Don’t let the title fool you – I’m not suggesting that racists should get more imaginative with their bigotry. The point is racism doesn’t need creativity to survive. It runs on autopilot. It’s a structural power that reproduces itself through routine and familiarity.
Racism isn’t unimaginative by accident, it’s unimaginative by design. From colonial pseudoscience used to categorise and stratify the human population, to today’s moral panic over immigration and maintaining “British values”, the plotline hasn’t changed. The same recycled logics keep being repackaged as something new.
Take immigration rhetoric, for example. In Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, he warned that Britain would be “heaping up its own funeral pyre” if Commonwealth immigration continued, painting Black and Brown migrants as a threat to the British cultural identity.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and the language has shifted, but the script has remained the same. Today, you hear about “swarms” of people in “small boats”, “illegal immigrants” taking our jobs, or asylum seekers to be shipped to Rwanda – like a commodity – in the name of “protecting our borders”. The cast and stage shifts, but the story doesn’t: Britain is under threat, outsiders = dangerous, and racism is a normal part of life.
Racism thus plagiarises itself; power copying its own homework, century after century.
This repetition seen across history desensitises us to the reality of racism; it stops being shocking and starts feeling inevitable. Prejudice turns into “common sense”, discriminatory policy is “just being realistic”, and violence is written off as “unfortunate but expected”. I’m not outside of this either. I’ve scrolled past headline after headline detailing the unjust killing of an unarmed Black person or the ongoing occupation of Palestine, sometimes without a double take.
Of course, individuals must take responsibility for what we ignore, but the sensationalist tabloids and short-form content built for outrage and virality make it so easy to look away in frustration. They recycle the same old rhetoric with little consequence, callously throwing around buzzwords until they feel natural, even boring. Repetition and drama are rewarded over reflection or context.
You can see it in the way stories are framed. The language itself strips events of their context and history, so nothing looks like it’s part of a pattern. That is exactly how monotony protects power: if everything is presented as a series of isolated mishaps rather than a script, we are invited to feel sad for a moment and then we move on – especially with the 24-hour news cycle. This way, nothing needs to change.
Journalists may simply be relaying politicians’ words in the name of balance and neutrality. But by repeating racist framings or far-right talking points without challenging or contextualising them, the coverage stops just informing the public and starts giving those narratives legitimacy.
So how do we go about disrupting this script?
It’s easy to feel that nothing can be done when the same narratives are played over and over again, especially when cynicism is treated as a sign of political maturity. But that cynicism is written into the script just as intentionally as monotony. If you are convinced nothing will change, you’re less likely to do something about it. Declaring everything hopeless can feel honest but it quietly lets monotony keep doing its work. Disrupting the script starts by rejecting resignation itself – believing change is possible, even when the narrative says it isn’t
Thus, we must contrast the unoriginality of racism with the effort it takes to imagine something different – something actually new. Genuine imagination is dangerous to power because it interrupts the script, refuses the “common sense” explanation, and insists that things could be different. And they need to be different.
Imagination may sound abstract, but it has everyday applications. In media, imagination could mean prioritising the stories of real people, encouraging a human-centred understanding of important issues that land powerfully even in short-form content. It could also look like investing in quality investigative journalism that connects individual suffering to wider structures, and supporting outlets that resist sensationalism in favour of depth and context.
Outside media, imagination could mean rejecting the far-right’s bigoted scripts. They often frame political debates as a simple binary – either adopt their position completely, or be dismissed as a sensitive liberal. However, true creativity steps outside of this trap entirely, designing solutions that neither excuse prejudice nor ignore real problems. Imagination, at heart, is active refusal of passive acceptance.
If you think I am being disgustingly optimistic, it is because I am. Optimism is completely necessary to the change. It means going off script. It asks us to be creative enough to see beyond the tired templates power continues to feed us – this is where anti-racism really begins.
