White Eye and demographics of Hollywood

Recently I found the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment (Smith, et al.), a goldmine of information on the demographics of American media. They’re not kidding about “comprehensive”. It quantifies inclusivity across industry management, directors, writers and speaking characters in every major theatrical release and broadcasted television show between 2014 and 2015.

What did it find?

The results on racial representation in Hollywood were not surprising at all. Minority groups are vastly underrepresented and the data proves it.

The authors considered a film as racially “balanced” if the distribution of ethnic groups in its speaking or named characters was within 10% of their actual census values. Even with such leeway, only 7% of films qualified as “balanced”.

Of particular note was African-Americans and Asians. 18% of films had no African-American characters and 50% of films had no Asian characters. Looking at leads, only 6.3% had Asian lead characters.

You get the idea. Pretty dismal.

Why is this?

There is a strong link with the dominant groups behind the camera and institutional racism. From its earliest days, Hollywood was founded by White men and the same situation remains due to a continuing “structure of exclusivity”. Power was inherited by members of the same group (an unfortunate consequence of insular social connections and prejudice) and only shared with others in a piecemeal fashion. This reinforced the unequal positions of racial groups. Almost a hundred years later, 87.3% of Hollywood directors are White.

What effect does it have?

Quite a destructive one.

Those with the power of representation bring their own perspective and have the power to inform, organise and divide symbols about the social world (Bourdieu 13). When this monopoly coincides with the dominant White society, media is shown through the “White Eye” (Hall 92) which unconsciously perpetuates ideologies of race. This often takes a form of a “grammar” of repeated themes and stereotypes, e.g. Whites are the centre of the story, Blacks are “problems”, Latinos are “criminal other” and Asians are “Oriental other”, just to name a few.

The worst part is that because there are so few non-White personnel, alternative perspectives that counter or dissect these dominant racial formations are suppressed. This makes the ideological grammar of race feel “natural” or “common sense”, perpetuating a self-reinforcing, vicious cycle that feeds biases of whole groups of people.

How to change it?

Easier said than done.

The report has a list of suggestions for how to change the situation. While they come from good intentions, I do wonder how realistic they are.

They are certainly right that changing the demographic makeup of positions of power has an effect on representation. Their data showed that when a film director is from a minority group, the average percentage of minority characters on screen increases by 17.5%. To achieve this shift, they recommend publicised inclusion policies for hiring. But this is better in theory than in practice. Institutional inertia means that media companies tend to treat this exercise as checklist-ticking (Shah). Minority workers are hired at low-paying entry level positions and not given a chance to climb the ladder, just to fill quotas and be done with it. They are marginalised and commonly treated as if they are only there because of corporate pandering to pissed off minority activists, rather than talent. Many in the general public feel the same way too, due to the common neo-liberal narrative that we live in a colour-blind society and all success is due to hard work. Whether it is true is not as relevant as the fact that people believe it is true, and thus will act as if it is true and react to the policy as if it is true, and some of these people are the ones who decide and enforce how hiring policies are implemented. A policy recommendation as radical as Smith, et al.’s “50% women and 38% people of color” would just fall on deaf ears.

They also recommend reviewing all creative decisions with checks and balances to counter stereotypes and mythologies. Great idea, but how would this be adopted industry-wide? I just don’t see Hollywood executives, directors and writers agreeing to sit down during production and “carefully process” all casting, screenwriting, characterisation and framing according to FTVMS325 theory. Deadlines are tight and ultimately the film industry is about profit. This suggestion does not fit into that paradigm and sounds like preaching to the choir.

This is not to say that change in the industry is futile, just that proposals and reforms that speak against its longheld tenets are less likely to be as effective as those that appear to fulfil them. Perhaps a more potent approach can be found in the case of Jackie Chan, who broke through from a successful career in Hong Kong. By encouraging such international co-opting, Hollywood can include minority filmmakers and actors, and their prior success negates any neo-liberal accusations or biases that they do not deserve their position. Moreover, there is actually a profit motive to hire and retain these people in positions of high exposure, to tap into rising foreign/minority markets and capitalise on domestic fans of those genres. Once hired, these people bring their own experiences and perspectives to offer alternatives to dominant ideologies. By couching inclusive representation within the framing of business interests and investment, it may be possible to “sneak” such diversity into Hollywood to establish a foothold then slowly erode its “White Eye” from the inside, rather than visibly railing against dominant ideologies and being rejected outright from the start.

Admittedly, this does have its flaws. Jackie Chan is still restricted to the kung fu genre, and in the same way, filmmakers and actors from ethnic minorities may just remain shoved into traditional pigeonholes. Also, there is not just a lack of industry diversity, but a lack of recognition of the problem. Hiring minority filmmakers and actors as an investment ignores that concern, while hiring policies put the issue into the forefront and encourage discussion. In the end, perhaps both types of approaches are necessary.

Works cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. "What makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 1-18. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media”. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. Eds. Gail Dines & Jean McMahon Humez. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications, 2011. 89-93. Print.

Shah, Beejoli. “In the White Room with Black Writers:Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Hires’.” Defamer. Gawker Media, 20 Dec. 2013. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

Smith, Stacy L., et al. Inclusion or Invisibility? Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment. Los Angeles, California, USA: University of Southern California, 2016. Web. 26 Mar. 2016. Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative.