The Myth of Colorblindness

Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema

Sarah E. Turner, Sarah Nilsen, Sarah E. Turner, Sarah Nilsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030174477
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores representations of race and ethnicity in contemporary cinema and the ways in which these depictions all too often promulgate an important racial ideology: the myth of colorblindness. Colorblindness is a discursive framework employed by mainstream, neoliberal media to celebrate a multicultural society while simultaneously disregarding its systemic and institutionalized racism. This collection is unique in its examination of such films as Ex Machina, The Lone Ranger, The Blind Side, Zootopia, The Fast and the Furious franchise, and Dope, which celebrate the myth of colorblindness, yet perpetuate and entrench the racism and racial inequities that persist in contemporary society. While the #OscarsSoWhite movement has been essential to bringing about structural changes to media industries and offers the opportunity for a wide diversity of voices to alter and transform the dominant, colorblind narratives continue to proliferate. As this book demonstrates, Hollywood still has a long way to go.

© The Author(s) 2019

S. E. Turner, S. Nilsen (eds.)The Myth of Colorblindnesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sarah E. Turner¹ and Sarah Nilsen²

(1)

Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

(2)

Film and Television Studies, Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Sarah E. Turner (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

Sarah Nilsen

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The morning after the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony, the headlines in The New Yorker and The New York Times read “Oscars 2019: A Spike Lee Win Notwithstanding, Hollywood’s Dinosaurs Prevailed” and “In ‘Green Book’ Victory, Oscar Critics See an Old Hollywood Tale,” respectively. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody described the ceremony as “the consolation-prize edition of the Oscars, with the diverse set of winners suggesting that the Academy welcomes the diversity of the industry, but without changing its ethos, its self-image, or its world view in any meaningful way” (p. 1). And, despite his film BlacKkKlansman winning the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay, Spike Lee likened the moment when Green Book won the coveted Best Picture award to being “courtside at the Garden, and the ref mak[ing] a bad call” (Barnes). Lee and others objected to the choice of yet another racial reconciliation film that Brody describes as a “repellently obtuse film of a white savior whose triumphant overcoming of his own racism lends its actual main character, a black musician, his cultural authenticity” (p. 2). And yet, Green Book’s selection aptly illustrates the systemic issues within Hollywood that led to the creation of the #OscarsSoWhite movement.

#OscarsSoWhite reflects Hollywood’s ongoing tendency to produce films starring white actors and to reward the same ¹ as evidenced by the five nominations for the “racial reconciliation fantasy” film Green Book (2018). New York Times film critic Wesley Morris sees the accolades for Green Book as basically 1990 all over again, wherein Driving Miss Daisy (1989) won four Oscars including best picture and best actress (for Jessica Tandy). As Morris reminds us, “any time a white person comes anywhere close to the rescue of a black person, the academy is primed to say, ‘Good for you!’” Racial reconciliation films speak to the desire for a return to a time when racism was overt and a product of Jim Crow laws. These idealized recreations of a mythical past displace current social anxieties about the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of a violent white nationalist movement.

On January 22, 2019, when the nominees for 2019 Academy Awards were announced, Spike Lee received six nominations for his film BlacKkKlansman, including best picture and best director, the first time he has ever been nominated for those awards. Lee would later explain that his nomination for Best Director was only possible because of the #OscarsSoWhite movement. When asked why, even after receiving an honorary Oscar in 2016, and considering his vast record of groundbreaking films, he has never received a nomination for the best director before, Lee responded that “[t]his would not have happened if there was not the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. What that campaign did, it made the Academy understand that they had to diversify their membership… If you don’t have diversity in the voting, it’s not going to be reflected in the nominations” (Sinha-Roy). The #OscarsSoWhite movement was launched with a single tweet by the lawyer and activist, April Reign, in 2015 after no nonwhite actors were nominated in any of the acting categories for that year. Though Reign’s initial advocacy was focused on the lack of diversity in the nominations for acting, it would eventually address all aspects of the Academy. The Academy of Motion Arts and Pictures, which oversees the Oscars, is divided into 17 branches and its members are engaged in all aspects of the filmmaking process, including directing, producing, and writing. Because of the outcry generated by Reign’s activism, the Academy “worked to diversify its membership ranks by issuing invitations to more women, people of color and international filmmakers” (Gardner). In 2015, they invited 322 new members and that number increased to 928 in 2018. According to the Hollywood Reporter, if all the invitations were accepted, “the overall percentage of women in the Academy would be 31 percent and the people of color would be 16 percent” (ibid.) (our emphasis).

