Hollywood, Separate and Unequal
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Mahershala Ali, right, and Alex Hibbert in Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” one of several high-profile features about African-American experiences being released this fall. But even as progress is being made, the film industry remains overwhelmingly white.
Exceptions do a lot of heavy lifting for us, as the theorist Utz McKnight argues. The success of individual blacks is seen as proof of racial equality, while, as Mr. McKnight writes, “the exceptional white racist is used to separate the existing racial white community from the onus of the past practices of Jim Crow.” The exceptional white racist — a neo-Nazi, for instance — becomes the emblem of hate, letting other whites off the hook, liberating them from the obligations of the past even as they benefit from racism and their whiteness. And because whites, after Jim Crow, turned to the government to take on problems of discrimination, the burden for change is on the government rather than on community.
Another problem is that the big studios depend on tent poles that they sell abroad, and blame international audiences for not supporting black actors, which becomes an excuse for studio discrimination. Never mind that profit isn’t legal grounds for bias. We can take comfort, I suppose, that diversity is inevitable, even at the studios, if only because of changing demographics.
When the academy unveiled its monochrome slate of acting nominees in January, a burst of activism followed, summed up by #OscarsSoWhite. The focus was on awards and the frustrating, infuriating homogeneity of American movies. Now, this fall brings the release of several high-profile features about African-Americans, including Ava DuVernay’s documentary “The 13th,” Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” and Denzel Washington’s “Fences.”
The existence of these movies is proof of progress in an industry that remains overwhelmingly white. They arrive in theaters as the United States is swept up in debates over mass incarceration, police violence, diversity and arguments about what “race” means. It is hardly just a black-and-white issue. But what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called “An American Dilemma” — the legacy of African enslavement and forms of white supremacy — remains polarizing.
And so, as we head into another fall movie season (#OscarsSoWhat) and the final months of the Obama presidency, it feels vital to look at where things are and what is to be done.
A. O. SCOTT I recently watched an insightful, timely and at times painfully funny movie about a young African-American actor trying to break into the movies. Bouncing from one audition to the next, he finds that the available roles are limited and limiting. He can play a slave or a thug, a buffoon or a saint. The filmmakers and casting directors — virtually all of them white — urge him to shuffle and suffer, to clown and strut, and in every case to confirm their ideas of what a black person should be, which is not really a person at all.
That movie is Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” and it was released in 1987. A year earlier, Spike Lee had arrived on the scene with “She’s Gotta Have It.” Eddie Murphy was at the peak of his stardom, having made the transition from funnyman to action hero with the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise. The very existence of a movie satirizing Hollywood’s backward racial attitudes was surely a sign that they were on the way out. And things did change, somewhat. Mr. Lee and other black directors made inroads into the multiplexes and the art houses. I remember the lines outside Film Forum when it showed Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” in 1992 and the hum of excitement that greeted “Boyz N the Hood” the previous year.
Ancient history and also déjà vu. Dig beneath the surface — the breakthroughs and frustrations, the lightning-fast pendulum swing from “12 Years a Slave” to #OscarsSoWhite — and you find the same stubborn problems. “Hollywood Shuffle” doesn’t need to be remade. It’s been updated in countless Dave Chappelle and “Key & Peele” sketches, all of which make a joke out of the painful reality that Hollywood still has a serious problem with black humanity.
Robert Townsend, left, in “Hollywood Shuffle” (1987), which he also directed.
MANOHLA DARGIS How could it be otherwise given that the history of American cinema is also the history of American racism? I’m reminded of this ugly truth every time I watch an old film in which there’s not a single character who isn’t white. Or the only black or Asian character is the maid or houseboy, serving the boss with a smile. Obviously much has changed, but too many new movies just play the tokenism game, using minorities as accessories or emblems of the white character’s presumptive good intentions — like the Prius parked in the driveway.
Early in their history, the movies were greeted as the great equalizer, a democratic ideal in beautiful celluloid, a mass medium for the masses. That’s a reassuring fantasy, because, as anyone who watches an old Hollywood movie knows, most movies didn’t speak to everyone equally. They still don’t, despite occasional efforts to change. This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited 683 new members — 46 percent are women, 41 percent are not white. However laudable the academy’s efforts, they will remain meaningless if the industry doesn’t make good-faith efforts at real equality.
It’s an institutional problem, which doesn’t mean it isn’t also an individual one. Along those lines we have to ask how vision — art itself — is used to rationalize and perpetuate racism, inadvertently or not. Are white directors who consistently work with primarily white casts asserting their creative vision or just racist? Most white directors make movies about white people, whose stories are framed as universal. The upshot is that whiteness is represented as the norm, which inevitably has a way of rendering everything else as “abnormal.” A white cast is a creative choice and just as problematic as the economic rationales that are trotted out to justify discrimination.
A scene from Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” (2013), which won the Oscar for best picture.
SCOTT Nobody wants to tell filmmakers what stories to tell or who to put in their movies. But insisting on the sanctity of art — the individual artist’s right to pursue a vision — can be a way of denying ugly systemic realities. You can’t necessarily blame a specific movie for being about the travails of a white guy, but surely the fact that something like 90 percent of all releases fit that description is a problem. And it’s a problem not just for African-American artists fighting for access, but also for the white people — film critics very much included — who benefit from the system and often unthinkingly uphold its norms and biases.
Commerce can provide its own set of excuses. Dubious assumptions about what audiences want have upheld all kinds of discriminatory practices. Studios that didn’t want to risk bookings in the Jim Crow South restricted what black characters could do, especially when it came to romance. More recently, the supposed resistance of economically important overseas audiences to black movie stars has affected casting decisions, even as the worldwide popularity of African-American music casts doubt on such assumptions.
