A horror film about a ghost becomes an argument about who gets to haunt history. Compact Magazine uses Bernard Rose's 1992 Candyman — and its distance from Clive Barker's original short story — as the entry point for a sharper question: when race becomes the master framework for understanding suffering, whose suffering disappears?
The Translation That Changed Everything
Barker's 1985 short story "The Forbidden" is set not in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects but in a post-industrial council estate in Merseyside. The people who inhabit it are, as the piece describes, "poor white folk: single mothers, old women, pensioned men who are no longer able to defend themselves." The monster who haunts them is not the ghost of a lynched slave but something more diffuse and harder to name — the accumulated weight of managed decline, industrial abandonment, and the slow erosion of any narrative that might explain their condition.
When Rose relocated the story to Chicago's South Side, he didn't simply change the postcode. He changed the diagnosis. The film's Candyman is the product of racial terror — a son of a slave lynched for loving across the color line, his wound the wound of American slavery still festering beneath the projects. It is a powerful and legitimate horror. But the piece argues that something was lost in the translation, something that Barker's original work had taken seriously: "Here the horror is not racism, but abandonment."
This is the analytical hinge on which the entire essay turns. The author — a sociologist at the University of Liverpool, writing in the first person with the authority of someone who left a place like Spector Street in 1984 — is not disputing that racial terror is real or that Candyman's American incarnation is unwarranted. The argument is more specific and more uncomfortable: that when racial frameworks become the only available language for injustice, they crowd out other histories that are no less real.
Spector Street and the Grammar of Suffering
Barker named his fictional estate Spector Street deliberately, and the piece treats the name as a text worth reading. The people who live there are ghosts not in the supernatural sense but in a sociological one — unmoored from community, severed from the labor and mutual recognition that once gave their ancestors a collective identity. As the piece puts it: "They learned to read their failure as personal and individual."
This is among the most precise formulations in the essay. What post-industrial Britain produced, the argument runs, was not simply poverty but a specific kind of poverty — one that arrived pre-interpreted, stripped of structural explanation, delivered to its inhabitants as a verdict on their own character. The unions had organized around skilled and dignified labor; they had little to offer those for whom work had simply ceased to exist. The welfare state provided subsistence but not meaning. And the cultural institutions that might have narrated this experience instead turned their attention elsewhere.
The piece draws a mordant contrast: "Sociology departments like mine were flourishing while the objects of study — far removed from the lives of most academics who taught there — rotted nearby." There is self-implication in this observation, and it lends the essay an honesty that pure polemic would lack. The author is not simply pointing fingers at the credentialed class from a safe distance; she is naming herself as a participant in the very institutions she critiques.
The Semiotics of Renaming
The essay's most concrete example arrives in the story of Gladstone Hall at the University of Liverpool, renamed Dorothy Kuya Hall in 2021 following student complaints about the Gladstone family's connections to slavery. The piece is careful not to dismiss the concerns that drove the renaming; it acknowledges that "slavery played a role in Liverpool's wealth, and that fact, and the suffering it entailed, should be remembered." What it challenges is the epistemology embedded in the process — the way a "democratic" consultation was limited in advance to names that spoke "explicitly to racial equality," foreclosing other possibilities before discussion began.
For the author, William Gladstone was not primarily a symbol of plantation wealth but a figure of "restless moral energy," committed to equality before the law and opposed to aristocratic privilege — the kind of historical figure that a working-class girl with aspirations could claim as her own. The renaming did not simply swap one name for another. It enacted a judgment about whose relationship to history counts, whose identification with past figures is legitimate, whose stories are allowed to be told.
Critics might note that this argument cuts both ways: the students who objected to Gladstone Hall had their own legitimate claims on institutional space, their own reasons for finding the name alienating. A building's name is not neutral, and the university's choice to rename it reflects a real moral reckoning, however imperfectly managed. The essay's insistence that working-class white Liverpudlians were silenced by this process does not fully reckon with the question of who was being heard before it happened.
