? It’s certainly nice to think of ourselves as more sensitive and inclusive, but a smarter, more cultured, more competent self? That packs more punch, especially in the context of work.

Flip reverse it

Going back to that first day at my first job, with my ignorant male peers claiming that diversity quotas were the reason that women were there. It filled me and my female peers with rage, understandably. But what’s the clapback?

It could have been: there are so many men because the standards are lower for them, due to often unconscious prejudice and favoritism. Leaders like to hire people like themselves, of course – they can relate to them more easily. And there are so many white male leaders because until not so long ago, only white men were legally allowed to be in positions of power, and withheld the right from everyone else. They kept all other groups oppressed through violence and exclusion. They were stuck in their ways for a long time, unable to even see other types of people as human beings. That’s in part why DEI was invented, to help them understand and evolve past their foolish limitations and stop holding humanity back from progress. They can be fragile and still need a lot of hand-holding in the present day, in order to avoid their feeling threatened or defensive. It’s not always easy for them to update their mindsets, they can be a bit attached to the past. They cope by questioning other people’s competence or attempting to assert dominance, sometimes in abusive ways.

Minorities have had to be really excellent to overcome all of the above; in fact, they are more likely to be overqualified, as much more is expected of them to “prove” their merit. Yet they still somehow must contend with the perception that their being in a disadvantaged position…. gave them an advantage.

A bit brutal, I know. I don’t seriously expect any company to take that approach in their DEI training. But it’s an alternative that does away with the perception of DEI lowering standards. Being ignorant needs to be branded as the pinnacle of cringe, it needs to be synonymous with incompetence and poor judgement. For too long straight white men have been branded the embodiment of Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence, and they’re not. They were just the only ones who had a chance at it.

But make it sexy

I said earlier, rather facetiously, that DEI is unsexy. Once in a previous job, when I was training to be an Agile Coach, the topic of reggaeton music came up. One of the other Agile Coaches said to me that he liked reggaeton, but that the lyrics were “not very DEI”. That is certainly true. But you know what reggaeton is? Sexy. That is why even a raging, radical feminist like myself will drop to the floor and twerk to Bad Bunny, because though I hate the misogynistic lyrics, how can I resist that beat? I’m only human.

The closest we’ve got to making DEI sexy is associating it with higher profitability. There are plenty of studies that show how effective women are at leading (duh) and how more diverse workforces generate more money (the only thing businesses truly care about). It’s a start, but it’s icky and screams cold-hearted capitalist. Even if it’s accurate, we need to go further.

It needs to be deeply uncool, embarrassing, status-lowering, to be ignorant and unconscious, intentionally or not. Shame avoidance is a stronger motivator than magnanimity and even success.

Jackson Katz in his TED talk recounts that his training for men was once referred to as “sensitivity training.” He countered that his training for men is leadership training: if a leader makes a homophobic or racist comment, "he needs leadership training… he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership.” King behaviour. See: leadership training. Now that’s sexy.

Men like Jackson Katz should be our cultural icons and getting all the air time, not horrors like Mark Zuckerberg saying things like corporate culture has become “too feminine” (his wife will be announcing she’s filing for divorce any day now).

So what does it all mean for DEI?

Once we have tackled ignorance, have got our historical facts straight, and can all get comfortable accepting that we exist in a certain historical context that has produced the world we inhabit today with many inequities… well, I honestly believe that if we can achieve just that, 70% of the work would be done.

When that foundation is laid, perhaps a lot of the problems will start sorting themselves out. Maybe we’ll stop hearing ludicrous statements like, “racism doesn’t exist anymore” or “I’m not prejudiced” (hint: we all are).

That’s quite a big ask for workplace DEI training. As I said before, by the time we enter the labour market it’s a little late; the education should start way earlier. But better late than never.

We are seeing signs of enlightenment in younger generations, who have had unfettered access to all the world’s knowledge from birth. They generally display more of the kinds of qualities we need in our leaders: social awareness, empathy, emotional intelligence.

Maybe rebranding DEI to MEI isn’t out of the question after all, because if we can cultivate those qualities, that truly would be meritorious, excellent, and intelligent.

Buy me a coffee

NB. This is going to be part one of a series on how we communicate about social issues, because I am so far from done.

Unless you are Luigi Mangione.

His appeal is so widespread that everyone is willing to share, with supporters dubbing themselves “sister wives”.

It would be easy to dismiss the furore as silly: just shallow women and gay men simping over good looks. But that wouldn’t explain the lesbians also going feral for him. And, in some cases, even the straight men. Older women want to mother him. Older men love him like a son.

