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The Myth of Colorblindness Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema Edited by Sarah E. Turner Sarah Nilsen

The Myth of Colorblindness “Turner and Nilsen’s latest co-edited collaboration richly adds to the landscape of scholarship that documents the ways in which traditional Hollywood co-opts race in flatly postracial ways; their fascinating collection also notes how some Hollywood cultural workers of color manage to refute such cooptation. The Myth of Colorblindness includes scholarship that analyzes a diverse array of contemporary films, and admirably complexifies the discussion of race in the post-#OscarsSoWhite era.” —Ralina Joseph, Director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE); Author of Postracial Resistance (NYU 2018) and Transcending Blackness (2013)

Sarah E. Turner · Sarah Nilsen Editors

The Myth of Colorblindness Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema

Editors Sarah E. Turner Department of English University of Vermont Burlington, VT, USA

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

ISBN 978-3-030-17446-0 ISBN 978-3-030-17447-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Sean Pavone/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Madi and Teya with love. For Josh, Lena, Samara, and Mike with love.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen Part I  Colorblindness 2

Colorblindness: The Lens That Distorts 13 Ashley (“Woody”) Doane

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Why Hollywood Remains “SoWhite” and a Note on How to Change It 35 Isabel Molina-Guzmán

Part II  Colorblind Racism in Hollywood Films 4

Living in Zootopia: Tracking the Neoliberal Subject in a Colorblind World 61 Sarah Nilsen

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The Paradox of Post-racialism: Black Hollywood’s Voice in Post-racial Discourse 89 Omotayo O. Banjo vii

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Colorblind Racism, The Trump Effect, and The Blind Side 113 Charise Pimentel

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Will Smith: A Global Brand of Blackness 141 Leah Aldridge

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Tricks of the (Colorblind) Trade: Hollywood’s Preservation of White Supremacy in the Age of Obama 173 John D. Foster

Part III Intersections Between Race, Ethnicity, and Gender and Colorblind Racism in Hollywood 9

Zombies, Muslims, and Politics: Racism Without Race in Contemporary America 195 Tarik Ahmed Elseewi

10 Latinas/os in Hollywood: Contemporary Representations in Black and White 215 Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo 11 Tonto and The Lone Ranger: Nostalgic Kitsch or Post-racial Backlash? 237 Sarah E. Turner 12 Cyborg Woman: Ex Machina and Racial Otherness 257 Tony Magistrale 13 The End of the World, Hollywood, and the Endurance of Military Violence: Elysium and World War Z 283 Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo Index 299

Notes

on

Contributors

Leah Aldridge is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Bryan Singer Division of Media Studies. Her research interests include international circulation of black images, globalization and transnational stardom, and how race in America impacts film and production practices domestically and abroad. In addition to being the former Associate Director for Youth Prevention, Policy and Training for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, she is an actress and screenwriter. Omotayo O. Banjo is Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Cincinnati. Her work focuses on representation and audience responses to racial and cultural media and has been published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Media and Religion, and Race and Social Problems. She teaches courses related to media theory, identity, and race. She is also an affiliate faculty of Africana Studies, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Journalism. Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo is Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University. She has authored, co-authored, or co-edited seven books, including Feminism After 9/11: Women’s Bodies as Cultural and Political Threat (2017), Projecting 9/11: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Recent Hollywood Films (2014), and Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship (2010), all with Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. She teaches in the ix

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areas of race and racism in US popular culture, scientific racism, race theory, and intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Ashley (“Woody”) Doane is Professor of Sociology, Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, and Associate Dean for Academic Administration at the University of Hartford. His published work includes numerous articles and book chapters on color-blind racial ideology, racial discourse, and whiteness as well as the co-edited (with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva) book White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (Routledge, 2003). He is Past-President of the Association for Humanist Sociology and Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Tarik Ahmed Elseewi  is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. Previous to Whitman Tarik was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Television Studies and a visiting assistant professor in both the film department and media studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. His areas of research and writing interests include the representation of Islam in the American media and Arabic-language media and national identity. His teaching areas include US film and television history as well as global media and cultural studies. John D. Foster is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He is the author of White Race Discourse: Preserving Racial Privilege in a Post-Racial Society (Lexington, 2013). He is also the author of several articles published in academic journals including Discourse & Society and Ethnic & Racial Studies. He studies the different methods used to rationalize and perpetuate social inequalities. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo is Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. Her books Feminism After 9/11: Women’s Bodies as Cultural and Political Threat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Project(ing) 9/11: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Recent Hollywood Films (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), and Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post9/11 Constructions of Citizenship (Rodopi, 2010) were co-authored with Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. Her edited collection A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality (Rodopi, 2009)

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was also co-edited with Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, and her book Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) was co-authored with C. Richard King and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. Tony Magistrale is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of twenty books including the foundation study of the films adapted from Stephen King’s fiction, Hollywood’s Stephen King (2003). His latest book entitled The Shawshank Experience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is a study of the film The Shawshank Redemption, and the novel from which it was adapted, and the history of the Ohio State Reformatory, the facility where the film was produced. Isabel Molina-Guzmán  is an Associate Professor in Latina/Latino Studies, Media & Cinema Studies and a faculty affiliate of Gender & Women’s Studies and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (NYU Press, 2010) and Latinas and Latinos on Television: Colorblind Comedy in the Postracial Network Era (University of Arizona Press, 2018). Her works have appeared in numerous edited collected and academic journals such as Latino Studies, Journalism, Popular Communication, and Critical Studies in Media and Communication. Sarah Nilsen is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Projecting America: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958 (2011) and co-editor with Sarah Turner of The Colorblind Screen: Television in PostRacial America (NYU, 2014). She has also published articles and book chapters on critical race theory in film and television, Disney studies, and Cold War culture. Her current book projects include Growing Up Disney: A Cultural History, and a history of the Walt Disney True-Life Adventures nature documentary film series. Charise Pimentel  is an Assistant Professor who joined the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Texas State in 2007. Her academic background includes a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish, a M.A. in Psychology (both from California State University, Chico), and a Ph.D. in the Foundations of Education from the University of Utah. Her primary research interests are in examining the intersections of race and language in schools and how these social constructs shape students’ school

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experiences. She has written several publications in the fields of multicultural education, bilingual education, critical whiteness studies, and immigration and education. Sarah E. Turner is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Vermont. She is the co-editor with Sarah Nilsen of The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America (NYU, 2014). Her areas of research include constructions of race in popular culture, contemporary black women writers, and the rhetoric of twenty-first-century racism. Her work has appeared in MELUS, Diversity in Disney Films, The Films of Stephen King, and Networking Knowledge.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen

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 consolationprize 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, Sarah E. Turner (*)  Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Sarah Nilsen  Film and Television Studies, Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_1

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2  SARAH E. TURNER AND SARAH NILSEN

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 same1 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

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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).

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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 postracial. 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.

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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 Native Americans” (21). The numbers are far-more problematic on the other side of the camera; “only 1.3 out of 10 film directors are people of color” (29). And these numbers are relatively unchanged from 2011; the percentage of directors of color in 2011 was 12.2 and in 2016, 12.6. White directors account for 87.4% of all directors, which is down from 89.9% in 2015. The gender gap is even worse, with male directors topping out at 93.1% in 2016. The study also reveals that white writers are responsible for 91.9% of all scripts despite the prevalence of a US population now comprised of 38.7% of minorities.

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This collection offers an important intervention in the study of the changing face of cinematic representations of race and ethnicity as constructed through one of the main mediums for cultural contestation and negotiation. Hollywood is a global powerhouse generating $11.8 billion in 2018 in the United States and Canada. Although the study of the role of race and ethnicity in Hollywood films is not unique, what distinguishes this collection is the examination of the narratives produced by the film industry that continue to celebrate the myth of colorblindness while allowing racism and racial inequities to persist and even become publicly lauded during the Trump Administration. The #OscarsSoWhite movement has been essential in making structural changes to media industries and offers the chance for a wide diversity of voices to alter and transform the dominant, colorblind narratives that continue to proliferate. These essays examine the way that the film industry has been engaged in a discursive battle over the articulation of current racial relations during a time of unprecedented social discord and division. This collection is divided into three sections. In the opening chapter, Doane provides a critical overview of the current state of theorizing colorblind racial inequality. This includes both a discussion of the political and social significance of colorblindness and an analysis of its dynamic and contradictory nature. He then presents a brief analysis of racial ideology and movies, with a focus on the 2016 controversy over black representation at the Academy Awards ceremony (#OscarsSoWhite). Molina-Guzmán uses Stuart Hall’s work on culture, representation, ideology, and hegemony that positions Hollywood as a cultural institution informed by and informative of US social values and norms as a means to unpack the #OscarsSoWhite movement to ultimately demonstrate that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nilsen’s chapter anchors the second part of the collection and explores the ways in which Disney filmmakers developed in Zootopia a colorblind narrative that promotes the neoliberal myth of meritocracy that rewards those with individual drive, perseverance, and overachievement. While the film has been explicitly marketed and roundly praised for its celebration of tolerance and its anti-bias messaging, Nilsen argues that the filmmakers anthropomorphize their animal characters to create a colorblind utopia where prey and predator live in harmony, while resurrecting the racist stereotype of the violent, savage (super)predator. Zootopia illustrates the ways in which colorblind beliefs help justify the

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maintenance of systemic racial injustice. Banjo’s chapter discusses the ways in which contemporary African-American or Black-centered movies treat race relations. On the one hand, non-Black characters (mostly White) are made visible by virtue of their numeric minority status and, at times, racial humor. On the other hand, friendship with non-Black characters (mostly white) in recent African-American films tends to be natural, normalized, and not forced. Banjo’s close reading of several contemporary films illustrates what she calls the paradox of postracialism in that the naturalizing and normalizing of interracial friendships between Blacks and Whites in films might blind us to forms of modern racism and its impact on racial minorities in the United States. Following this, Pimentel examines the notion of colorblind racism by deconstructing the racial messages produced and perpetuated within the popular, heartwarming narrative presented in the motion picture The Blind Side. Aldridge’s chapter challenges Hollywood’s systemic belief that blackness in Hollywood produced films and television shows generally does not perform well in international markets. Focusing on Will Smith, Aldridge seeks to trace the emergence and convergence of certain elements contributing to Smith’s success including those historical, cultural, and industrial, in effect problematizing Hollywood lore that “black doesn’t do well in foreign.” The last chapter in this section addresses Hollywood’s complicity in, as well as depictions of, white supremacy and white power particularly in the age of Obama and its aftermath. Foster argues that Hollywood has employed several tactics to present a diverse (i.e., multiracial) face while actually reproducing the same storylines of the past, i.e., narratives that produce positive presentations of whites and negative presentations of racial “others.” The three methods for perpetuating white supremacy in the guise of “color-blindness” discussed here include: (1) casting biracial actors in lead roles and more diverse casts in general; (2) portraying biracial characters and “diverse” storylines (while casting whites to play such roles); and (3) promoting diversity via alien, animal, or make-believe species. The third part of the book looks at the intersections between race, ethnicity, and gender and colorblind racism in Hollywood. In the first chapter, Elseewi argues that filmmaking is the site through which this nation composes itself and explores what he refers to as the ambivalence at the heart of American national subjectivity. To illustrate this, he juxtaposes filmic and political utterances about infection, virality, plague,

