by Andrea Widburg
The venerable BBC—which British television viewers are legally required to fund through the license fee—used to have a certain cachet. Yes, the news always had a delicate communist tint, but it was still straight reporting, and a certain patriotism lingered, like the scent of a faded rose. And, of course, there were those marvelous historical TV dramas that celebrated Britain’s glorious history and literature.
That BBC is dead and gone. The modern BBC isn’t merely left-leaning; it is radicalized, with much of its radicalism centering on race. Before the postwar immigration boom, Britain was overwhelmingly white. Even as late as 1991, 94.1% of the population of England and Wales identified as white. By the 2021 census, that figure had fallen to 81.7%, while only 74.4% identified specifically as White British.
Meanwhile, in the large urban enclaves where the BBC operates, the ratios are even more extreme. In 2021, London was 53.8% white, while Birmingham and Leicester were majority-nonwhite, with whites accounting for 48.6% and 40.9% of their populations, respectively.
No wonder, then, that the BBC has taken its leftism and turned it to race. In the world of the arts, the BBC is busy recasting Britain’s history as a wildly multiracial society, whether in fact or in fiction. In the latter case, 2018’s version of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, a straightforward murder mystery, was rewritten to focus on xenophobia and fascist nationalism, implying that Britain is worse today. These aren’t the only examples of this obsessive race-swapping.
But rewriting the past isn’t enough. For a revolutionary media outlet, it’s also necessary to remind the shrinking number of white Britons that they are racists. The latest evidence of racism? The trend toward natural nails, rather than long, wildly painted and bedazzled nails.
You read that right. The combined labors of Tiffanie Turnbull and Simran Sohal resulted in an article titled How the bare nails trend became a class issue. Over the course of 1,300 words, they carefully explain that, after years—decades, even—of fancy nail stylings, the fashion has shifted:
In recent months, Paloma Buddemeier has watched a stream of people walk into her nail salon with the goal of looking as if they’d never been there at all.
“It’s crazy,” the owner of Wumman Spa in London says.
These customers still get their nails filed, buffed, and trimmed. “You still do the cuticle, you do the soaking and hydrate everything,” says Buddemeier, “but you just put no polish on.”
Driving this, she says, is a viral craze for bare-looking nails.
In recent months, artsy shots of glossy naked nails have been flooding social media and taking over fashion runways and red carpets, which some are viewing as the latest symbol of “quiet luxury”.
Sounds good to me. As someone who has eschewed nail polish for decades, since I hate the feel of it on my nails, I’m actually feeling very fashion-forward. Or could it be that I’ve been reveling all those years in my racial superiority? Apparently, that is sufficiently plausible a proposition for the BBC to devote serious attention to it:
Nail art’s historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures, they say.
“That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities,” beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo tells the BBC.
“They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty.”
The BBC article admits that, sometimes, a lack of nail polish is just that: a way to make life simpler. (Indeed, and pardon me for being crude, but I’ve always wondered about the bathroom habits of the long, bedazzled nail crowd.) So they focus on Angela Scanlon, an Irish TV figure, who finally had it with the effort needed to maintain her nails—although salons have typically managed to turn “natural” nails into a massive, unnatural production.
But then there’s that racism thing. There’s an endless discussion about the class element of long nails. Of course there is. Women who labored in the fields couldn’t have pretty, long nails. But starting with the Victorians, well-groomed short nails became a class symbol, too. The essay reminds us, though, that “it was women of colour who really made manicures an accessible and fashionable form of self-expression, historians say.” Free blacks in a free society make for free-wheeling fingernails.
The essay also helpfully reminds us that Vietnamese immigrants laboring in nail salons made all these fancy manicures inexpensive enough for ordinary women. Yup. Unlimited immigration fuses with racial politics in a dazzling outburst of creative nail design. It’s a microcosm of the best of the West.
And, of course, in leftist world, the personal is always political:
Few would argue there aren’t valid feminist questions for the beauty industry to answer, around unrealistic standards for example, but the largely female-run nail sector also feels empowering for many women.
But hey, if you’re white, whatever you’re thinking right now, it’s probably racist.