No, in the case of Luigi Mangione, it goes far, far beyond his looks. This mass infatuation is merely revealing deep-seated truths about our western collective consciousness, values system, and sociopolitical landscape (including outside of the USA)… as well as what women want and admire in a man.

So what exactly is it about Luigi Mangione that has so captured imaginations the world over? In this article I will go over the various factors that have combined into him becoming an unlikely pin-up boy.

But at the end of the day, I think it boils down to just one thing. Read till the end to find out what that is (yes, this is bait. I’ll do whatever I can to retain your frazzled attention span).

Rising Luigi fever

Most people, particularly Americans who are sick (literally) of corrupt health insurance companies, were already riding for whoever shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on 4 December 2024, long before any suspect was identified. When Luigi was arrested five days later and his photos released, it only gilded what was already a lily in the public’s eyes. He was heroic and handsome – what wasn’t there to love?

(N.B. Luigi Mangione is legally innocent. He has not been found guilty and at the time of writing, his case has not yet gone to trial. But the media has for the most part assumed his guilt, and the general discourse has followed this assumption).

Though vigilante justice is a thorny topic, there was widespread understanding for why somebody might do what the shooter did. And in some ways it worked - suddenly, health insurance claims that had been stalled for months were cleared without questions. A controversial policy on anaesthesia was scrapped. Claims were going through immediately. The left and right were suddenly in agreement about something – the awful state of American healthcare. Class consciousness was activating. Real, tangible change was happening. Luigi became a figure to rally behind. He was someone who (allegedly) got things done.

Then into the canon of Luigi images were added two landmark events: his epic perp walk upon arrival to New York city on 19 December, and his filmed court hearing appearance shortly thereafter.

If the perp walk were meant to somehow discredit him, it backfired spectacularly. Surrounded by a hefty retinue of heavily armed NYPD officers, with a fresh taper fade, threaded eyebrows, and somehow making an orange jumpsuit and shackles look like a runway fit, Luigi slayed that perp walk with his head held high. If he was intimidated by the spectacle, as was no doubt the intention, he showed it not a smidge. Comparisons were made to Renaissance paintings and Jesus Christ – in visual language, he was the single bright spot amongst the dark uniforms of the NYPD. By making such a fuss, they only gave him more significance and made him look more powerful. He became a martyr, thus sealing his hero status in the public consciousness.

Then there was his court appearance a few days later. The stylish burgundy jumper and white shirt combo that he wore, strategically matching his lawyer Karen Agnifilo’s outfit, sent the Internet into orbit. The jumper sold out immediately. In the face of another press frenzy at the courthouse, Luigi continued to carry himself with dignity and a certain sass, even managing to flash a couple of smiles, and fans lost their minds.

But as I pointed out at the start of this piece, it isn’t just about appearances…

The perfect canvas for projection

Luigi is currently, and for the foreseeable future, without a voice (he really is the perfect man – seen and not heard. That’s a joke, before the incels start crying). Since his arrest, his image has been widely disseminated but he has barely been permitted to speak. The only words we got out of him were that one time he tried to speak to the press, before being slammed against a wall and hustled hastily away indoors.

And so what does one do with a pretty, but silent, image? Why, project onto it, of course! Luigi has had no opportunities to risk giving everyone the ick by speaking, so the people are free to let their imaginations run rampant. His every gesture can be interpreted and dissected any which way, with no chance for him to verify or disprove.

This lack of data has led to a collective cognitive dissonance, both sides of which favour him regardless. On the one hand, he is seen as a murderer with a conscience. He’s a class-conscious social justice warrior - our “vigilante boo” as he was dubbed in a viral parody song (a cover of The Plain White Tees’ Hey There Delilah).

He has been nicknamed The Adjuster (a reference to the professionals who evaluate health insurance claims), and Saint Luigi. What actor, musician, or influencer, however charismatic, can compete with a man who (allegedly) killed for his beliefs, and risked his life for the greater good of the American people? What celebrity could match up, let alone an ordinary man? He sacrificed himself for the collective. He’s a man with conviction – though nobody wants him to get one.

Some of the funnier images to come from his supporters are the countless Photoshopped “alibis” for Luigi at the time of the shooting in New York city.

On the other hand, there is a very strong sentiment that Luigi is innocent. This is mostly because the evidence presented so far to the public is unconvincing to the point of being utterly spurious. I won’t go into it all here, but suffice to say that nobody is convinced. As Luigi’s Pennsylvania lawyer Thomas Dickie famously stated at a press conference, proffering his empty hands and inviting the cameras to zoom in on the evidence for Luigi’s guilt, “here’s all the evidence… nothing, I’ve seen nothing”.