Reign’s success in drawing public attention to the dearth of nonwhite representation in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy’s subsequent move for inclusion in its membership were crucial steps toward re-fashioning an industry with a long and extensive history of systematically excluding minority groups. #OscarsSoWhite, by forcing the industry to diversify all aspects of its business, has opened up the opportunity for new and alternative narratives to appear that will challenge the dominant tropes that have permeated the US film industry. As many scholars have noted, the media plays a powerful and important role in social learning and, in particular, our understanding of difference and diversity in our society. The legal scholar, Ian Haney Lopez, has argued,

We begin to learn about race as children, yet even as adults we continue to learn about race through a constant bombardment of messages, images, and storylines from myriad sources. In a society like ours, no one can escape a racial education that often occurs by osmosis, gradually filling one’s head with racial understandings of the social world. (182)

Scholars of media, in attempting to make sense of how ideas of diversity function in our society, must first examine the cultural ideas and beliefs that are prevalent in people’s social worlds. “These socially, culturally, and historically constituted ideas and beliefs, or cultural models, get inscribed in institutions and practices, and daily experiences such that they organize and coordinate individual understandings and psychological processes and behavior” (Plaut, p. 82). Hollywood films—that is, the six major studios that produce the majority of big blockbuster films for global distribution—present cultural ideas and beliefs that may include “collective representations about a social group, or even ideas about what diversity is and how to interpret and approach difference. These ideas are then used to construe people’s actions, make decisions, or justify one’s actions in racially diverse situations” (ibid.). The essays in this collection document the ways in which the media reproduces social ideas and beliefs about race in material representations that are “produced and embedded in public or shared setting” and which reinforce the “race-relevant cultural and structural realities in people’s minds” (Plaut, p. 84).

With the 2008 election of Barack Obama, our first African-American president, many Americans had hoped that his two terms would positively change race relations in this country. This window of opportunity provided a transformative cultural moment that many deemed post-racial. Yet negative stereotypes of African-Americans and other groups have persisted, and deep political as well as personal polarization over the appropriate social policy responses to racial inequality has revealed an ongoing legacy of cultural anxiety and division. Social scientists have argued that the dominant racial ideology of our time can be understood within a colorblind racial framework: a contemporary set of beliefs that posit that racism is a thing of the past and that race and racism do not and should not play an important role in current social and economic realities.

Colorblind racism became a discursive framework that was employed by much of mainstream, neoliberal media to celebrate an image of a multicultural society while simultaneously disregarding the systemic and institutionalized racism impacting minority communities. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and media studies scholars defined and described the manner in which colorblind racism functioned within minoritized groups while understating the widespread circulation of a multiplicity of white identities that have been galvanized by the myth of the post-racial moment. Colorblindness is one of the most powerful racial-diversity ideologies that currently pervades the US public imagination (Plaut, p. 88) and has directly impacted social relations and institutional life in the United States. Sociologists have identified the central beliefs of colorblind racism this way:

(1) most people do not even notice race anymore; (2) racial parity has for the most part been achieved; (3) any persistent patterns of racial inequality are the results of individual and/or group-level shortcomings rather than structural ones; (4) most people do not care about racial difference; and (5) therefore, there is no need for institutional remedies (such as affirmative action) to redress persistent racialized outcomes. (Forman and Lewis)

Colorblind racism speaks to that same desire—that ideal that claims race doesn’t matter—that, ultimately, we are all the same. There is a level of comfort in the act of imagining an America where race and color do not play an active role in the lives of anyone—despite almost daily evidence to the contrary.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump exposed the racist discourse that is central to the perpetuation of colorblind racism in contemporary America. MSNBC Reporter Joy-Ann Reid argues that the “seeds of Trump’s victory were sown the moment Obama won”—a prescient insight that understood the dangers represented by Obama’s victory as well as the then likelihood, now reality, of a racial and racist backlash. As Reid explains, “economic anxiety didn’t elect Trump. The desire of millions of Americans, from the farms to the suburbs, to see Mexican immigrants deported, a wall erected across the U.S. southern border and Muslims banned from entering this country did.”

Darnell Hunt’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report offers important insights regarding the changes (or lack thereof) taking place in Hollywood on both sides of the camera. This is the fifth such study, and it is unrivaled as a comprehensive study of the film and television industries. The report begins this year with the reminder that minorities or minoritized groups comprise nearly forty percent (38.7) of the US population. That figure is important when seen in connection with the fact that minorities “accounted for the majority of ticket sales for five of the top ten films ranked by the global box office” (4). ² However, only 1.4 out of 10 lead actors in film are people of color. While this number is an increase from the 10.5% of people of color in lead roles as denoted in the 2011 study, Hunt points out that people of color would have to triple their 2016 numbers just to reach a proportionate representation. Moreover, despite comprising only 61.3% of the population, whites “claimed” 78.1% of film roles. Black film representation is close to its demographic percentage at 12.5% of roles and 13.3% of the population. However, as Hunt points out, “all other minority groups were significantly underrepresented [at] 2.7 percent for Latinas/os, 3.1 percent for Asians, 3 percent for mixed or multi-racial, and 0.5 percent for N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Colorblindness
• Part II. Colorblind Racism in Hollywood Films
• Part III. Intersections Between Race, Ethnicity, and Gender and Colorblind Racism in Hollywood
• Back Matter