Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop & Power: an absorbing exploration of racism in the music industry

“Why do I feel invisible? Why do I feel like the least favoured, the least desired? Is it all in my head?” By the time Leigh-Anne Pinnock, the 29-year-old British singer and one third of the world’s biggest girl group, Little Mix, finds herself confronting these questions in Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop & Power (BBC One/Three), it’s become clear that the answer to that final question is “no”. Here, the only non-white presenting member of the girl band (Jade Thirlwall is also mixed race) set out to unpick the impact that racism (unconscious or otherwise) has had on her decade-long career in pop music.

Pinnock is not the first Little Mixer to tackle a tricky political subject in recent times: in December, Jesy Nelson announced her departure from the band, citing the toll that relentless media exposure and internet trolls had taken on her mental health – something she explored a year earlier in the BBC Three documentary Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out.

The breach – by all accounts amicable – was never openly addressed in the film. The only other Little Mixer to prominently appear was Thirlwall, whose grandfathers were Yemeni and Egyptian, recalled with devastating matter-of-factness being called a “token darkie” and having bleach powder thrown at her in the school toilets – as a viewer, you’re left vaguely wondering why this solo project wasn’t a collaboration between the two friends.

But missed opportunity or not, this is a film about Pinnock, whose Bajan and Jamaican grandfathers married white women, and who is sometimes considered, as one astute fellow black musician suggested, the “token black girl” of Little Mix. Relatively light-skinned as she is, as the single kinky-haired member of a British pop band with a predominantly white fan base, she often felt like the least popular member of the band but couldn’t put her finger on why. The film was as much about Pinnock’s own awakening to racism, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, as her experience of it.

Her memories of a hundred small moments of unconscious discrimination, some of which were caught on camera, made for melancholy viewing. In one clip, a group of three teenage fans are each asked which band member most reminds them of themselves; despite her best efforts, Pinnock’s face falls when she is the only one left unchosen. It may seem trivial but it is not difficult to imagine just how many similar experiences she has had. It’s exactly the urge to dismiss something as nothing, the suspicion that “it’s all in my head”, that makes such insidious, impersonal racism so difficult to combat.

Pinnock can pinpoint the moment that she first acknowledged to herself what was going on: it was during Little Mix’s South America tour in March 2020, when they played their first gig in Sao Paulo. The footage of her staring out in disbelief at a stadium crowd of majority people of colour chanting her name is touching. “I have never felt that love. I’ve never felt so accepted” she says. The murder of George Floyd two months later, and the global wave of Black Lives Matter protests it started, confirmed what she had, by her own account, spent twenty years denying: that she too was a victim of racism.

But it’s not that straightforward. The most unusual theme to emerge from the film, and one that demands greater conversation, is how the shade, not just the colour, of someone’s skin affects their treatment. “Colourism”, or discrimination against individuals with a darker skin tone, often coming from those in the same racial group, is something Pinnock, as a light-skinned black girl, is visibly wrestling with. We all know by now what it means to be a victim of racism or a possessor of white privilege; but what if you’re both?

Later, on a Black Lives Matter march, she meets a group of young black women who demand that she use her privilege and platform as a light-skinned pop star to demand structural changes in the music industry. It is obvious that Pinnock feels on the back-foot – not as bold, not as black, not as educated on anti-racism as these poised young women – but she never acknowledges it; brave as the film is, it would be even more so if she addressed these very natural feelings of inadequacy.

One obvious question left at the end of any project in which an individual grapples with their own experience of a large-scale problem is, what will it achieve beyond the personally cathartic? That question is posed directly by the same group of young black women, in a refreshingly direct exchange when Pinnock guests on their podcast: “I haven't seen much change in legislation, I haven’t seen much change in workplaces; all I’ve really seen realistically is a lot of conversation” observes one.

The final and least satisfying third of the film follows Pinnock’s efforts to respond by getting an executive from her label, Sony, to take a meeting with her about how the company is addressing racism. In this attempt, her relative youth and the fact that she’s a pop star not an activist becomes a problem: it was a bit depressing to watch her feel bad over Sony ignoring her emails; or hearing mid-level marketing executives explain the company’s inclusion and diversity strategies to her (why didn’t she look them up to prepare for the meeting?).

But that very youthfulness and naivety also gives this documentary huge charm: Pinnock is honest, open, unabashed about looking uncertain or admitting her own mistakes. While the coronavirus conditions in which it was made deflate some elements of drama – I wonder whether in an ordinary world Pinnock might just have marched into a Sony office and demanded to say her piece, rather than sending an email – the sense of personal progression evoked gives it reasonable pace. For a girl band that began on the world’s blandest talent show, Little Mix’s newfound politicism makes for absorbing viewing.