So, there is also a fervent confidence that Luigi is not the shooter, with theories ranging from a case of mistaken identity to a framing.

Yet regardless of whether he’s a courageous killer or wrongfully accused innocent, all parties are in agreement: they want him set free. A person who can inspire equal love amongst those who believe him a murderer and those who believe him innocent must be unique, at least in recent history. For the moment we don’t know which is correct.

And that’s the basis of every crush: a lack of information.

But the information that is available has only bolstered his perfect man status.

The digital footprint of a saint

As Luigi is now locked away out of sight, the only option for the fans and online sleuths has been to plumb his past. And, with a rigour and determination that should intimidate the FBI, they have uncovered every possible thing that can be found online (even Venmo texts). And there couldn’t be a cleaner digital footprint.

His socials include him sharing notes on books that he read, an essay on the Roman empire from his high school days, and code on GitHub. His Goodreads reviews indicate an earnest, deep thinker who was concerned with the state of the world.

Needless to say, photos from all stages of his life have been circulated and edits have been made. Not only does the man not take a bad photo, there has been nothing scandalous, risqué, or even cringe.

There aren’t even any selfies; we all know that men who take too many selfies are suspicious. The spiciest thing out there is a video of him at a daytime party smashing open a can of beer on his head and drinking it. Oooh, shocking(!) He is even considerate enough to step to the side to avoid splashing anyone. All photos seem to be taken by others, and usually feature him with a big smile.

It’s true that his X account suggested political leanings with standard tech bro overtones - those of us who work in tech know the type. But in Luigi’s case there seems to be a genuine humility – I don’t sense the arrogance typical of that ilk. I’m an expert at annoying men who consider themselves rational (the worst!) and making them cry through debate, and I’m so far undefeated – perhaps he would be the final boss. Mind you, I’ve never met him so this is me giving a perfect demonstration of imaginative projection.

Despite the damning media portrayal and spin, all reports from people who knew him have been overwhelmingly positive. He is described as a kind, friendly, helpful, studious guy. Not even any bitter exes have come out of the woodwork. His Reddit posts mostly involve sharing information about his back condition and encouraging and uplifting others with similar issues.

One of the viral photos making the rounds is of Luigi holding a tub of ice cream tied with a bow, smiling widely at the camera. The story behind the photo is that once in his university dorm he overheard a girl expressing sadness that the ice cream in the communal fridge had run out. So he went out and got her some and, not having any ribbon handy, fashioned a bow from painter’s tape. Apparently it’s a fancy ice cream brand too. Is this man real?

So it’s not all just projection. The aggregated impression is of a very intelligent, wholesome, and thoughtful man who wanted to help people. A true gentleman, in other words.

He’s a nerd

In our techno-patriarchy, the nerd reigns supreme. It’s brainpower, not brawn, that will get you the riches and authority in our day and age. Sadly, most of the tech overlords are either not famous and/or ugly. Despite being some of the most successful men in the world, they don’t get thirsted over much (Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk? I rest my case.)

And then came Luigi.

High school valedictorian. Computer science bachelor’s and master’s degree. Ivy league. Gaming nerd. Robot builder. And he has a six pack.

With pop culture’s hunks being predominantly entertainers, and content about them devolving into increasingly inane brainrot fodder, Luigi has been a breath of fresh air. He’s not in showbiz, he didn’t seek the limelight, he was just a studious guy who may or may not have become politically radicalised.

Not only did he prompt a surge in interest in STEM, now a whole generation of people are suddenly interested in the American justice system. Terms like jury nullification have become common parlance, young people are taking an active interest in the law, and of course there is now an uncomfortably bright spotlight being shone on the American health insurance industry.

Girls sigh over celebrities, but really want to marry a smart, hardworking, kind, and ordinary man. No Hollywood hunk can realistically fit that role. Luigi has filled that gap in the imaginations of young women the world over. He’s famous, possibly a killer, a powerful political symbol, but he’s also just one of us. It’s a contradiction, but as I already pointed out, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of this entire affair.

He has suffered

Spondylolisthesis (a spine condition), brain fog, existential worries – the man has been through it. A privileged upbringing didn’t shield Luigi from pain and suffering. This only humanises him further, grounding his image in a relatable reality and giving the illusion of closeness.

Reports of him cutting out his family and friends and disappearing in the months before the shooting also hint at some emotional strife. Cutting out the people closest to you is not something one does lightly.

