There is a quote attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster that feels increasingly pertinent while watching Young, Black and Right-Wing (Channel 4): “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.” We now live in a world of unprecedented misinformation, which puts programmes such as this in a more tricky position. It’s not enough to simply share a plethora of views with detached voyeurism and frame them all as equally valid; a TV documentary cannot hold that it is raining and dry at the same time.
The presenter Zeze Millz, to her credit, does hold some of the most dangerous rhetoric to account. She occasionally fires back with statistics and acknowledges when the points her subjects are making are racist. She also makes the show eminently watchable as a witty and expressive host with an ability to roll her eyes so hard you fear her retinas may detach. But in the slim one-hour run-time, we breeze through her own political beliefs and a variety of approaches to being young, rightwing and black without truly scrutinising any.