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monstrosity, and living death—zombies in films, Muslims in “politics”— to discuss the role of the Muslim body in articulating post-racial social anxiety in the United States. Lugo-Lugo shifts the focus from Muslims to Latinas/os in the next chapter and continues a conversation about Latina/o representations and the changing nature of Latina/o racialization in twenty-first-century America as envisioned and architected by US popular media and the American mainstream generally, and Hollywood more particularly. Turner’s chapter problematizes the choice to cast Johnny Depp as Tonto in the 2013 re-make of The Lone Ranger by reading that choice through a colorblind ideology that enables white-washed casting and rewards the commodification of Native American culture. The final two chapters continue the work of the text—to problematize the role of colorblindness in Hollywood—through close readings of sci fi/apocalyptic depictions of race and gender. Magistrale explores the role of the racialized and sexualized cyborg “woman” in Ex Machina while Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo explore how the militarization of the United States is depicted in two films released over a decade after 9/11—Elysium and World War Z—and how this militarization reflects racialized anxieties. Hollywood filmmakers do not only tell colorblind tales. As movements like #OscarsSoWhite and Black Lives Matter draw public attention to the persistence of systemic and institutionalized racism in the United States, cultural and social beliefs and ideas about diversity also change and evolve. The incorporation of a much more diverse membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is one step toward providing the opportunity for the production of alternate narratives that will challenge colorblind ideologies. However, as the 2019 Academy Awards demonstrated, Hollywood still has a long way to go.

Notes 1.  Some notable exceptions are of course Black Panther (six nominations and three Oscars) Crazy Rich Asians (no Oscar nominations but a SAG and two Golden Globes), and BlacKkKlansman (six nominations and one Oscar). 2. Hunt’s 2017 study found that in 2015, “people of color purchased 45 percent of all movie tickets sold in the United States.”

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Works Cited Barnes, Brooks. “In ‘Green Book’ Victory, Oscar Critics See an Old Hollywood Tale.” The New York Times, February 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/02/25/business/media/green-book-spike-lee-reaction. Brody, Richard. “Oscars 2019: A Spike Lee Win Notwithstanding, Hollywood’s Dinosaurs Prevailed.” The New Yorker, February 25, 2019. https://www. newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/2019-oscars-a-spike-lee-win-notwithstanding-hollywoods-dinosaurs-prevailed. Forman, Tyrone A., and Amanda E. Lewis. “Racial Apathy and Hurricane Katrina: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Dubois Review 3, no. 1 (2006): 175–202. Gardner, Chris. “#OscarsSoWhite Creator April Reign to Attend Academy Awards: ‘I Feel Immense Pride’.” The Hollywood Reporter, February 19, 2019. Accessed February 19, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ rambling-reporter/oscarssowhite-creator-april-reign-attend-2019-academyawards-1187374. Haney Lopez, Ian. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Haney Lopez, Ian, and Anat Shenker-Osoria. “The Answer to GOP Dog Whistles? Democrats Should Talk More About Race, Not Less.” The Washington Post, August 22, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/the-answer-to-gop-dog-whistles-democrats-should-talk-more-aboutrace-not-less/2018/08/22/7cfa4d3a-a184-11e8-8e87-c869fe70a721_story. html?utm_term=.14e63b644c97. Hunt, Darnell et al. “Hollywood Diversity Report 2018: Five Years of Progress and Missed Opportunities.” UCLA College: Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2018. Morris, Wesley. “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” The New York Times, January 23, 2019. AR1. Plaut, Victoria C. “Diversity Science: Why and How Difference Makes a Difference.” Psychological Inquiry 21, no. 2 (April–June 2010): 77–99. Reid, Joy-Ann. “The Seeds of Trump’s Victory Were Sown the Moment Obama Won.” MSNBC, October 20, 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/ opinion/seeds-trump-s-victory-were-sown-moment-obama-won-ncna811891. Sinha-Roy, Piya. “Spike Lee Says Best Director Nod for BlacKkKlansman Wouldn’t Have Happened without #OscarsSoWhite.” Entertainment Weekly, January 23, 2019. Accessed February 19, 2019. https://ew.com/awards/2019/01/23/ spike-lee-blackkklansman-best-director-oscar-nomination/.

PART I

Colorblindness

CHAPTER 2

Colorblindness: The Lens That Distorts Ashley (“Woody”) Doane

If the United States was the basis for a film series, one could make a strong argument that a dominant element in the movie—like the “ring” in Lord of the Rings or “the Force” in the Star Wars films—would be the dynamics of race and racism. From its inception as an English colony in the seventeenth century, the United States has been what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) has called a “racialized social system,” a society where socially-created racial categories have played a central role in the distribution of wealth, power, and other things that are socially desirable. What does this mean? It means that the history of the United States cannot be understood apart from the European “settlement” (invasion), the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples, the enslavement and racial domination of Africans, and the racialized incorporation of immigrant groups. It means that today, as the United States is nearing the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the legacy of centuries of racial oppression and the ongoing institutionalization of white advantage have created a society where “race” continues to shape outcomes in economics, politics, and society in general.

A. (“Woody”) Doane (*)  Department of Social Sciences, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_2

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Systems of racial domination and oppression do not exist in a vacuum. They are supported by racial ideologies (Doane 2017), collections of beliefs and understandings about race and the role that it plays in society. These ideas and beliefs become our “common sense”; they shape the way in which we view the world and the modes of discourse that we use to communicate our ideas to others. They surround us, as we encounter them in interpersonal interactions, popular media (including movies), and institutional settings such as education and religion. But racial ideologies are more than ideas and understandings. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2018 [2003], p. 9, emphasis in the original) asserts, racial ideologies are used to “explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo.” In other words, racial ideologies are inherently political—groups use them as weapons in social struggles to attack or defend the existing racial order (Doane 2007; Omi and Winant 2015 [1986]). While these “ideas” about race are extremely important, they cannot be understood apart from their connection to a structure of racial domination. Racist ideas—those defending racial oppression and inequality—do not exist apart from a system of racial inequality. This point cannot be overemphasized, for all too often public discourse presents an image of racist ideas as a product of individual “hate” or some type of innate aversion to people who “look different.” If we look at racial ideologies across the reach of United States’ history, it is evident that they have evolved over time. Ideas about race emerged alongside other concepts of difference (e.g., Christian vs. “heathen”), but then became dominant as English colonizers sought to justify conquest, dispossession, and enslavement (Smedley 2007; Gossett 1997 [1963]; Kendi 2016). With the rapid growth of the influence of science in the nineteenth century, racial ideologies began to incorporate the claims that humans could be divided into distinct “races” (subspecies), that “race” was linked to other human qualities such as intelligence, treachery, and a range of other psychological and cultural traits, and that some races (invariably white) were innately superior to other “inferior” races (Smedley 2007). This “classical racism” was used to defend colonialism, enslavement (and later the “Jim Crow” racial order), imperialism, and other forms of white supremacy in the face of antiracist challenges. These racial ideologies were also the basis for the eugenics movement, anti-immigrant mobilization, and Nazism. By the middle of the twentieth century, classical racism faced challenges from post-World War II anticolonial movements, as well as antiracist movements such as the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, the scientific

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support for the idea of race came under repeated attack (e.g., Montagu 1997 [1942]), to the point that at present “race” is more generally viewed as a social construction that does not capture the scope of human biological diversity. As a result, “classical racism” is no longer the dominant racial ideology (although it has not completely disappeared). Given this change, the social and legal changes in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and the increasing social disapproval of overt expressions of racial prejudice and discrimination, it has become increasingly popular to assert that the United States has become a “post-racial” society—as evidenced by the increasing visibility of persons of color in positions of influence, including the election of Barack Obama as the first “black” President of the United States. The problem with this claim, however, is the persistence of social and economic inequality that tracks along lines of race. Consequently, the ideological challenge is how to “explain” the persistence of racial inequality in a “post-racial” society. How can one view American society as “just” and “fair” if it is racially unequal? For a large number of scholars and others studying the persistence of racism in the United States, the answer to this question is that a new racial ideology—colorblindness—has emerged as the dominant racial ideology that explains and justifies the continuing significance of white advantages and racial inequality in American society today (Carr 1997; Bonilla-Silva 2018 [2003]; Doane 2003). Stated simply, colorblindness is the claim that race no longer “matters” in the United States, that racism is no longer a significant obstacle to the advancement of peoples of color. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the end of legal segregation, and the general discrediting of overt racism, there emerged a “backlash” (Omi and Winant 2015 [1986]; Hughey 2014) against claims by oppressed groups that racism remained an obstacle to racial inequality. And in his seminal work Racism Without Racists (2018 [2003]), Bonilla-Silva details the frames, rhetorical strategies, and storylines that whites use to justify the racial status quo in this “post-racial” society. Given that racism in the twenty-first century tends to be covert, institutional, and systemic (Feagin 2010 [2000]), it becomes easier to see racism as a relic of the past. Moreover, “colorblindness” is aspirational, it describes the society that Americans want to live in, one where—to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.—people are “judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.” As an ideology, colorblindness “feels good” because it describes the United States as a society that has successfully transcended its racist history; it also absolves Americans, particularly white Americans, of any responsibility for social change to address racial inequality.