And then of course there is the image, keeping women up at night with tears in their eyes, of Luigi in a prison cell. It’s indubitable that he has suffered, and is continuing to suffer, deep injustice: the aforementioned perp walk, for a start (something that could never legally happen in the UK, where I am from), the backward presumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the documentaries that have already spawned, sporting outrageously presumptuous titles like Luigi Mangione: the mind of a killer. He’s been denied bail and treated like he’s already been convicted for murder.

Luigi has been profoundly wronged, and appears to stand alone, facing off against the weight of the American judicial system, with three sets of charges levied against him. These charges are widely acknowledged to be excessive in nature, including stalking and terrorism. It’s awoken a potent protectiveness in the people. They feel compassion for him, feel the sting of injustice, and so are all drawn further in.

An aside on misogyny

Of course, it wouldn’t be a public discourse without generous dollops of misogyny. It is common practise to dismiss women and their interests. Much mainstream media has been quick to ignore the sociopolitical overtones of his fandom, and disdain the admiration for Luigi as moral decay or delusional women wanting to save a bad boy – “I can change him!” What they don’t seem to realise is that his supporters don’t want to change him; he is considered quite perfect as he is. And if he did do the things he is being accused of, he is in fact the saviour.

What it ultimately all comes down to

…is respect.

The collectively constructed image of Luigi is of a man that has won everyone’s deepest most abounding respect. The fandom is so rabid because it is such a rare thing for women to truly respect a man. A man who is not only not a danger to us, but (allegedly) deadly to those who would hurt us. Who has known suffering and injustice and, rather than blaming and harming women, children, or oppressed minorities (yes, the bar really is that low), for once correctly identified a source of oppression and proactively (ALLEGEDLY) took action.

That, or he’s a sweet, nerdy innocent who is going through the worst time of his life with dignity and courage.

Women love their partners and fathers, brothers and friends, care about them, have affection for them, worry for them, fear them… but respect? True, deep, all-encompassing, unwavering respect? A heartfelt admiration elicited from wordless actions alone? Sadly, it is not too common.

And that is what makes Luigi Mangione an uncommonly attractive man. For better or worse, whether it’s based on truth or illusion… women respect him.

Buy me a coffee

Read my next article: Luigi Mangione, the making of a modern martyr, which goes over the details of his case.

The first half of January has seen a phenomenon that nobody had on their 2025 bingo card: American citizens learning rudimentary mandarin en masse and running with open arms towards Chinese citizens. And the Chinese opening their arms in welcome.

Perhaps “netizens” would be a better term, as this has all happened online. With the impending US TikTok ban on 19 January looming over Americans, in the past week there has been a mass exodus from the platform onto a most unexpected replacement: RedNote, a Chinese-owned app, which has shot to number one on all app stores.

As a British Chinese and heavy TikTok user, this prodigy has taken over my life in recent days. I’m based in Spain so my TikTok won’t be disappearing anytime soon, but as about 90% of the content I am served on that app comes from the United States (as is the case for many European users), I am heavily invested and I’ve been closely following the unfolding drama with bewilderment and anthropological fascination.

The USA vs. China

The ostensible reason that the USA wants to ban TikTok is because it is owned by China, an “adversary” to the USA, and therefore poses a supposed security risk to Americans, who have been pouring their data into this Chinese app. Now, in retaliation, American TikTok users have flocked onto RedNote (小红书, xiaohongshu), an app that is not only also Chinese-owned, but whose entire interface is in Chinese, and which is (till recently) used by majority Chinese users in China.

Up till now the Great Firewall of China, which prevents access within China to many foreign social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, has kept the populaces of these two countries separate. The TikTok that is available in the USA and around the world is not accessible to people in China. They have their own version, Douyin (抖音), which has the same logo but is otherwise a very different app.

But now, with Americans thronging over to Rednote, jokingly dubbing themselves “TikTok refugees”, the two populations have been thrown together in a most sudden and unexpected manner.

Side note: what is RedNote?

The Chinese name for Rednote translates literally to “little red book” (yes, as in Mao Zedong’s little red book of communist propaganda).

The interface and features are very similar to TikTok. However, Rednote is a female-dominated app, popular amongst women for sharing hobbies like makeup, fashion, crafts, and music. This goes some way in explaining the very friendly welcome the Americans have received upon their arrival.

Americans vs. the USA

I have lost my mind at the countless humorous videos that have spawned in the past week. Americans are declaring in mandarin that they love China and communism. One TikToker filmed herself preparing a “care package” of her data for Xi Jinping, including a swab of her DNA, hair samples, medical records, and passport, to the sound of the viral Chinese song Jin sheng yuan.

