How BLINDED BY THE LIGHT Illuminates The Politics Of Race & Class

To be sure, I am probably the target demographic of Gurinder Chadha’s 2019 film Blinded By the Light. Like the film’s protagonist, Javed (Viveik Kalra), I come from a distinctly working class background that left me excluded from much of the culture around me. When he was 32, my father suffered a heart attack working at a steel mill and went to work while suffering from it for a week as he was afraid of losing his job, doing irreparable damage to his heart. As far back as I can remember, I have felt the weight of being from the poor, working classes.

So like Javed, when I first heard the music of Bruce Springsteen, I was swept up in a kind of rapture of emotion. Even as a Clevelander, I was pulled into the exuberant, gritty music of New Jersey’s rock and roll poet and felt much of my own experience in his tales of escaping the confines of the Jersey Shore.

Unlike Javed, however, I am, like Springsteen, a white man. Blinded By the Light’s inspirational story (inspired by the true story of writer Sarfraz Manzoor) is one of a young English citizen of Pakistani heritage finding refuge from both his class position and the bitter racism he encounters in Margaret Thatcher’s England. It is this aspect of the film that I want to focus on here.

Blinded By the Light was generally well-received by critics who appreciated its enthusiastic, youthful embrace of the film musical genre as well as its commentary on race relations in the post-Brexit era. The film’s transatlantic cultural themes also situate it as a post-Trump film as well, however, and I think that Chadha’s work offers American viewers a valuable political lesson about the intersection of class struggle and racism.

Race and Class in Contemporary Politics

In the immediate wake of the 2016 U.S. election and continuing right up to the present Democratic primary debates, the question of whether Democrats should focus on identity issues or the economic concerns of the “white working class” has dominated the musings of the sober, serious punditry.

The question is a ridiculous one.

Asad Haider’s book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, is but one example of a political analysis that demonstrates the folly of thinking about race issues and working class issues as if they are utterly distinct.

Looking at historical political movements by people of color, Hader shows how the fight for minority rights has never been a separate endeavor from the fight against class oppression. He emphasizes that the Combahee River Collective introduced the term “Identity Politics” in 1977 and that in their conception of the term, it accounted for the fact that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” In other words, the group of black, lesbian militants understood that systems of racial oppression and those of economic domination are inseparable.

Somehow, in our current political moment, our political machines have forgotten this definition of identity politics and we have disastrously set our politics up in such a way that we have to choose between “race issues” and “class issues.”

Politics and Javed’s Musical Initiation

One of Blinded By the Light’s great accomplishments is how its politics capture the original intent of the term “Identity Politics.” From the beginning, Javed’s Pakistani world intersects with the larger working classes of his Jersey-like Luton.

Even before his discovery of Springsteen’s music, Javed’s world offers him glimpses of solidarity between Pakistanis and white English people in the economically depressed world of Luton. His childhood friend Matt, his girlfriend Eliza, his English teacher, and his elderly neighbor Mr. Evans  (who fought Nazis and is embittered by their emergence in England) each provide Javed points of acceptance into the larger English culture. It is Javed’s initiation into the music of Bruce Springsteen, however, where the film boldly puts the connections between race and class on display.

Javed’s Sikh friend Roops gives him a couple of tapes to listen to, which Javed dismissively accepts. His first listening experience, which will ultimately be his entry into a confident identity that reconciles his race and class position and give him a sense of belonging,  occurs at the climax of a remarkable sequence in which both race and class come together to make Springsteen’s music ring true for him.

First, Javed is spat on by a racist of the political far-right who was scrawling a racial slur on a wall. Alone and threatened by the youth’s fascist aggression, he scurries away to the safety of his friend’s apartment. This social and political exclusion is later reinforced by his father, who forbids him to attend a party at Matt’s house. His father tells him that, as a Pakistani, the British will never accept him.

This scene is followed by an image of the family’s poverty. In the morning, the family car will not start and Javed, his sisters, and their mother must all push it in humiliating full view of his neighbors, putting their low class position (and their subsequent lack of options) on heartbreaking display.

Next, Javed and his father visit a more well-heeled Pakistani friend that has moved into a more affluent neighborhood. Here both race and class come into play in the same scene. First, the wealthy Pakistani jokes that when they first moved to Luton, it was a nice place to live, but now there are “too many Pakistanis.” Implied in this joke is that the problem with these immigrants is not their race, but their low class position, which is what drove him and his wealthier family to the richer suburbs. Yet even their wealth does not protect them from the racism of rising fascism in Thatcher’s England. The scene ends tragically with several white children urinating into the family’s house through the mail slot in the door.

After a short scene at school in which Javed’s teacher encourages him in his writing, we come to the final, pivotal scene in this sequence. Javed’s father is laid off from the Vauxhall motor plant in Luton and the family faces abject ruin, like the characters in any number of Springsteen’s songs.

These four scenes work together to push Javed into a desperately low position, which sets the stage for his rapturous first experience with Springsteen’s music. Race and class are not separate problems for Javed and the Boss’s working-class poetry profoundly speaks to him, even in its inherent whiteness. Luton might well have been in New Jersey, and Thatcher’s economics have crushed the British working classes in much the same way that Reagan’s did in Bruce’s America.

Javed’s musical inspiration is built on a recognition that racism and class struggle are not different, but each part of a larger system of oppression. The music articulates this for him.

Solidarity and Difference

Yes, Blinded By the Light brilliantly shows how race and class are inescapably connected. But the film is also too smart to ignore how race affects class. Not all working class people experience the world the same way, and the National Front does not threaten the lives of poor white people in this film.

While always inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s music, down to his flannel-heavy style of dress, Javed comes to an understanding that his experience as a Pakistani working class person is ultimately distinct. For instance, in one particularly moving scene, he accompanies his younger sister to a Pakistani dance club and momentarily puts the Boss on pause to revel in the music of his own ethnicity.

He also reconciles with his father much earlier than a Springsteen character would be expected to, and this seems to come from a place of respect for his cultural heritage. In the film’s climax, Javed delivers a speech to his school with his estranged family watching. In it, he makes clear how the music of New Jersey’s working class hero, which he calls “the best of human values” has its limits in defining Javed’s Pakistani-British values. He movingly finds himself unwilling to pursue a romantic life of pure, individual freedom, opting instead to use his freedom to build a bridge between himself and his rich cultural and familial heritage.

Conclusion

I have an LP of Springsteen’s masterpiece Darkness on the Edge of Town on the wall of my office. I’ve often said that someone could probably figure out everything worth knowing about me by listening to it a few times. So Blinded By the Light is probably going to be a precious film for me for the rest of my life and I will undoubtedly force my children to watch it with me many times as I weep my way through it in the years to come.

I also hope, however, that my kids will see how this film understands something about our politics that most people miss. We make a terrible mistake to think that the problems of white working class are unrelated to those of people of color. Of course there are differences in those experiences, and as we’ve seen, the film smartly knows where to make those distinctions.

Javed understands that there are limits to how Springsteen can represent the totality of his experience. His moving speech that reconciles him with his father is evidence of that.

But still, the film shows us how the issues of the poor and working classes are intimately related to issues of racial inequality. Our political elites present us with a cynical false choice when they suggest we must choose between the two. Solidarity among the working classes means solidarity across racial lines.

Blinded by the Light was originally released on August 9th, 2019.