Many Americans — black and white, liberal and conservative — want to believe in progress. And of course it’s absurd to deny the changes that have happened. But the insistence that things are always getting better can lead to a kind of retrospective magical thinking, an eagerness to declare that the problems of the past have been solved once and forever. White Americans are eager to imagine that racism had a specific end date. It died with emancipation, or the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or the election of Barack Obama. But of course those milestones were also the start of new chapters in an unfinished history.
Kim Wayans, left, and Adepero Oduye in “Pariah” (2011), directed by Dee Rees.
As it is in politics, so it is with movies. In the 2000s, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Jamie Foxx and Halle Berry all won acting Oscars. More recently, “Precious” and “12 Years a Slave” had their moments. Spike Lee took home a career-achievement statue. But it’s always too easy to conflate individual achievement with systemic change. And it takes nothing away from the hard work and creative brilliance of the black actors and filmmakers who succeed on their own terms, against long odds, to note that the structural facts that made those odds so long in the first place are still very much in effect. Which may be partly why the foothold that African-Americans manage to gain in Hollywood from one generation to the next can seem so fragile, and progress so easily reversible.
DARGIS The thing is that awards shows — much like most entertainment-media profiles — tend to focus on exceptional individuals, while ignoring the institutional barriers that are still in place. It’s tough. I want to celebrate the real, hard-fought triumphs of someone like Ms. DuVernay, who’s about to shoot a major studio movie and has a new television series in addition to her forthcoming documentary. At the same time, those achievements — and I think she would agree — shouldn’t be seen as representative of the situation for all female directors, specifically minority women. If anything, the industry needs exceptional individuals to help obscure just how bad things are.
Exceptions do a lot of heavy lifting for us, as the theorist Utz McKnight argues. The success of individual blacks is seen as proof of racial equality, while, as Mr. McKnight writes, “the exceptional white racist is used to separate the existing racial white community from the onus of the past practices of Jim Crow.” The exceptional white racist — a neo-Nazi, for instance — becomes the emblem of hate, letting other whites off the hook, liberating them from the obligations of the past even as they benefit from racism and their whiteness. And because whites, after Jim Crow, turned to the government to take on problems of discrimination, the burden for change is on the government rather than on community.
Halle Berry and Denzel Washington, who won Oscars in 2002 for best actress and best actor.
This helps clarify, I think, one of the industry’s seeming paradoxes. The movie business is overwhelmingly run by white people — the top talent agencies are, according to one study, almost 90 percent white — who may not be overtly racist but are also not doing anything to transform their industry. Like a lot (most?) of whites, they operate as if they have no stake in racism, as if it’s something that happens somewhere else, say, in the heart of those Southern-fried villains who pop up in movies. Even those white industry players who make a good-faith effort to effect change often cling to dubious Hollywood formulas.
SCOTT The movies with black protagonists that tend to win awards — to be legitimized, in other words, as mainstream, serious and prestigious — are more often than not about exceptional figures, many of them drawn from the annals of American history. Athletes. Musicians. Leaders. People whose remarkable accomplishments both ease the consciences of white viewers and mask the collective struggles and communal experiences that sustained the heroes in their work.
Even when those heroes are not historical people, they carry the burden of representativeness. In the prestige movies that court critical and academy approval, black people are often symbols and symptoms, their stories parables of pathology, striving and redemption. These stories are frequently rousing — and the performances that anchor them are often full of rich feeling and complex humanity — but it’s still the case that the focus on the extreme and the exceptional comes at the expense of the ordinary. Which means, somewhat paradoxically, that movies interested in everyday stories about black lives — about work, marriage, family and friendship — can feel downright revelatory. That was true of “She’s Gotta Have It” in 1986. It was true of Barry Jenkins’s “Medicine for Melancholy” in 2009, and it has been true, more recently, of films as different as Dee Rees’s “Pariah” and Justin Simien’s “Dear White People.” It’s not that these movies don’t address race, racism and the complexities of African-American identity, but that they ground those themes in the nuances of realism and personal vision.
And they remain rare, mostly small-scale independent projects. In the past decade, we’ve seen a flood of indie comedies about the diffident dating habits of young people living in American cities. Almost all of those people have been white. A similar kind of movie was just released about the early, tentative courtship of two attractive African-American 20-somethings in Chicago. It’s called “Southside With You,” and you could see it as an exception that proves the rule, since those ordinary quarter-life kids are none other than Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama.
DARGIS Ha-ha [mirthless laugh]. One problem is that the big studios depend on tent poles that they sell abroad, and blame international audiences for not supporting black actors, which becomes an excuse for studio discrimination. Never mind that profit isn’t legal grounds for bias. We can take comfort, I suppose, that diversity is inevitable, even at the studios, if only because of changing demographics: The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2055 there will be no single racial or ethnic majority in the United States. But what happens until then? Embarrassing the studios doesn’t work; they’re immune to shame.
That leaves a few options, including industry self-policing. The last Directors Guild of America contract, for instance, required that the major television studios create diversity initiatives. It may also be time for government intervention. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is looking into discrimination against female directors; perhaps it should also take on the entertainment industry’s hiring practices toward minorities. Certainly the whiteness of American movies seems proof enough that moviemakers openly and consistently violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
Whatever the reason — art, greed, indifference, ignorance, prejudice — American movies remain defined by the principle of separate and unequal. A 2015 study from the University of Southern California found that black performers are, relative to their population estimate, better represented than Latinos, who are the least represented. But numbers are misleading because, as we know, a white star like Leonardo DiCaprio almost always takes the lead while Samuel L. Jackson plays backup, Rosario Dawson comes (and goes), and John Cho steals the scene with too few lines. And so it goes — until, I suppose, American moviegoers say enough.