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Why Colorblindness Matters Colorblindness matters not because it enables individuals to claim that they don’t see race or to deny the impact of racism, it matters because it enables whites collectively to deny, dismiss, and downplay racism and to defend a social system that disproportionately benefits whites. As a dominant ideology, colorblindness is a political tool that can be used not only to deny racism but also to attack affirmative action, school desegregation, and other social programs and policies that are designed to remedy racial inequality or are perceived, such as public assistance, food stamps, or housing assistance, primarily to benefit communities of color. Colorblindness is embedded in American institutions and American culture, it shapes how people perceive racial issues and how they communicate about them. Like the lens in a camera or a pair of glasses, it brings the world into a designed focus and creates a specific vision. At the center of colorblindness are issues of racial inequality. Even a quick glance at social data shows substantial racial disparities in income, wealth, and poverty, as well as education, incarceration, infant mortality, life expectancy, and a range of other social indicators. If the claim is being made that race no longer matters and that racism is no longer a meaningful barrier to success, then how do those making that claim explain the continuing significance of racial inequality? This is a crucial problem for colorblind racial ideology, because unless inequality can be explained by causes other than racism, the claim of a colorblind, postracial society collapses. Colorblind racial ideology includes a number of techniques that are used to “explain away” racial inequality. One is “naturalization” (BonillaSilva 2018 [2003], p. 56), the claim that inequality is simply the result of “normal” social processes. For example, high levels of residential and school segregation (and the ensuing disparities in wealth and educational outcomes) are explained as the result of individual choices and preferences. And the relative absence of supermarkets, banking outlets, and other services in communities of color are dismissed as the outcome of “market forces.” The color-blind assertion that flows from this is that since these inequalities are the result of “natural” forces, it would be “unnatural” and presumably unfair to develop laws and policies to address the situation. Another method for “explaining” racial inequality is to claim that unequal outcomes are due to “deficiencies” on the part of peoples

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of color. This frame, termed “cultural racism” by Bonilla-Silva (2018 [2003], p. 56), replaces “classical racism” claims of biological/genetic inferiority with an emphasis on presumed group behaviors and cultural values. As a consequence, racial inequality in the workplace can be viewed as the result of an unwillingness to work hard and a poor “work ethic,” unequal education is due to group cultures that do not value education, and differences in poverty rates are the outcome of poor family values (e.g., unwed mothers, absentee fathers, having too many children). From a political standpoint, “cultural racism” enables whites and their allies to blame communities of color for racial inequality while absolving the larger society of any need to take action to remedy racial inequality and social problems. Moreover, existing social programs such as public assistance, food stamps, and housing vouchers can then be condemned (and curtailed) as rewarding and enabling bad behavior and fostering dependency. Colorblind racial ideology and the denial or downplaying of racism are compatible with two other dominant ideologies in American society— and in Hollywood films—meritocracy and individualism. Meritocracy is at the center of the “American Dream,” the strongly held belief in the United States that anyone can be successful with the “right stuff”— ability, correct values, and hard work (Hochschild 1995; Johnson 2015 [2006]; MacLeod 2009 [1987]). The cultural belief in meritocracy is so strong that individuals use it as an explanation for their success or failure despite awareness of the benefits of family wealth and the disadvantages of poverty (Johnson 2015 [2006]; MacLeod 2009 [1987]). Meritocracy is intertwined with the value of individualism, the view of a society where individuals are self-reliant and free to pursue their own advancement and self-interest, that is at the center of American culture (Bellah et al. 1985). For many in the United States then, the belief in meritocracy and individualism becomes a common sense understanding of the social world. These beliefs provide a foundation for accepting the colorblind claim that racism is not a barrier and the colorblind alternatives (cultural racism, naturalization) for explaining racial inequality. The connections between colorblindness, individualism, and meritocracy also help us understand the sometimes acceptance of colorblindness by members of groups of color (Bonilla-Silva 2018 [2003]; O’Brien 2008; Croll 2013). Another important element of colorblind racial ideology is the dominant practice of defining racism as individual attitudes (prejudice) and behavior (discrimination). As I have argued elsewhere (Doane 2006, 2014),

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this has significant political implications. If racism is viewed as an individual phenomenon disconnected from relationships of power and social institutions, then it becomes easy to claim that anyone of any race can be racist (if they hate or discriminate against other races). This in turn enables the emergence of a line of reasoning that equates white racism with black racism, Latinx racism, and other racisms, thus ignoring or denying both the entire history of racism in the United States and the persistence of institutional racism in the present. This “equalizing” of racism among groups is compatible with claims that that whites are frequent victims of racism (Doane 2003; Gallagher 1997)—that affirmative action (“reverse discrimination”), school desegregation/racial balancing, and “political correctness” are unfair to white Americans. And as Norton and Sommers (2011) found, whites are more likely to see racism against whites as a more significant problem that racism towards peoples of color. This sense of victimization, along with a racialized fear of immigrants, was a major force behind the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.

The Complexity of Colorblindness— And Racial Ideologies While the above summary of colorblind racial ideology outlines its core elements and its role in maintaining white advantages and racial inequality, it would be a gross oversimplification to end here. All Americans do not engage in colorblindness all of the time, and all whites do not engage in colorblindness. The politics of racism in the United States are much more complex. While colorblindness may be the dominant racial ideology, it is not the only racial ideology in the United States. Dominant ideologies are often opposed by counter ideologies—belief systems that make dramatically different claims about race and racism. Classical racism has not completely disappeared and its adherents still assert the superiority of whites. For example, in a 2016 poll (Flitter and Kahn 2016), nearly half of Trump supporters characterized blacks as more violent and criminal than whites, and 40% described them as more lazy (and even 20–30% of Clinton supporters described blacks as less intelligent, more lazy, and more violent and criminal). Colorblindness is also challenged by those who argue that structural and institutional racism is still a major force in American society—an ideology that might be called systemic racism consciousness (Doane 2017) and which is the complete opposite of colorblindness.

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This conflict is important because a key component of the politics of race/racism is to gain the upper hand in struggles against opposing ideological positions. In essence, the purpose of racial discourse is to mobilize supporters, attract new followers, and discredit or neutralize opposing viewpoints. This means that if colorblind racial ideology is to remain a dominant ideology, then its proponents need to counter opposing ideological claims—particularly the claim that racism is systemic and that racial barriers create inequality. Furthermore, ideologies do not exist in isolation, but in an arena shaped by intergroup conflict, social change (e.g., the impact of social media and cell phones on racial discourse), and racial events (Doane 2007)—occurrences that trigger a national (or local) discussion of issues of race and racism (e.g., the election of Barack Obama, the killing of Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter, Starbucks arrests). These changes consistently challenge colorblindness to provide “explanations” that support the claim that racism no longer matters. An ideology must be both dynamic and flexible to thrive in such circumstances. Colorblindness has proven to be immensely flexible. As BonillaSilva (2018 [2003], p. 74) observed, colorblind racial ideology forms “an impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades whites from the United States’ racial reality.” And as I have argued previously (Doane 2014, 2017), it is this flexibility that gives colorblind racial ideology its staying power. Two areas illustrate this point: the way colorblindness can incorporate “diversity,” and the way that it can explain “racism” within a colorblind framework. At first glance, any discussion of “diversity” would seem to undercut the claim that race no longer matters. Yet over the past four decades, the idea of diversity has become ubiquitous in the United States. Corporations and universities scramble to present diverse images in the media (Embrick 2011; Berrey 2015). Individuals take pride over living in “diverse communities” (Burke 2012). “Diversity training” and “diversity awareness” are seemingly everywhere. How can we have diversity in a “colorblind” society? Is there such a thing as “colorblind diversity?” Yet colorblindness is flexible enough to incorporate diversity. First, following Joyce Bell and Douglass Hartman (2007), we note that diversity is usually defined in very general terms. In addition, colorblind racial ideology views diversity (in terms of race/ethnicity) as a characteristic of individuals—much like height or hometown. As a result, inclusion is like changing the cast of characters—but not the overall script. Diversity

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is also something that can be consumed—food, music, and culture—to burnish non-racist credentials without acknowledging the existence of systemic racism. Even the election of Barack Obama to President of the United States, arguably the ultimate example of a “post-racial” society, did not challenge the white-dominated racial order. The point of “colorblind diversity” is to demonstrate that society has transcended racism. Similarly, colorblind racial ideology has also demonstrated an ability to adapt to racial events. On the surface, the existence of racial events would seem to contradict the claim that racism had been serving as an obstacle to success in contemporary society. Yet as long as racism is framed as individual thoughts and deeds, this does not necessarily pose a challenge to colorblind racial ideology. Individuals and groups can denounce as “racist” a white barista at Starbucks or a white neighbor of an Airbnb who wrongly calls the police on innocent African-Americans. They can respond with outrage and applaud the cancellation of the show of a Hollywood celebrity such as Roseanne Barr for a “racist” tweet. They can revile white supremacists like Richard Spencer and groups of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. And they can even condemn individual police officers or an entire police department for the killing or mistreating of African-Americans. Yet from a colorblind vantage point, these cycles of racism and condemnation “prove” that society as a whole is not racist because of its willingness to speak out against “hate” and racism. I would suggest that it is this dynamic that enables 64% of Americans to say that “racism remains a major problem in our society” (Arenge et al. 2018) while systemic racism remains unchallenged. If “racism” is merely the product of “racist” individuals engaging in behavior that is condemned by the larger society, then it is possible to have “racism” without undermining the argument that the United States is a “post-racial” society. Another problematic aspect of colorblindness—and of ideologies in general—is inconsistency. Human beings are not computers; ideologies are not algorithms. Accordingly, we cannot expect individuals and groups to be completely colorblind. We know from existing research that more overt displays of racism persist, especially out of the public eye (Myers 2005; Picca and Feagin 2007). And some elements of colorblindness—“cultural racism” and the use of code words such as “bad neighborhood”—are very thinly disguised forms of race talk. Yet at the end of the day, colorblindness is flexible enough to account for these contradictions. Individuals can offer counternarratives (e.g., Roseanne

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Barr describing a claimed lifetime of advocacy for civil rights as a balance to a racist tweet) or explanations (“I was tired”; “It was taken out of context”). What I see as more challenging for colorblind racial ideology is the increasing awareness, even among whites, that society as a whole includes significant obstacles for blacks and other groups of color and that ultimately, the playing field is not level. For example, Paul Croll (2013) found that 38% of whites agreed that “laws and institutions work against blacks more than any other racial group” (as opposed to 82% of African Americans) and 47% agreed that “laws and institutions favor whites more than other groups.” This raises an important question: how sustainable is colorblindness if a significant plurality of whites acknowledge a structural basis for racial inequality? How can colorblindness adapt to this? One potential answer to these questions is provided by Tyrone Forman and Amanda Lewis (2006) who introduce the notion of “racial apathy”—claimed ignorance and indifference to racism and racial inequality. This reinforces the notion that colorblindness is an intentional strategy for avoiding racial inequality. In a similar vein, Jennifer Mueller (2017) argues that whites actively create colorblindness even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Respondents in her study were pushed to confront systemic white privilege in their own family history and present experience. In response, they employed a range of strategies—evasion, mystification, willfully selecting colorblindness—to avoid dealing with systemic racism. These studies demonstrate the existence of a multitude of cognitive strategies to maintain a social and political basis for defending white dominance and privilege. Nevertheless, I wonder whether there is a “tipping point” past which colorblindness in no longer tenable.

Beyond Colorblindness? Racial Discourse in the Trump Era As I noted earlier, racial ideologies—and society as a whole—are constantly evolving as a result of political conflict and social change. It is therefore important that those studying racism and racial ideology be alert to changes in racial discourse. I believe that one significant development has been the emergence of more overt expressions of racism in the wake of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign (Jonnson 2016). This began with the candidate himself, who during the primary season made a series of racist statements including describing Mexicans as “criminals”

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and “rapists” (Desjardins 2017). These events triggered what I have elsewhere referred to as the “racial morality play” (Doane 2014), a public trial and judgement of persons who violate the norms of colorblindness by engaging in overt racism. In recent decades, racist or even racially tinged statements by public figures have had severe consequences. Surprisingly, despite a storm of criticism, including from fellow Republicans, Trump easily weathered the controversies with minimal consequences. Instead he was defended for “speaking his mind,” “exercising his rights,” and “defying political correctness.” In a public opinion poll, 29% of Republican voters said that Trump appealed to bigotry, but that they still supported him (Bump 2016). And the bottom line was that despite many violations of the “racial etiquette” of colorblindness, Trump won both the Republican nomination and in November 2016 the election for President of the United States. During the campaign and following Trump’s election, one outcome of the process was the apparent normalization of overt expressions of racism, what might be referred to as the “Trump card.” The Southern Poverty Law Center (Costello 2016) documented an increase in racial attacks and hate speech following the election. In a Connecticut high school basketball game, students from a predominantly white town used chants of “Trump” to taunt players on a predominantly black team (Blair 2017). According to one supporter, “Trump broke that P.C. barrier … made me feel comfortable again to speak out.” He then went on to exult that “#WhiteShaming doesn’t work anymore” (Kaleem 2016). These events lead to the question of whether colorblindness is still the dominant racial ideology or if it has been supplanted by a new set of understandings. One analysis of the phenomenon comes from Bonilla-Silva (2018 [2003]) who argues that despite his many racist statements, Trump is still forced to operate within a colorblind logic. For example, over the past few years, Trump has felt compelled on multiple occasions to claim that he is “not a racist” (Danner 2016; Debonis 2018). Bonilla-Silva also observes (2018 [2003], p. 223) that “the hegemony of one form of racial ideology does not mean that at certain historical junctures a secondary form cannot be heightened” (in fact, he references the “Reagan years” in the 1980s as an example of this temporary heightening). This reminds us that racial politics and racial discourse can indeed be rather messy, and that multiple racial ideologies can coexist and overlap. While I agree with Bonilla-Silva regarding the continuing dominance of colorblindness and the ability of other ideologies to experience

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“surges” in influence, I also wonder whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new racial ideology, or at least a dramatically new variation of colorblindness. This ideology, which I will call the “new white nationalism,” can briefly be described as a strong belief in American uniqueness and superiority, but one that is reactive or defensive with respect to changes over the past half-century. It is also linked to a definition of “American” from a white, European-American perspective that is strongly anti-immigrant and also opposed to issues raised by peoples of color (hence, the reason some commentators suggested that “Make America Great Again” also meant “Make America White Again”). The “new white nationalism” includes more overt racism (defended as being “not politically correct”) and its proponents tend to be silent in dealing with cases of racism. At the same time, it incorporates many elements of colorblindness, especially the denial of racism (except against whites) as a significant force in the United States, the use of “cultural racism” (often in a more overt manner) to “explain” racial inequality, and the desire to avoid extreme forms of overt racism (still a “no fly zone” in United States’ politics). The “new white nationalism” is not the dominant racial ideology and I do not foresee it becoming one in the near future. Yet it will continue to be an important political force in the United States in the years to come.

Colorblindness (and Racism) at the Movies So what does all of this have to do with Hollywood? From a sociological perspective, the film and entertainment industry is an institution, which we can define as social arrangements (rules, roles, cultural practices) that shape behavior in important areas of life. Institutions (family, education, sport, government, etc.) are the building blocks of society, but they also reflect society. Since its inception, one of the defining characteristics of the United States has been a racial hierarchy. This racialized social system, and its supporting ideologies, have been embedded in American institutions—and in American movies. From the beginning, the United States’ film industry has reflected the United States’ racial order. During the Jim Crow era, one of the earliest movies, the epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), was considered a cinematographic breakthrough. It also glorified the Ku Klux Klan, had white actors in blackface, and contained crude racist stereotypes of African-Americans. The classic Gone with the Wind (1939) presented a

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whitewashed vision of enslavement and Reconstruction amidst stereotypical representations of African-Americans. The popular “Western” genre in the 1950s and 1960s romanticized the frontier (ignoring issues of conquest and colonialism) along with stereotypical images of Native Americans and Mexican Americans. With the exception of films based on jazz or Broadway musicals, communities of color and issues of racism were ignored. When roles did involve people of color, they were most often stereotypical (e.g., the controversial roles played by the actor Stepin Fetchit) or in many other cases played by whites—for example, Marlin Brando as Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata (1952), Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story (1961), and Laurence Olivier (in blackface) in the title role of Othello (1965) (Simons 2016; Moreno and Arthur 2016). Racist America was clearly captured on film. As the United States evolved, so did the movies. The social changes of the Civil Rights Movement and other events of the 1960s were reflected, however imperfectly, in Hollywood films such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Yet while there was change, much remained the same. From the “Blaxploitation” films of the 1970s to the present, movies continued to place African Americans in stereotypical roles, more often as criminals or gang members than professionals (Crockett 2016). Incredibly, white actors still play characters of color (Simons 2016), often with skin tone adjustment—e.g., Johnny Depp as Tonto in the Lone Ranger (2013) (as discussed later in this collection), Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson in Elizabeth, Michael, and Marlon (2016), and Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007), while black actors in “white” roles—John Boyega as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) or several black actors in The Hunger Games (2012)—received substantial pushback (Holmes 2012). Recent research from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California documents the continued underrepresentation of actors and directors of color (Smith et al. 2017, 2018), which parallels their underrepresentation in high status roles in the rest of society. Ironically, this underrepresentation comes in the face of research that indicates that people of color are disproportionately more likely to go to the movies (Motion Picture Association of America 2017). While institutions reflect society, they are also the arenas in which it is remade. The film industry is not only in the (multibillion dollar)

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entertainment business, but it is also an agent of cultural production. Movies shape our understanding of the world, especially faraway places and “other” peoples. For many Americans, their images of the Middle East, Africa, Latin American, Asia, and the Pacific islands come primarily from movies along with news coverage (usually of crises or catastrophes) and other sources such as the problematic images on the pages of National Geographic (Goldberg 2018). And Hollywood is also influential in shaping the past, as images of people (Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X) or events (Selma, the 1967 urban rebellion in Detroit) come from movies. This cultural production is influential in transmitting and reproducing racial ideologies. Certainly “Westerns” were effective in creating a narrative of brave (white) settlers taming the frontier (and legitimizing their possession of the land) while ignoring the conquest of Native Americans. Likewise, Hollywood played a key role in popularizing an image of Hawai’i as an exotic paradise (with exotic people) and a military base for brave American warriors (Konzett 2017), while erasing the illegal United States annexation of Hawai’i and the oppression of the Hawaiian people. Richard Dyer (1997) describes how film works to normalize whiteness (and white hegemony) in contrast to the marked identities of the non-white, non-Western world. Other critics have analyzed cinematic representations of the “white messiah” (Vera and Gordon 2003) in contrast to peoples of color portrayed as either loyal servants or barbaric villains, or “magical Negro” films (Hughey 2009) where lower class African Americans use almost “supernatural” powers to redeem broken whites (keeping the focus upon the white character). In all of these cases, movies are creating racialized images that either conform with or do not seriously challenge the dominant racial understandings. Given that my claim at the beginning of this chapter was that colorblindness is the dominant racial ideology, it would be useful to explore more directly how it connects to Hollywood. First, colorblindness is the dominant lens through which screenwriters write scripts, directors and actors create movies, and audiences and critics view them. Racial issues in films are viewed through a colorblind lens in which race is an individual characteristic and racial differences can be “explained” as the result of individual choices, market forces, or the cultural “deficiencies” of peoples of color. And as outlined above, audiences have been socialized in a society where systemic racism is downplayed and denied. The historical summary presented above notwithstanding, Hollywood has created a significant number of films in recent years that deal more

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directly with racial issues—seemingly a contradiction of colorblind racial ideology. Yet colorblindness is incredibly flexible. For example, many of the films that have engaged racism in the past few years have primarily focused upon enslavement (The Birth of a Nation [2016]; 12 Years a Slave [2013]; Django Unchained [2012]) or the Civil Rights Era (Detroit [2017]; Loving [2016]; Hidden Figures [2016]; Selma [2014]; The Butler [2013]; The Help [2011])—in a manner that highlights the racist history of the United States. These films provide white audiences the opportunity to feel angry about racism, thereby enhancing their own antiracist self-image as well as their own sense of living in a “postracial” society. But I contend that this is a demonstration of how colorblind racial ideology can be deployed to minimize or encapsulate racism: since the events in the movies happened either 50 or over 150  years ago, they can be dismissed as the “past” (cf. Bonilla-Silva’s 2018 [2003], p. 98, storyline “the past is the past”), regrettable events from which the United States has moved on and that are not relevant for understanding the present. As Jennifer Mueller and Rula Issa (2016) observe in their insightful commentary on 12 Years a Slave, the movie enables white audiences to locate racism in the South, interpret the protagonist’s experiences as “unique” due to his life as a “free” man, and completely mystify the fundamental role of enslavement in the political and economic development of the United States. Thus audiences can walk away feeling tearful and outraged, but not inclined to think differently about twentyfirst century racism. In what appeared to be an even more significant challenge to colorblindness, the complete absence of Oscar nominees of color in 2015 led to the #OscarsSoWhite protest movement, which gained additional momentum when the 2016 nominees were also all white (Grossman 2015; Ambrosino 2015; Keegan and Zeitchik 2016). This act of calling out Hollywood for racial exclusion was clearly a “racial event” that brought issues of racial inequality to the foreground. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences responded by significantly changing its virtually all-white voting membership to include a more diverse group of participants (Academy 2016; Bradley 2016). And the results were dramatic, with a slate of nominees in 2017 that was so diverse that some media outlets responded with the headline #OscarsSoBlack (Ejiofor 2017). With another diverse list of nominees in 2018 (Tan 2018) and the overwhelming box office success of the film Black Panther (2018), with a black director and a majority black cast, Hollywood seemed to

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have moved beyond race. Nevertheless, I believe that this event is best understood through the frame of “colorblind diversity.” By making changes on the most visible stage in Hollywood, “Oscars’ Night,” the film industry can promote this visible diversity as evidence that it has addressed its “race problem.” And given Hollywood’s impact on American culture as a whole, this can be taken as additional “proof” that race no longer matters in the United States. Yet as star writer, actor, and director Chris Rock (2014) and #OscarsSoWhite founder April Reign (2018) remind us, racial inequality remains embedded in Hollywood, especially with respect to access and to positions of power. For example, as Stacy Smith, Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper (2018) have demonstrated, there has been extremely limited change in diversity among directors over the past decade. The idea of “post-racial” Hollywood remains in the realm of fiction, better suited to Wakanda than the United States.

