There is a paradox in talking about the future of race and the post-colonial in film. Speaking about race and ethnicity is so often paired with the historical grievances of the past, the same goes for the discussion of the post-colonial. The “post” will always be there to qualify the time following the retreat of colonial powers and the actualization of governments and societies run by the formerly colonized, though the forces of previous occupiers can still be felt.
Because of the ever-present nature of history in relation to race, ethnicity, and the post-colonial, the present often feels like its stuck in the past. We would like to imagine a future in which people’s differences are regarded in a more nuanced fashion: not totally bad or good, or right or wrong for that matter, but rather acknowledged and celebrated. On that note, we would like to ask the question where does the future of race, ethnicity, and the post-colonial lie in the context of television and film. Are these two mediums merely barometers of contemporary society or can they can they influence society to see race, ethnicity, and the post-colonial in a new light?
Past, Present, and Future: Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary American Cinema
By: Ayana Aaron
While the notion of a post-racial America has been largely debunked as of late, many believe that we are currently in an era where the distinctions between various racial groups/ethnicities and former oppressors/ the formerly oppressed are being blurred. But are they really?
We are coming at this blog post from the context of cinema and media, the representation of people, fictional or otherwise, to the broader world on screens big and small. The world might be changing its views towards race and ethnicity, but is cinema?
Some of the biggest films of the past several years have told the stories of blacks in American culture. I include on this list films like Django Unchained (2012), The Help (2011), The Butler (2013), and 12 Years a Slave (2013), all movies that have been favored by the critics, and all movies that have either won awards or are slighted to do so. What do these movies all have in common, besides being good? They are about the oppression and subjugation of black people in one form or another, whether it be during slavery or the civil right’s movement.
This is not a blog post calling for black people to abstain from acting in films that show us as we historically were, and arguably still are to some extent, oppressed by structural racism and prejudice, but rather a blog post calling for the making, the financing, and the support of films that show black people prospering, as we often do, or living lives affected by things other than racism and prejudice.
Films like those mentioned above are important. Through visual means, they bring to light a conscious of America’s dark past, a past that is not often talked about. It can be argued that America, and western society as a whole, cannot move forward until it comes to grips with its past, and that movies like 12 Years a Slave help our society do just that. But I would argue that one way to hopefully to overcome racism and prejudice, is to start seeing black people and other people of color as not just subjects of oppression as result of their race. Race and ethnicity are an important part of human identity that should not be ignored or forgotten, but at the same time they shouldn’t be the only part of a person’s identity to be acknowledged.
In part, the films that I am advocating have already been made in a period regarded as the “Golden Age of Black Cinema”, when filmmakers like Spike Lee released films that told nuanced stories of black lives. These films are starting to be made again, and while they might not be the highest in artistic quality, films like Act Like a Lady, Think Like A Man (2012) (which I have some qualms about from a feminist standpoint) and Best Man’s Holiday (2013) showcase black people as just that, regular people with regular problems. * Both films were a surprise hit in the box office. There is this notion that they are “black films” made for the entertainment of black people, because the larger, and whiter, American public can’t relate to them. I highly doubt that many can relate to the violence of Django Unchained, but that didn’t stop people from flocking to see it. It seems, in terms of films that portray the lives of black people and also have the ability to win awards and therefore gain some cultural capital, that a form of “spectaclized” oppression is preferred.
The films or television shows that I hope will be made in the future don’t have to be devoid of pain or sadness. These emotions come with the territory of life, and shouldn’t be erased to make things more “pleasant.” But wouldn’t it be nice if black people, and all people of color for that matter, were portrayed on the silver screen not solely in the context of a painful past, but in regards of more hopeful future as well?
* I would like to acknowledge that films like Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man and Best Man Holiday portray the lives of middle and upper-middle class black people. I don’t believe that films should just show the experience of middle-class blacks. As I have said before there are an array of black experiences, and differences in socio-economic status is a contributing to that diversity. Films like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) are a nuanced portrayal of black life in cities that should also be highly esteemed in society.
Diverse Peoples: Evolving Racial Narratives in Television
by Aron Brown
Before we begin to even touch on the issue of race in television, it should be noted that the trends and developments towards diversity noted in this post are, more often than not, the exception to the rule. Out of the three hundred channels on cable TV currently, excepting those that need to be paid extra for, twenty are created with the intention of representing a non-white racial demographic. Which of course leads to the pertinent question of why it’s still necessary for there to be a Black Entertainment Television channel or an HBO Latino, but no special designation for white television. To put it bluntly, much of television still is white television. For the first few decades of TV in America, whiteness was more than a norm. The story of white people was the only recorded narrative, with near-silent racial clichés flitting about like humanoid set pieces. Since the Civil Rights Movement, more effort was made to create a space on television for people of color— Roots, The Cosby Show, and Eye on the Prize are all groundbreaking shows that came out in the 80’s that really mark the trend towards creating well-rounded, human characters and exploring the nature of being African American. But, as the Museum of Broadcast Communications points out in its lovely and thorough history of race in television, three trends regarding race remain prevalent to this day:
- The continuing virtual invisibility of Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, except as tools to reveal elements of the Euro-American characters’ personalities.
- Continued color-segregated television (BET, Star India Gold, SET Asia); casts from the 1980’s on have been mostly white or black, with few Asian, Native, or Latino/Chicano Americans participating.