The Charity Representative's Lecture
One of the essay's most viscerally rendered scenes takes place at a public discussion event on aging inequalities, organized at the site of Liverpool's first school for girls. A charity representative — "polished, cosmopolitan, wearing Doc Martens, an expensive haircut and statement jewellery" — delivers an opening address that pivots quickly into a lecture about the building's origins in the profits of transatlantic slavery. The author scans the faces of the older people in the room: "huddled in thin anoraks, their shopping bags against their knees."
The detail is precise and pointed. These are not the city's wealthy beneficiaries of historical trade routes; they are its current poor, invited to hear their own stories and instead asked to sit quietly in the dock of history. The invocation of "white privilege" as something possessed by pensioners with bus passes and Primark coats is, the piece argues, not just theoretically confused but practically harmful — it makes it harder, not easier, to see who is actually suffering in the present tense.
This is where the essay's argument is both strongest and most vulnerable. The strongest version: moral frameworks have material consequences, and a framework that classifies the city's poorest residents as privileged oppressors will shape policy, institutional attention, and cultural resources in ways that leave those residents worse off. The most vulnerable version: the essay risks implying that attention to racial injustice is intrinsically at the expense of attention to class — a zero-sum framing that the historical record does not always support, and that some critics will identify as a rhetorical move with its own political valences.
Monocausal History and Its Costs
The piece broadens its critique to the International Slavery Museum on Liverpool's Albert Dock, opened in 2008 to commemorate the bicentenary of Britain's abolition of Atlantic chattel slavery. The museum, the essay argues, presents its subject with so little broader context — no other forms of slavery, Britain's abolition role downplayed — that the quarter-million schoolchildren who have visited it are "likely to have taken home the message that no other slavery existed in the world."
Similarly, a university anti-colonial working group's account of eugenics research in the 1920s highlighted work on mixed-race children while omitting, the piece notes, that the same research was "also deeply concerned with purported links between white poverty and mental deficiency." The poor, the marginal, the vulnerable of Liverpool disappear from the account — not through malice but through the logic of a framework that has already decided which suffering is legible.
The essay's rhetorical climax is a description of four moves by which race becomes installed "at the top of the hierarchy of suffering": trade becomes exploitation; exploitation becomes racial exploitation; racial exploitation is described in terms of black suffering; black suffering becomes "the sole motor of Liverpool's growth." Each step is arguable. The cumulative effect, the piece contends, is a history that cannot see what it cannot name.
"They learned to read their failure as personal and individual."
This sentence sits near the heart of the essay's project. The transformation of structural abandonment into individual shame is not a natural process — it is taught, Compact Magazine argues, and it is taught by the same post-industrial forces that stripped communities of work, role, and mutual recognition. When institutions then adopt a moral language that further erases those communities from the ledger of legitimate suffering, the lesson is reinforced. Candyman's invitation — "Don't fight it... Resistance is too hard" — becomes the ambient message of the cultural and academic apparatus itself.
A fair counterpoint: the essay does not fully engage with the question of whether the working-class white communities it describes have been silenced in the ways it claims, or whether they have instead been served by political movements, media coverage, and institutional attention that communities of color have historically lacked. The claim that monocausal racial frameworks dominate British institutions is a contestable empirical claim, not a self-evident one — and the piece makes the argument primarily through illustrative examples rather than systematic evidence.
Bottom Line
Compact Magazine has produced a genuinely difficult essay — one that uses film criticism as a vehicle for making an argument about the politics of historical memory and institutional attention that cannot be easily dismissed or easily accepted. Its central claim, that frameworks which center race as the master category of suffering can render class-based suffering invisible and self-blaming, deserves serious engagement rather than reflexive rejection. The essay is most persuasive when it is most personal, and most vulnerable when it implies that attention is a fixed resource — that naming one injustice necessarily erases another. Whatever one makes of its conclusions, it asks a question that serious institutions ought to be able to answer: whose stories count, and who decides?