CULTURE

James Bond and the Politics of Whiteness

Idris Elba was “too street” to play Bond, they said — too far from how he was written. But Bond has no original: remade every era, his racist novels quietly edited, his canon now authored by a video game. In a character who could be anyone, the one thing held sacred is that he stays white. That…

BY fake-goya

18 June 2026 · 6 min read

When Idris Elba’s name came up for James Bond, the novelist Anthony Horowitz called him “too street.” He apologised — “a poor choice of word” — but the apology missed the point. The objection was never about manners. It was a belief: that Bond is a fixed thing, and a Black man would break him. The question to ask is what about James Bond is actually fixed.

“Probably a bit too ‘street’ for Bond. Is it a question of being suave? Yeah.” — Anthony Horowitz, Daily Mail

Nothing about Bond has ever held still — he’s remade with every face that plays him. Connery, the one everyone calls definitive, was a Scottish milkman drilled into a “mid-Atlantic” voice that exists nowhere on earth, charming and casually brutal with women in a way that has aged from suave into something close to ugly. Then Moore: all raised eyebrow and innuendo, a camp that now plays as pure cringe. Dalton dragged him somewhere colder and meaner, the gloss stripped off; Brosnan sanded that back into a knowing, post-Cold-War smoothness, winking at his own absurdity. And then Craig threw the whole thing out — a broken man, violent and haunted and mortal, and almost by accident the truest Bond of all: a battered agent of a small island reckoning with how little power it had left. There’s an irony in it. The most acclaimed Bond is the one who stopped being a fantasy of British greatness and became an elegy for it — the broken man standing in for the diminished country, doing on screen the reckoning the country itself never quite has.

And it runs deeper than the films. The source itself gets edited: in 2023 Ian Fleming Publications went back through the novels and cut the N-word from Live and Let Die — Fleming had authorised similar changes for the American editions in his own lifetime — and nobody mourned the original. So the question isn’t really about Bond. It’s what we owe any character we inherit: the precise words he was written in, or the better version we could choose? Fiction has faced that question before — and answered it.

Take Dickens. When he wrote Oliver Twist he called Fagin “the Jew” more than two hundred and fifty times — a caricature so grotesque it fixed the antisemitic type for a century. Years later a Jewish woman, Eliza Davis, wrote to him and asked how he could have done it. Dickens didn’t bristle and defend the work. He went back through the novel, cut a hundred and eighty of those references, softened Fagin in the later editions, and wrote a sympathetic Jewish character into his next book. The most English of novelists revised his own canon because a reader told him it was doing harm. No one today demands the original back in the name of fidelity to Dickens. The lesson is older than Bond: the canon was never sacred. It gets corrected, and it evolves.

So who is actually resisting? Not, it turns out, the people who own Bond. Barbara Broccoli and EON — the family that has run the franchise for sixty years — gave the 007 codename to a Black woman, Lashana Lynch, in No Time to Die, and confirmed they’d had Elba in genuine contention. The custodians opened the door themselves. The resistance came from outside it: from Horowitz, from Roger Moore foreshadowing the same objection years before, from the durable chorus that a Black Bond just “wouldn’t be realistic” — a verdict Elba would eventually echo about himself. When the people who can say yes have already said yes, and the “no” comes from the commentary box, the objection was never about the character.

Bond is that fantasy in a dinner jacket — the suave imperial agent standing in for the nation, an emblem of a power Britain no longer holds. Which is where the films’ irony meets something the country can’t face. In Natives, Akala describes being taught Hume and Locke at one of the best universities in the world, and never once being told about the scientific racism those same Enlightenment names helped construct — the curriculum itself quietly edited, the flattering half kept, the rest dropped. Afua Hirsch names the same thing as amnesia: an empire never mourned, never reckoned with, a Britishness whose real definition is who it excludes. Craig’s broken agent grieved the lost empire on screen; the nation that built him never has. He is the reckoning Britain keeps refusing to have with itself.

And Reni Eddo-Lodge names the mechanism beneath all of it. Structural racism is covert, she writes — “difficult to hold to account… it slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy” — and under it whiteness sits as the unspoken default, the norm so total it never has to announce itself (search “most beautiful women,” she notes, and they come back white). Which is the work a single adjective was doing. Horowitz didn’t say Elba was too Black for Bond. He said “too street.” The code doesn’t say the word out loud anymore; it picks one that does the same job and keeps its hands clean.

“The covert nature of structural racism is difficult to hold to account. It slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy. You can’t spot it as easily as a St George’s flag and a bare belly at an English Defence League march. It’s much more respectable than that.”— Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

There’s a deeper reason the whole “as he was written” argument falls apart: there was never an original to write from. Connery was manufactured, not discovered; each film is assembled out of the ones before it; the copy came first, and behind it there is nothing. Baudrillard had a name for this — a simulacrum — and a sequence Bond walks step by step. An image starts by reflecting something real. Then it distorts that thing. Then it hides the fact that the real thing has gone — pretending there’s still something underneath when there isn’t. And finally it cuts the cord entirely: a copy of nothing, pointing only at other copies. Bond has gone the whole way. Ask what the real Bond is beneath the actors and you’re looking for a basement under a building that was always just façades.

“it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”— Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra And Simulation (ingles)

Then it flipped. For decades the Bond games were the obvious copies — tie-ins trailing the films. But there’s no film Bond now: the last one ended, no successor cast yet. So 007: First Light, a video game, is the current canonical Bond — it manufactures a young-Bond origin for a character who never had a fixed one, and it’s the blueprint the next film will follow. The copy has become the source; the derivative is now the original. The games were always a simulation of the films — and the films were already copies of nothing. The canonical Bond is now a simulation of a simulation, with no real Bond anywhere underneath. If even that can move, nothing about Bond was ever fixed.

A character with no original to honour, remade in every era, his novels quietly corrected, his canon now written by a video game — Bond could be anyone at all. Everything about him moves except one thing: he stays white. Set against all that motion, the single fixed point gives itself away. It isn’t faithfulness to the character. It’s a door held shut against the colour of the man on the other side.

“Bond was written how he was written for a reason.” — Idris Elba

I kinda feel sorry for Idris. He went on to say a Black Bond wouldn’t be realistic, that audiences wouldn’t accept it — but I don’t read that as conviction so much as surrender. I don’t think he reasoned his way there. I think he was worn down to it, year after year, by a chorus that treated the colour of his face as the one fixed thing in a character with nothing fixed about him. The door was open; the owners were willing. So they didn’t keep the part from him, exactly. I think they got him to give it up himself.

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