Conclusion What lies ahead for colorblind racial ideology—and for colorblind Hollywood? I foresee that colorblindness will remain the dominant racial ideology in the United States, but that it will face heightened challenges from opposing ideologies. One push will come from the “systemic racism consciousness” counter ideology, as activists and social movements (#BlackLivesMatter, #HereToStay) will continue to contest the dominant narrative that structural racism is no longer a significant social problem. Proponents of colorblindness will have to develop new explanatory frames and rhetorical strategies in order to maintain their hegemonic position. On the other side, colorblindness will also be confronted by the forces that have given rise to what I have called the “new white nationalism.” Demographic changes (the increasing percentage of peoples of color) have already occurred and more shifts are inevitable and the United States progresses towards “majority-minority” status in the middle of the twenty-first century (Pew Research Center 2015). This will, I believe, lead to a continuation of “white backlash” and an increase in acts of overt racism. Yet the “new white nationalism” will face its own challenges, as advocates seek to balance claims of white victimization and an increasing threat from immigration with the need to appear “non-racist” in the face of colorblind racial etiquette. It is certainly safe to say that the racial politics of the coming decades will be both complex and contentious.

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As a social institution, the film and entertainment industry will reflect these conflicts. The #OscarsSoWhite struggle will continue, but systemic change will be a more difficult goal. Movies will continue to shape cultural understandings of racial issues, but within a larger social framework. I suspect that while the film industry will be affected by ongoing racial conflict and racial events, mainstream Hollywood will continue to operate within the “colorblind diversity” and “colorblind racism” frames discussed in this chapter. Films that address racism will continue to be set in the past or in fiction. A movie tackling Ferguson or Baltimore, Trayvon Martin or Philando Castile, families divided by deportation or living in fear of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids would probably be too controversial and too risky in terms of box office success to go beyond the domain of independent films. And given the general liberal progressive perspective that is currently dominant in the film industry, I would also be surprised to see a movie reflecting “new white nationalism” ideology—either overt white victimization or stereotypical portrayals of “dangerous” immigrants (absent a writer/actor/director with the star power and political leanings of Clint Eastwood). We may see some change in focus, but the “colorblind lens” will remain in place.

Works Cited Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Academy Takes Historic Action to Increase Diversity.” Oscars.org, January 22, 2016. Accessed June 9, 2018. http://www.oscars.org/news/academy-takes-historic-action-increase-diversity. Ambrosino, Brandon. “Here’s Why People Are Tweeting #OscarsSoWhite.” Vox.com, January 15, 2015. Accessed June 8, 2018. https://www.vox. com/2015/1/15/7551923/oscars-so-white. Arenge, Andrew, Stephanie Perry, and Dartunorro Clark. “Poll: 64 Percent of Americans Say Racism Remains a Major Problem.” Nbcnews.com, May 29, 2018. Accessed May 29, 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ politics-news/poll-64-percent-americans-say-racism-remains-majorproblem-n877536. Bell, Joyce M., and Douglas Hartmann. “Diversity, Everyday Discourse, and ‘Happy Talk.’” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 895–914. Print. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Print. Berrey, Ellen. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Print.

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Blair, Russell. “In Some High School Gyms, the President’s Name Is a Taunt.” Courant.com, March 5, 2017. Accessed March 6, 2017. http://www.courant. com/politics/hc-trump-high-school-racial-taunt-20170303-story.html. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 465–480. Print. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism & Racial Inequality in Contemporary America. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Print. Bradley, Laura. “The Academy Finally Announced Major Changes So the Oscars Won’t Be #SoWhite.” Slate.com, January 22, 2016. Accessed June 9, 2018. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/01/22/the_academy_ announces_major_changes_so_the_oscars_won_t_be_sowhite.html. Bump, Phillip. “7 Percent of Donald Trump Supporters Think He’s Racist.” Washingtonpost.com, September 1, 2016. Accessed September 9, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/01/7percent-of-donald-trump-supporters-think-hes-racist/?utm_term=.0cd9fa41b6b0. Burke, Meghan A. Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities: Whiteness and the Power of Color-Blind Ideologies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Print. Carr, Leslie G. “Color-Blind” Racism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. Print. Costello, Maureen. “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools.” Splcenter.org, November 27, 2016. Accessed March 6, 2017. https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/ splc_the_trump_effect.pdf. Crockett, Zachary. “‘Gang Member’ and ‘Thug’ Roles in Film Are Disproportionately Played by Black Actors.” Vox.com, September 13, 2016. Accessed June 9, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2016/9/13/12889478/ black-actors-typecasting. Croll, Paul. “Explanations for Racial Disadvantage and Racial Advantage: Beliefs About Both Sides of Inequality in America.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (2013): 47–74. Print. Danner, Chas. “Trump Again Insists He Is Least Racist Person.” Nymag.com, June 11, 2016. Accessed June 12, 2016. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/trump-again-insists-he-is-least-racist-person.html. Debonis, Mike. “Trump: I’m Not a Racist.” Hartford Courant, January 15, 2018: A1, A6. Print. Desjardins, Lisa. “Every Moment in Donald Trump’s Long and Complicated History with Race.” Pbs.org, August 22, 2017. Accessed September 12, 2017. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/every-moment-donald-trumpslong-complicated-history-race.

30  A. (“WOODY”) DOANE Doane, Ashley W. “Rethinking Whiteness Studies.” White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 3–18. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Doane, Ashley W. “What Is Racism? Racial Discourse and Racial Politics.” Critical Sociology 32 (2006): 255–274. Print. Doane, Ashley W. “The Changing Politics of Color-Blind Racism.” Research in Race and Ethnic Relations 14 (2007):181–197. Print. Doane, Ashley W. “Shades of Colorblindness: Rethinking Racial Ideology in the United States.” The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America, edited by Sarah Nilsen and Sarah Turner, 15–38. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Print. Doane, Ashley W. “Beyond Color-Blindness: (Re) Theorizing Racial Ideology.” Sociological Perspectives 60 (2017): 975–991. Print. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Ejiofor, Annette. “#OscarsSoBlack: ‘Moonlight,’ “Fences’ and ‘Hidden Figures’ Get Nods.” Nbcnews.com, January 24, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/oscarssoblack-moonlight-fenceshidden-figures-get-nods-n711356. Embrick, David G. “The Diversity Ideology in the Business World: A New Oppression for a New Age.” Critical Sociology 37 (2011): 541–556. Print. Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010 [2000]. Print. Flitter, Emily, and Chris Kahn. “Exclusive: Trump Supporters More Likely to View Blacks Negatively—Reuters/Ipsos Poll.” Reuters.com, June 28, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-race/exclusive-trump-supporters-more-likely-to-viewblacks-negativelyreuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN0ZE2SW. Forman, Tyrone A., and Amanda E. Lewis. “Racial Apathy and Hurricane Katrina: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Du Bois Review 3 (2006): 175–202. Print. Gallagher, Charles A. “White Racial Formation: Into the Twenty-First Century.” Critical White Studies, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 6–11. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Print. Goldberg, Susan. “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist: To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.” Nationalgeographic.com, March 2018. Accessed March 23, 2018. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/. Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1963]. Print. Grossman, Samantha. “Almost All the Oscars Nominees Are White.” Time.com, January 15, 2015. Accessed June 8, 2018. http://time.com/3669143/ oscars-2015-nominations-white/.

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Hochschild, Jennifer. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Holmes, Anna. “White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games.” Newyorker.com, March 30, 2012. Accessed June 9, 2018. https:// www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/white-until-proven-blackimagining-race-in-hungergames. Hughey, Matthew W. “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films.” Social Problems 56 (2009): 543–577. Print. Hughey, Matthew W. “White Backlash in the ‘Post-Racial’ United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (2014): 721–730. Print. Johnson, Heather Beth. The American Dream and the Power of Wealth. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015 [2006]. Print. Jonnson, Patrik “Why So Much Blatant Racism Is Bubbling to the Surface.” Csmonitor.com, October 9, 2016. Accessed October 12, 2016. https:// www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/1009/Why-so-much-blatantracism-is-bubbling-to-the-surface. Kaleem, Jaweed. “‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Being White.’ Trump’s Win Brings ‘White Pride’ Out of the Shadows.” Latimes.com, November 17, 2016. Accessed November 30, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-natrump-white-pride-20161117-story.html. Keegan, Rebecca, and Steven Zeitchik. “Oscars 2016: Here’s Why the Nominees are So White – Again.” Latimes.com, January 14, 2016. Accessed June 8, 2018. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-etmn-all-white-oscar-acting-nominees-20160114-story.html. Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2016. Print. Konzett, Delia Malia Caparoso. Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Print. MacLeod, Jay. Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009 [1987]. Print. Montagu, M.F. Ashley. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1942]. Print. Moreno, Carolina, and Riley Arthur. “25 Times White Actors Played People of Color and No One Really Gave a S**t.” Hufffingtonpost.com, February 27, 2016. Accessed June 7, 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/26times-white-actors-played-people-of-color-and-no-onereally-gave-a-sht_ us_56cf57e2e4b0bf0dab313ffc. Motion Picture Academy Association. “THEME Report: A Comprehensive Analysis and Survey of the Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment [THEME] for 2017.” Mpaa.org, April 2018. Accessed June 9, 2018. https://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MPAATHEME-Report-2017_Final.pdf.

32  A. (“WOODY”) DOANE Mueller, Jennifer C. “Producing Colorblindness: Everyday Mechanisms of White Ignorance.” Social Problems 64 (2017): 219–238. Print. Mueller, Jennifer C., and Rula Issa. “Consuming Black Pain: Reading Racial Ideology in Cultural Appetite for 12 Years a Slave.” Race and Contention in Twenty-First Century U.S. Media, edited by Jason A. Smith and Bhoomi K. Thakore, 131–147. New York: Routledge, 2016. Print. Myers, Kristen. Racetalk: Racism Hiding in Plain Sight. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Print. Norton, Michael I., and Samuel R. Sommers. “Whites See Racism as a ZeroSum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (2011): 215–218. Print. O’Brien, Eileen. The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Print. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2015 [1986]. Print. Pew Research Center. “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065: Views of Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed.” Pewresearch.org, September 28, 2015. Accessed June 10, 2018. www.pewresearch.org. Picca, Leslie Houts, and Joe R. Feagin. Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Reign, April. “#OscarsSoWhite Is Still Relevant This Year.” Vanityfair.com, March 2, 2018. Accessed May 26, 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2018/03/oscarssowhite-is-still-relevant-this-year. Rock, Chris. “Chris Rock Pens Blistering Essay on Hollywood’s Race Problem: ‘It’s a White Industry.’” Hollywoodreporter.com, December 3, 2014. Accessed June 9, 2018. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/top-five-filmmakerchris-rock-753223. Simons, Meredith. “100 Times a White Actor Played Someone Who Wasn’t White.” Washingtonpost.com, January 28, 2016. Accessed June 7, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/28/100times-a-white-actor-playedsomeone-who-wasnt-white/?utm_term= .5f04140b387a. Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007. Print. Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper. “Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007–2016.” Annenberg.usc.edu, July 2017. Accessed June 7, 2017. https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Dr_Stacy_L_Smithinequality_in_900_Popular_Films.pdf.