- Use of dehumanizing stereotypes in dramatic television, where minority characters most often play drug addicts or criminals.
This last element is particularly important because it leads into the discussion of diversity in TV! Aka diverse cast shows. On cop shows— one of the primary sources of diversity in mainstream media— there is usually a decent racial balance, but, as was previously noted, this inclusion of people of color as cops often is countered/balanced by an overwhelming portrayal of the same criminalizing stereotypes mentioned before.
It’s interesting to consider that one of the first recognizably diverse casts was Star Trek. The show was imperfect in many ways and did not always live up to its own lofty ideals, but it was based upon lofty ideals. Namely, the ideal that in our future, a character did not have to be defined by their race or their place of origin, whether that be a planet or a nation. Moreover, it refused to erase the identity that came with this race or origin, and often made exploring that identity a plot point (albeit obliquely, through a white actor playing an “alien”). Around the same time, Sesame Street made a point of showing kids of many different races and backgrounds learning and playing together. The message for both shows was similar: when we look at our world, who do we want to see helping it grow and progress? And can we start to think of progress and success as something not one race can and should achieve, but something that can and should be the part of everyone’s narrative?
As television makes its way forward, these basic principles have returned consistently within well-written shows. As was noted concisely (and precisely) by James Schamus at a talk with Ang Lee earlier this year, diversity is often substituted for equality. Going by diversity alone, one might believe The Fast and the Furious series is the best representation of race in America. It is very easy to create narratives for characters that are confined to certain stereotypes, rather than creating equality complex human beings. To make a specific example, humor treads a thinner line than drama; even the best intentions can go the way of creating “well-meaning but in fact dehumanizing” jokes. Glee is particularly guilty of indulging in well-intentioned irony gone wrong, where race and background are no longer explored so much as fallen back on. When well-intentioned irony is done right, however, you get shows like Ugly Betty and Community, where the fundamentals of bigotry are mocked and the stereotypes are explored but where characters, through their believable intentionality and complexity, are saved from becoming caricatures and instead come across as absurd individuals (still shaped by their race) in ridiculous settings.
It’s not exactly an revolution of the television world, but shows that carefully and deliberately create diverse casts are popping up across television. They range from monster-of-the-week shows, like Sleepy Hollow, to The Wire and Scandal, which are rated as being at the same caliber as extraordinarily popular white-centric shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Orange is the New Black has also made strides in not only intelligently portraying people of color, but women of color, who get a double whammy of racial and sexist stereotyping on most shows. Moreover, a recent study done by the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies’ Professor Darnell Hunt, “Hollywood Diversity Brief: Spotlight on Cable Television,” noted that casts that were 31-40% minority had the highest median household ratings. Also! Shows with diverse writing teams fared better; writing staffs that were 10% minority or less (see: the majority of shows) fell in ratings compared to writing staff with 11-20% and 41-50% minority. Studios and broadcasting companies hopefully are discovering that having token characters no longer cuts it for most viewers. When the racial majority of your viewership does not match the racial majority of your characters, there is a problem with how you are handling representation, and representation is always important. To quote Whoopi Goldberg, “When I was nine years old, Star Trek came on, and I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here mom, everybody, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.”
Outro
This isn’t to say television at its most diverse still isn’t facing a multitude of problems: even when you have a show with the most diverse cast known to humanity, chances are that it will still feature a protagonist who is white (and male), through whose eyes we are introduced to the diversity of other characters in the cast. From then on, the arc of the show can take you into the lives of the other, previously secondary characters. Even when the primary narrator is not the white male lead— as in Elementary or Sleepy Hollow— the person with a great power or ability or destiny usually is. And even when this is not the case, such as on The Mindy Project or Ugly Betty, further diversity can be limited by producers who don’t want to “call too much attention” to it by including many more minority characters. In other words, even when representation is at its best, there are usually ways that it can be better. In films, where there is only one story arc per ninety minutes and a huge production budget, there is even less investment in bringing together diverse casts of characters. When there is that investment, they’re often given a particular type of story, one about historical racial struggle. What could be the logic?
Both in the television and in the film industry, there is an idea that, just as it’s assumed that women will see films that are designed to be “guy” movies but guys will not see “girly” films, people of many races will be okay with seeing a white lead more than white people will be okay with paying money to see non-white protagonists (especially in a story that is not usually “non-white”). Why is this? Due to a historical, cultural, political, and social education we receive— surprise! — from the media amongst other things, we are more likely to think of a white male as a “neutral mask” that we can superimpose our heroic selves onto. This type of protagonist is like a stick figure symbol for the human race: it is different from most people in important ways, but they’ll probably still recognize themselves in stick-figure form.
So why are white men easier to imagine as avatars for our wish fulfillment fantasies? Harry Potter, Neo, Superman, they’re all ordinary guys who discovered they had great power. Is it harder to believe that a non-white non-male person has great power? Perhaps, but it’s more likely that there’s a continuing problem where a colonial version of the “everyman” hasn’t be kicked out his heroic narrative in our post-colonial world. The people banking on said narratives are unwilling to consider that we might not want a stick figure anymore. The world we inhabit now cannot afford to have two-dimensional representations of race and racial narrative, and for every person digging in their heels, there’s someone else striding ahead.