This song has become the anthem for the TikTok migration over to RedNote. There have been countless videos of people tearfully saying farewell to their “Chinese spy” on TikTok, with Chinese TikTokers making spoof goodbye from your spy videos in response. Chinese RedNote netizens have been facetiously introducing themselves as “your personal Chinese spy”.

AI has also been deployed on both platforms to generate unhinged images representing Sino-American unity.

This at-scale level of unserious behaviour on the part of the Americans is fundamentally a massive middle finger to the US government, founded not in love for the Chinese state, but hatred of their own. It’s giving “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.

More astute creators understand that the real reason behind the TikTok ban is not fear of China stealing American data. It is fear of Americans themselves. On the Chinese-owned platform, Americans have been able to share ideas at unprecedented rates.

For example, pro-Palestinian content on TikTok was outperforming pro-Israel content by such a long shot that TikTok’s CEO was said to have to meet with concerned executives at the likes of Tinder and Facebook to assure them that TikTok was not pushing anti-Israel content.

The true fear is that Americans are communicating on an app that the US government cannot fully control. They cannot control the means of communication, and therefore they cannot control the people. And that is a far scarier prospect than a foreign adversary.

Snubbing Meta and Musk

Tightly wound up in all of this is also the growing ire toward two mammoth presences in tech: Meta (and therefore founder Mark Zuckerberg), and Elon Musk. With TikTok set to disappear, a logical solution would be for Americans to go over to any of the other massive social media platforms available to them: Facebook, Instagram, X.

On the contrary, many creators are calling for everyone to delete their accounts on these Meta- and Musk-owned platforms, and instead go over to RedNote.

Meta spent $7.6 million on lobbying to get TikTok banned, so TikTok refugees are not about to lend their support to the very cause of their expulsion. Indeed, TikTokers have been calling for boycotts and gleefully reporting Meta’s plummeting stock price.

That aside, the atmospheres on Instagram, Facebook, and X are notorious for being hotbeds of hostility, though of course, TikTok is not without trolls or negativity. The content each user is served is largely dependent on the algorithm’s understanding of them. The side of TikTok I see is a very humorous, good-natured and supportive one. The comments section is truly a place of refuge and community.

In any case, RedNote’s surging popularity among TikTok refugees is also a direct result of Americans looking for an alternative that is associated with neither Meta nor Musk.

New international friendships

An unexpected and undeniably sweet side effect of this American migration to RedNote has been the swell of positive energy and cultural exchange on both sides. They are teaching one another their respective languages, with one Chinese student going viral asking for help with their English homework (Americans got the answers wrong).

With the characteristic speed of today’s digital landscape, companies have scrambled to keep pace: Duolingo released a video teaching viral slang phrases in mandarin Chinese, such as “raw, next question” and “my Shayla”.

It’s been beautiful and a little bittersweet to watch on the sidelines. Growing up in England as a Chinese girl in the 90’s was rough; racism was rife. In my teens, as China became a more prominent global power, and people began taking an interest in learning Chinese, it became a little less uncool to be Chinese. But the interest in China was largely economic (learn Chinese to get rich!) and the image of China as a country economically exploited by the West, or a grim place with a sinister government, persisted.

Now, with thousands of westerners flocking to RedNote, it’s the first time I’ve seen Chinese people becoming truly humanised by the West. They are realising that the Chinese are people – with beating hearts and wicked humour, with hobbies and worries, just like everyone else.

The Chinese response has been nothing but hospitable. They are open and curious and some have even become emotional at this opportunity for connection between two countries who have otherwise been cut off from one another – “you guys broke the wall and come to us [sic],” as one creator tearfully announced. I can’t help but contrast this with how I imagine Americans would respond if one of their apps were suddenly flooded with Chinese people speaking Chinese… I suppose we’ll never know.

There are still undoubtedly big cultural gaps but the Americans seem to be on their best behaviour, and making efforts to be respectful, so for now it’s all fun and games and like one big school exchange.

I am somewhat concerned about what might happen if the Americans start sharing more political content on there… things could get gnarly. There are already murmurs of RedNote separating domestic Chinese users from overseas users. This would be a blow for the Chinese diaspora, for whom RedNote is the only app that they can use both abroad and at home to connect with China. Some are hoping that the mass migration to RedNote will panic the USA enough to cancel the TikTok ban.

We will all be watching with curiosity to see how this plays out in coming weeks.

P.S. I fear that most of my TikTok citations in this piece will disappear after the 19th of January.