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Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper. “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair? Gender, Race & Age of Directors Across 1100 Films from 2007–2017.” Annenberg.usc.edu, January 4, 2018. Accessed June 7, 2017. http://assets. uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-directors-chair-2007-2017.pdf. Tan, Shelly. “This Year’s Oscar Nominees Are More Diverse, But Has Hollywood Really Changed?” Washingtonpost.com, February 28, 2018. Accessed June 9, 2018.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/entertainment/ diversity-infilms/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bbe34372f108. Vera, Hernán, and Andrew M. Gordon. “The Beautiful American: Sincere Fictions of the White Messiah in Hollywood Movies. White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 113–125. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

CHAPTER 3

Why Hollywood Remains “SoWhite” and a Note on How to Change It Isabel Molina-Guzmán

In 2015, the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment (CARD) on 2015s Hollywood film, TV programs, and digital series found that while women are increasingly included as writers, creators, and directors in television, racial and ethnic minorities remain mostly excluded from every realm of television and film (Smith et al. 2016). The CARD report concludes that Hollywood “still functions as a straight, White, boy’s club,” where women and ethnic and racial minorities need not apply for jobs (ibid., p. 16).1 With regards to diversity among decision-makers and in production, acting and content, Hollywood is defined by its ethnic and racial homogeneity and incremental structural change. Two years later, research on the industry finds that the needle has moved for some and remained static for most others (Hunt et al. 2018). While women have made substantial representational gains bringing them almost to parity with US demographics, ethnic and racial minorities remain radically underrepresented. And women and ethnic and racial minorities remain relatively locked out of production with gains mostly I. Molina-Guzmán (*)  University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_3

35

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coming from their participation in streaming television. As previous studies document, the reality for audiences, actors, creators, and executives of color in the entertainment industries remains defined by exclusion from the industry and invisibility on the screen (Directors Guild of America 2015; Hunt et al. 2016, 2018; Hunt and Ramon 2015; Negrón-Muntaner and Abbas 2015; Smith et al. 2014a, b, 2015, 2016).2 A more interesting question for me is not “Who is to blame?” for the lack of diversity, but rather “Why” has Hollywood changed so slowly over the past decade, a decade marked by the election of the first mixed-race African-American president and dramatic demographic change making Latinas/Latinos the largest ethnic/racial minority group in the United States and bringing the share of the US population who identify as African-American, Latina/o, American Indian, and mixed ethnicity/race to more than 40%. To answer the questions of “why,” I engage Stuart Hall’s work on culture, representation, ideology, and hegemony to position Hollywood as a cultural institution informed by and informative of US social values and norms, specifically whiteness as cultural norm. As a cultural institution, contestations over the lack of diversity in Hollywood are indicative of broader social conflicts over the changing status of ethnicity, race, and gender. Due in large part to the success of more than 15 years of watchdog activism by the Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition (MEMC), the emergence of Shonda Rhimes and others producers of color is signaling the beginning of incremental changes in the representational fortunes of US ethnic and racial minorities, at least on television. Empirically this chapter uses news coverage of Hollywood to question the Hollywood paradox—the lack of diversity in film and TV production yet TV’s increasing shift toward on-screen representational diversity. It concludes by using streaming provider Hulu’s “East Lost High” (ELH) as a case study for reflecting on the digital turn in television and innovative models in production and representation. First, the chapter briefly contextualizes the contemporary state of diversity in Hollywood, US demographic changes, and recent academic and industry studies. As Hall (1986) argued, situating cultural analysis within the historical specificity of cultural production is particularly important for making sense of ethnic, racial, and gender differences. Next, the demographic data and industry studies are situated in the news and entertainment coverage of the 2014–2015 television season. Guided by Hall’s writing on hegemony and ideology, I analyze news discourses of TV’s diversity collected from the Lexis-Nexis news database

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from January 2014 to January 2016 (two TV pilot cycles) using the search terms “diversity and television.” After duplicates and irrelevant content were eliminated, the sample of 53 articles from publications such as The Hollywood Reporter and The Washington Post was analyzed. Analyzing the journalistic framing of Hollywood diversity provides insight into the hegemonic tensions at play in the cultural industries. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on the future of ethnic and racial representations in a changing TV environment through the case study of Hulu’s “East Los High (ELH)” (2013–2017). Four unstructured phone interviews with the executive producer, showrunner, producer/writer, and a TV/digital content writer of the show were conducted in the Fall 2015. The interviews provide a window into the decision to produce the show for a streaming content provider rather than a traditional TV network. A study of ELH allows for a thoughtful reflection on ethnicity, race, and gender representations in the contemporary TV landscape.

Stuart Hall’s Legacy: Theorizing Diversity in Contemporary Hollywood The following section synergizes Hall’s writings on ideology, representation, and hegemony to build a theoretical framework for studying (1) Hollywood’s historical ethnic, racial, and gender homogeneity; (2) competing public discourses surrounding diversity in Hollywood; and (3) the digital turn in the structure and content of Hollywood. Hall’s work significantly contributed to the development of a cultural studies cannon on media representations, audiences, and ethnic and racial difference. In particular, Hall conceptualized cultural representations as a complex set of production and interpretative practices informed by a society’s norms and values and thereby imbued with social meaning. Thus, Hollywood, as a globally dominant producer and purveyor of cultural representations, is a significant site for studying contemporary contestations over ethnic, racial and gender difference and how those conflicts speak to changes in broader relationships of power. Throughout his scholarship, Hall foregrounded the political significance of studying media representations of differences generally and ethnic, racial, and class differences specifically. Although Hall did not often address these forms of identity, I add gender and sexuality as they centrally intersect with other forms of difference (Molina-Guzmán and Cacho 2014).

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Difference, Representation, and Power. Hall argued a cultural studies approach to the study of ethnic and racial representations conceives of the media as a significant cultural space for studying social and political power: (W)hat cultural studies has helped me to understand is that the media play a part in the formation, in the constitution, of the things that they reflect. It is not that there is a world outside, “out there,” which exits free of the discourses of representations. What is “out there” is, in part, constituted by how it is represented. (1992, p. 14)

Consequently, if the media is constitutive of and constituted by society, then studying Hollywood structures and representations of racial and ethnic identity is informative of more general conflicts over the social and cultural status of difference. Indeed, the lack of substantial representational progress in media and popular culture representations of racialized groups during the 1980s and 1990s allowed Hall to theorize about the complicated nature of ideology and power in contemporary US and British society. Hall viewed the lack of representational change as part of a colonial ideological legacy (1992, 1997). Specifically, he argued the historical reproduction of “Othering” through stereotypic binary representations of ethnic and racial difference was symptomatic of the hegemonic push and pull of power. The unchanging nature of the media is a result of the “fatal coupling of difference and power” as majority ethnic and racial groups seek to maintain cultural and political control in a changing world: This double syntax of racism – never one thing without the other – is something we can associate with old images in the mass media; but the problem about the mass media is that old movies keep being made. And so, the old types and the doubleness and the old ambivalence keep turning up on tomorrow’s television screen. (Hall 1997, p. 17)

Indeed, Spike Lee’s response to Green Book’s 2019 Oscar-win for Best Movie exemplifies the continuing relevance of Hall’s observation: “‘I’m snakebit. Every time someone’s driving somebody, I lose,’ he later told reporters backstage, in reference to his breakout film, Do the Right Thing, losing the Oscar for Best Screenplay to Driving Miss Daisy in

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1990.”3 The tendency toward homogeneity, structural stability, and binary representations of Otherness is a result of implicit and explicit racial and gender biases by those in control of the production of popular images and narratives. Changes in representations, narratives, and media discourses become difficult (if not impossible) because transforming representational regimes means transforming economic, social, and political structures as well. Hall perceived these questions of power, difference, and media representation as ethically important to democratic societies, and he called on cultural studies scholars “to mobilize everything that it can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply antihuman in their capacity to live with difference” (1992, pp. 17–18). Achieving change in the media industries requires a radical willingness to give up political, economic, and culture power through the empowerment of marginalized Others. Ideology and Hegemony. One of Hall’s most significant applications of Gramsci is the recognition that ideology, defined as “the ‘ideas’ which people use to figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it and what they ought to do,” is not over-determined by economic class but is instead located within historically situated social formations (1985, p. 99). Building on Hall’s conceptualization of ideology, the increasingly heated debate over the lack of ethnic and racial diversity in Hollywood and the gender, ethnic, racial, homogeneity of its creative decision-makers is symptomatic of a historically situated US social formation under hegemonic contestation. Because the social formation of a specific historical bloc is diversely constituted across class interests, malleable over time and depends on the voluntary incorporation of the subaltern class; hegemony is never permanent or absolutely achieved and may be considered to be always in crisis (Hall 1986).

Hollywood’s Hegemonic Crisis Contemporary conflicts over the lack of diversity among Hollywood’s decision-makers, content creators, and the representations they produce are reflective of the “role of civil society in the balance of relations between different social forces in society” (1986, p. 8). As a consequence of dynamic demographic change in US population and media audiences, the ethnic and racial homogeneity of Hollywood as an arena of civil

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society is being called into question. For example, Los Angeles and New York City, where a majority of content creators work and reside, are majority-minority cities and California is a majority-minority state (Desilver 2015). Furthermore, ethnic and racial minorities currently make-up 40% of the US population and demographers predict that by 2050 the United States will be majority-minority (Desilver 2015). The increasing diversity of the United States and associated calls for cultural representations reflective of that diversity make Hollywood’s “whiteness” a key arena for contemporary contestations over power. Changes in ethnic and racial demographics of the country are also shifting who consumes and how audiences watch television and film. A report by the Motion Pictures Association of America (2014) concluded that White non-ethnic audiences account for less than 50% of moviegoers. African-Americans watch movies at rates relatively equal to and Latinas/os at rates greater than their share of the US population. With regards to the digital turn in media consumption, Latinas/ os and African-Americans own smartphones at higher rates than other populations (López and Patten 2015; López et al. 2012; Pardo and Dreas 2011) and along with Asian-Americans are more likely to stream television and movie content on digital devices (Gonzalez 2014). And African-American audiences consume more content across a diverse set of platforms than any other demographic group (Nielsen 2014). These demographic social, economic, and technological forces are contributing to a destabilization of Hollywood’s hegemony. In New York, a 2014 lawsuit filed by the state against the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (Local 52) illustrates the challenges by women and ethnic and racial minorities to the historically established structures of creative media work.4 As a result of the settlement, Local 52 who represents technical workers such as camera grips and sound technicians agreed to revise its nepotistic admissions process for union membership and adopt equal opportunities policies. Higher up the creative labor hierarchy, the Directors Guild of America in 1985 filed an unsuccessful class-action lawsuit claiming gender discrimination against Warner Brothers, Inc. and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.5 Ironically, the number of women directors has declined in the 30 years since the failed lawsuit, resulting in the more recent 2015 action by the Los Angeles American Civil Liberties Union requesting an investigation into discriminatory recruiting and hiring practices by Hollywood’s major film studios, television networks, and talent agencies.6 The lawsuit

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was motivated in part by industry studies indicating a consistent and historical bias against the hiring of women and ethnic and racial minorities as executive decision-makers, producers, directors, writer, actors, and technical workers (Hunt et al. 2016; Hunt et al. 2018; Smith et al. 2015, 2016). The shift in demographics and media consumption patterns are increasingly empowering audiences, social media activists, and media activist organizations such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the MEMC, whose television diversity report card is credited as driving the incremental changes occurring in US television. The MEMC is considering developing a similar report card for film studios. By keeping pressure on the Hollywood gatekeepers, academics, social media activists, and media activist organizations are central elements in the hegemonic struggles surrounding racial, ethnic, and gender equality. The conflicts surrounding Hollywood interconnect with other ongoing challenges to other institutions of civil society such as the family, church, and education. Casting director Tracy (Twinkie) Byrd, who has worked on film projects such as Fruitvale Station (2013) and TV programs such as BET’s Being Mary Jane, argues that Hollywood’s lack of diversity is the result of economic risk aversion. Given the high cost of production of film and network television, creative decision-makers staff projects with people in their social network, people who are safe and familiar—friends, relatives, previous associates, and others personally referred to them by trusted colleagues: “They live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools. Their kids go to the same schools. Ok. It’s the system.”7 The system, for Byrd, embeds Hollywood in the structures of economically and racially segregated housing and education of Los Angeles. Hollywood is thus an element of civil society involved in a “very particular, historically specific, and temporary ‘moment’” of hegemonic crisis (Hall 1986).

The Journalistic Discourse of the Hollywood Paradox Contemporary Hollywood is caught between the force of historically established White patriarchal structures, cultural production and the rising currents of changing demographics, economics, and technology. Examining the trade and entertainment coverage provides an opportunity to study the ideological tensions between the pull of Hollywood’s established gender and racial structure and the push to transform the

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system. Journalistic texts are embedded in broader social and political struggles over equality and social justice in the United States (MolinaGuzmán 2010). This section examines Hollywood’s hegemonic crisis by analyzing news coverage about the 2014–2015 TV season featuring the success of Shonda Rhimes’ ABC Thursday-night lineup (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder) and the history making premieres of “diverse programming” like Fox’s Empire, ABC’s Fresh of the Boat and Black-ish, Lifetime’s Devious Maids, CW’s Jane the Virgin, and HULU’s original and all Latina/o production of East Los High.8 Three sets of interconnected discursive frames are discussed: (1) Hollywood exceptionalism, (2) economic imperatives, and (3) institutional racism and sexism. Journalistic writing is a complicated cultural text. With the exception of opinion columns and editorials, journalistic practices mandate adherence to objectivity and the presentation of multiple perspectives. Not surprisingly the majority (32 of 53) of articles reflected articles less critical of Hollywood by using the exceptionalism and economic imperatives frames. The remaining 22 articles primarily consisted of interviews, news analysis, and columns and engaged in a discourse more explicitly critical of Hollywood’s institutionalized racism and sexism. Hollywood Exceptionalism Frame. The dominant discursive frame of news articles (32/53) acknowledged improvements in Hollywood through narratives of exceptional individuals, in particular the 2014– 2015 success of three executive producers: Lee Daniels (Empire), Paul Lee (Fresh off the Boat), and Shonda Rhimes. This frame operates in a news media environment that privileges individual stories of success and an entertainment environment that encourages the branding of the “entrepreneurial self” (Banet-Weiser 2012). Examples include stories with headlines such as “TV Pilot Season’s Big Get: Diversity” (O’Connell, 13 February 2015), “Fall TV 2014: Diversity is all the rage – finally” (Barney, 19 September 2014), “TV diversity? It’s real, and it’s fabulous” (Ramanathan, 2015), and “Minority Report How ‘Empire’ changed prime-time diversity for the better” (Roarke, 29 October 2015). While generally celebratory, some of the stories do acknowledge the slow pace of change and the continuing underrepresentation of African-American, Asian-American, and Latina/o actors and characters in US television, such as this column in The Toronto Star “Do not adjust your set; TV shows are becoming more diverse, but there’s still a long way to go” (Wong, 19 November 2015).

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Focusing on exceptional individuals and events decreases social and political pressure on Hollywood’s dominant gender and racial structures.9 For example, in a news story about Viola Davis’ Emmy-winning role in How to Get Away With Murder, Rhimes’ is quoted: “‘The only way I was going to get the narratives and find things that I would be at the forefront of was if I drove it’, Explains Rhimes” (Pesce, 13 July 2015). She implicitly acknowledges Hollywood’s racial and gender bias while also reifying her self-brand. By framing stories around narratives of individual success and the branding of the entrepreneurial self, the news texts elide discussion of institutionalized racism and sexism. Discourses of Hollywood exceptionalism contribute to the Hollywood paradox in two ways. First, it associates improvements in TV representations of ambiguous multicultural difference with market demands, specifically the increasing diversification of US media audiences and exceptionalism of a few producers of color (Joseph 2018). Second, it equates the minimal on-screen visibility of marginalized groups with social progress. Ultimately, both reinforce the perception that Hollywood’s diversity is improving and responding to social pressures. For example, in this New York Post column about Empire the writer observes, “With TV having finally achieved a truly diverse racial spectrum, the film world is overdue to play catch-up” (Roarke). The columnist problematically uses the minimal yet unprecedented diversity of the 2014–2015 TV season as evidence that the TV industry has resolved its structural problems with racial and gender bias. Increasing images of difference rather than structural transformations is the solution. However, in a critique of the cultural politics of representation, Herman Gray concludes that increases in multicultural representations of difference hide continuing gendered and racial structural inequalities: “Rather than struggle to rearticulate and restructure the social, economic, and cultural basis of a collective disadvantage, the cultural politics of diversity seeks recognition and visibility as the end itself” (2013, p. 772). Thus, journalistic discourses about multiculturalism and difference in the media such as the celebratory coverage of TV’s diversity elide the continuing need for structural change. The visibility of the exceptional few ideologically allows for the structural exclusion of the many. Industry studies released during the 2014–2015 season actually found minimal change in critical positions of institutional power (Directors Guild of America/DGA 2015; Hunt et al. 2016; Hunt and Ramon 2015; Negrón-Muntaner and Abbas 2015; Smith et al. 2015, 2016). For instance,

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in the 2014–2015 TV season, of the 3910 episodes aired on TV, 69% (2592) were directed by White men, following by ethnic and racial minority men at 15%, women at 13% and ethnic and racial minority women at 3% of episodes (DGA 2015). Of the 227 TV series examined by the DGA, 22% showed no to minimal hiring of women or ethnic and racial minorities in creative positions with Being Mary Jane (BET) leading the way at 100% diverse hiring.10 Ironically, Shondaland Productions with its predominantly White male directing and writing staff did not rank among the top 50 best shows in diverse hiring. Black-ish, Devious Maids, Fresh off the Boat, Jane the Virgin, and Modern Family did make the top 50 list by hiring women and ethnic and racial minorities to direct at least 40% of the episodes. With regards to film, where directors play the most significant creative role in the vision of the movie, the CARD report found even greater homogeneity with 82.4% of films released in 2013 and 2014 directed by White men compared to 1.3% by ethnic and racial minority women. From 2007 to 2013, African-American women directed only two major-studio feature movies (Smith et al. 2015). Economic Imperative Frame. Interestingly, journalistic texts that did not foreground the frame of Hollywood exceptionalism instead used the industry studies to deploy capitalist logics in celebration of Hollywood’s perceived progress. Specifically, the economic imperative frame focused on findings that movies and TV series with more diverse characters and actors outperformed those with all White casts in the box office and the ratings (Hunt et al. 2016, 2018; Hunt and Ramon 2015). At least 9 out of the 53 stories focused on the industry studies. For example, stories like “Embracing diversity reaps rich reward” (Morial, 7 June 2015) and “Diverse Casts Deliver Higher Ratings, Bigger Box Office” (SiegemundBroka, 25 February 2015) discussed the studies to build a narrative that diversity in Hollywood was economically inevitable and already happening. Journalists also focused on demographic changes as core to Hollywood’s economic survival. The economic imperative frame, similar to the Hollywood exceptionalism frame, centers on diversity on-screen rather than changes in the gender and racial structure of Hollywood. By assuming that demographic change will result in industry adaption, TV on-screen representations of difference are used as evidence of progress. On-screen representational progress is once again equated with long-term structural change. The economic imperative frame inevitably leaves the racial, ethnic, and gender privilege of Hollywood’s power structure uncontested.

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Both the Hollywood exceptionalism and economic imperative frames are illustrative of what Jodi Melamed (2011) terms “neoliberal multiculturalism.” Neoliberal multiculturalism manages the contradictions of ethnic and racial life in the United States. It celebrates incremental steps in screen visibility while leaving the structural inequality of the industry unchallenged. It accepts cultural visibility as a social good while erasing the reality of increasing poverty among ethnic and racial minorities in the United States (Lopez and Patten 2015). And it rationalizes superficial evidence of diversity in terms of the language of market rather than based on the ethics and values of producing change for the common good (Downing and Husband 2005). Institutionalized Racism and Sexism Frame. Not all of the entertainment coverage fell neatly into the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism. A slight minority of the texts (20/53) actively engaged the industry studies to raise concerns with Hollywood’s institutionalized racism and sexism. To demonstrate this frame, the analysis focuses on news coverage about a column published in an online industry publication Deadline Hollywood: “Pilots 2015: The Year of Ethnic Casting” (Andreeva, 24 March 2015).11 In the column, Nellie Andreeva (editor of Deadline Hollywood) reported that talent agencies and casting directors were concerned that Hollywood’s increased desire for diversity was hurting the employment prospects of White actors: But, as is the case with any sea change, some suggest that the pendulum might have swung a bit too far in the opposite direction. Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal.

Andreeva’s report quickly re-circulated in online and print publications with often troubling headlines, such as this online trade site “TV Is Running Out of Roles For White People, Deadline Reports.”12 Colorblind casting is a neoliberal multicultural practice that assumes a level employment field. In color-blind casting, all actors regardless of ethnicity, race, or gender are given an equal opportunity to compete for roles. The anonymous comments by talent agents and casting directors in the Deadline column were widely interpreted as suggesting industry calls for diversity, while healthy for the economic survival of the industry, was resulting in institutional discrimination against White actors.

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Industry studies actually indicate that color-blind casting practices are rare. And talent agencies and casting directors act as primary gatekeepers for women and ethnic and racial minority actors (Hunt et al. 2016; Hunt and Ramon 2015). For example, the talent rosters of the top five Hollywood agencies underrepresent ethnic and racial minority actors, effectively relegating them to less prestigious agencies with less cultural capital in the industry (Hunt et al. 2016). When ethnic and racial minority actors are represented by the major agencies, they are three times less likely to compete for starring or co-starring film and TV roles (ibid., pp. 37–38). Consequently, the talent agents who supply talent for major film and network television productions and the casting directors who filter out the actors who audition for those roles based on color photographs remain two of the greatest barriers to entry for women and ethnic and racial minority actors. Instead of declining roles for White actors, industry studies document the minimal and problematic progress for actors of color. Representations of Latinas/os from the 2010 to 2013 television seasons, which included Modern Family, were actually worse in terms of quantity and quality than it was during the 1950s (Negrón-Muntaner 2014). In film, women have less than 30% of speaking parts (Smith et al. 2014b) and 74% of speaking parts belong to White actors while black actors (4.9%), Latina/o actors (4.4%), Asian actors (4.4%), and Middle Eastern and American Indian actors (less than 2%) remain underrepresented (Smith et al. 2016). With regards to the quality and texture of those roles, the findings indicate an equally troublesome terrain. In 2015, 66% of characters across film, television, and streaming platforms were depicted by men and 71% of characters depicted by White actors (Smith et al. 2016). Though there has been a small gradual improvement in Hollywood representations throughout the past nine years ago, Asian-American, African-American, Latina/o, and Native American characters remain relatively invisible, relegated to secondary roles and constrained by Hollywood’s legacies of gendered ethnic and racial stereotypes (Berg 2000; Del Rio 2006; Béltran 2010; Havens 2013; Joseph 2012; Means Coleman 2002; Molina-Guzmán; 2010; Smith-Shomade and MeansColeman 2013; Squires 2009, 2013; Valdivia 2010). Scholarship on ethnicity and race in the media document a regime of representation that constructs African-American and Latina/o characters as perpetually exotic, foreign, and a cultural threat. It is a regime of representation that entertains through homogenizing stereotypes of differences.

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A seemingly innocuous remark in the Deadline column reveals competing investments in Hollywood’s structure. The public response was swift with the MEMC releasing a statement calling for an apology (which the publication eventually made) and highlighting the privilege and power at play in Hollywood’s resistance to change: Shame on Deadline for giving a platform for the prejudices of a few Hollywood agents who, under the cloak of anonymity, revealed themselves to be among the entertainment industry gatekeepers reluctant to change their unfair and exclusionary practices and make way for progress.

The most journalistically covered response to the Deadline article came from Shonda Rhimes when she tweeted: “1st Reaction: HELL NO. Lemme take off my earrings, somebody hold my purse! 2nd Reaction: Article is so ignorant I can’t even be bothered.”13 Responding to the controversy in a Hollywood Reporter article about the Deadline piece, Rhimes added “In this world in which we all feel we’re so full of gender equality and we’re a postracial [society] and Obama is president, it’s a very good reminder to see the casual racial bias and odd misogyny from a woman written in a paper that we all think of as being so liberal” (Goldberg, 24 March 2015). Rhimes is a major advocate of colorblind casting. Tony Goldwin the showrunner for How to Get Away With Murder has stated that it was his tutelage as a writer for Scandal that encouraged him to cast Viola Davis in a role written for a White man (Goldwin 2015). The push against the racial and gender bias of talent agents contrasts with the more celebratory frames of Hollywood exceptionalism and emerging economic imperatives. Despite progress in diverse TV representations, the Deadline column made visible that the battle for Hollywood equity goes beyond the screen. And that at stake in the struggle over representation is the loss of White patriarchal power and privilege. The frame of institutional racism and sexism mostly found in editors and columns rather than news articles injects an oppositional narrative critical of Hollywood’s entrenched power structure. The comments in the Deadline column and the backlash to it make clear that what is ultimately under contestation is White male institutional privilege in Hollywood, a privilege masked by increasing on-screen diversity.

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East Los High: Innovating Inclusive Models of Production and Representation Changes in television content production, distribution, and audiences present an opportunity for thinking through a potentially transformative representational future outside of traditional Hollywood racial and gender structures. Streaming platforms are developing original content with Latinas/os and other ethnic and racial minorities at the center of their audience strategy. These paid-by-subscriber services know who is paying to access their content and what content they are accessing, and in response, they are paying and hedging their bets on developing original content for their diverse subscriber demographic. Furthermore, because streaming services do not have their content regulated in the same way as network television, they can push the representational boundaries and indulge in unconventional narratives. It is also possible for these services to integrate the online platforms on which many younger audiences stream (smartphones, tablets, and so on) with advertiser content in innovative and extremely targeted ways. Hulu’s first original “transmedia” programming ELH features an all Latina/o production and directing team, all Latina/o writing staff, and all Latina/o cast produced on location in the predominantly Mexican neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Converged Production Model. Blending the genres of telenovelas and public service announcements through a transmedia platform, ELH concluded after its 4th season in 2017 and remains one of Hulu’s most successful show. Since its first season (seasons were made up of shows released at one per week July–August), it has remained among Hulu’s top show for Latina/o viewers (Katie Mota, 2 November 2015).14 For the series’ third season, Hulu decided to make it exclusively available to subscribers forcing their young audiences to find creative ways to access the show. Audiences are encouraged to engage the show through Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And there is a transmedia production and writing staff dedicated to developing its online content, which includes several fictional vlogs by the characters as well as other ancillary content such as links to resources. While almost all television content now has some transmedia/social media component, what is unique about ELH is that from its creation and development the executive producers positioned the transmedia element as central to the success of the show. President and executive producer of Wise Entertainment, Katie Mota, was introduced to the

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concept of convergence and transmedia production while completing a Master’s in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research. For her thesis, she examined the changing media environment in India, Mexico, and the United States and developed a theoretical framework for using transmedia content in educational entertainment: From there, really, from the theoretical, I created a proposal of how to basically apply my theory into practice. Having done what we had done, what I was doing for Population Media Center all over the world, except this time it was going to be in the U.S. market. This time it was going to be a transmedia series with television as the tent pole, and then transmedia around it, going deeper into character story and social issues, and also then connecting, interacting with fans.

The Population Media Center, an international organization dedicated to using educational entertainment to disseminate information about girls and women’s health and reducing unplanned pregnancies, financed the project in collaboration with a team of non-profit partners. After its first season success, Hulu picked up the rights to the show, providing them with financial to hire guild workers and improve the production values. From the beginning, Mota believed digital technology was the key to reaching her desired audience and achieving her ultimate pedagogical goal: to provide sexual education information to urban Latinas. According to Mota, she turned down offers from television networks in favor of Hulu. Her decision was based on Hulu executive’s support for the all Latina/o cast, unconventional and controversial storylines, and the fact young viewers would be connected to the Internet enabling them to engage, navigate, and more easily find online resources: They never asked to change (controversial elements) or take them out. They’ve been very supportive of us, thoughtfully using our method where we’re working with tons of nonprofit organizations and experts and specialists and teens themselves to understand how to best attempt to incorporate these issues in a thoughtful way. It felt like for all of those reasons it was the right place. (Mota)

According to Mota, networks interested in the show wanted more control over the storylines and casting. Demands by the network to change

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the all Latina/o cast to a multiracial ensemble more typical of network television was a line Mota was not willing to cross. The networks wanted the creative concept without the cultural and social politics of the show. However, for Hulu, it was a low-risk investment given the service’s desire for original content and the show’s already in place external financing. Rupturing Representational Regimes. On ELH, each season ends and begins with an audience debriefing of students from East Los High School. In partnership with academic consultants, community consultants, and student consultants, Bedoya (executive producer of programming and new media) observes and participates in the focus groups held with several hundred students. The focus group research dictates everything from casting decisions and plot developments to what type of information the teenagers need and are looking for. For example, based on research from Season 1, the producers decided to write out the main protagonist because students could not relate to her character. And in response to queer students who said they could not see themselves in the story, the producers decided to write in an LGBT storyline (Bedoya, 22 October 2015). The show also included a storyline on domestic violence last season, and this season they are addressing the issue of undocumented youth, drugs, gangs, and gang violence. One of the key mantras for the showrunner Carlos Portugal is staying as true as possible to the lives of those they represent. The show takes place on location and community writers are employed to ensure the language used is reflective of East Los Angeles Latina/o high school students. Because they work collaboratively with more than 15 public health non-profit advocacy organizations such as the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Advocates for Youth, and Planned Parenthood, the show is carefully checked for accuracy and digitally linked with the appropriate information and assistance resources (Bedoya, 22 October 2015). The program has an advisory board comprised of some of the advocacy organizations, academic consultants, and community representatives to help guide the representation of the issues, Latinas/os, and the youth. As a result of those consultations, the writers often edit the script to more accurately reflect issues and information. In addition, a research and development team, along with the actors, staff Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram accounts throughout the airing of the show and sometimes during the off-season. Finally, the transmedia content is at the center of development:

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Although we will do the occasional PSA (public service announcement), we try to really weave the net, go deeper and make that another entertaining and engaging experience that has (the PSA) woven in, but allows people to self-navigate into the places and the characters that interest the most.

All of the research, the streamed show and the transmedia content work together to produce a seamless, provocative, educational, and ultimately entertaining program with Latina/o audiences at the center. ELH producers have transformed the genres of television dramas and education programming through bypassing the White patriarchal structures of network TV. Working outside the institutional constraints of Hollywood has allowed ELH to rupture dominant representational tropes through story development and writing that pushes through stereotypes to tell narratives that are achingly complex and familiar to young marginalized audiences and yet foreign in that they are rarely told on network TV. The writers and executive producers of the show claim they purposefully play with stereotypes knowing that the stereotypes will be deconstructed by the end of the season (Bedoya, 22 October 2015). The success of ELH demonstrates the potential for the digital as well as film to shift the power and privilege of contemporary Hollywood.

Conclusion Although network TV depictions of ethnic and racial minorities are incrementally improving, executive decision-making and content production remain constrained by the racial and gender power structures of Hollywood. It is that privilege that is under contestation in the Hollywood paradox– the lack of diversity in film and TV production yet TV’s increasing shift toward on-screen representational diversity. However, the focus by news media and cultural activists on improving diversity on the screen shifts attention away from questions of institutional power. As Gray (2013) argues, the focus on the representational relieves pressure from the need to change economic, employment, and labor practices. In that sense, conflicts over the lack of diversity in Hollywood are indicative of broader social contestations over power and capital. The structures of US cultural production continue to stabilize White patriarchal heteronormative privilege by preserving Capital, with a capital C. Thus, the approaches by which texts are produced and distributed might

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look different, and the texts may be more visually and thus superficially reflective of the diversity that defines contemporary Western society, but the structural conditions of inequality upon which Western capitalism depends remain stable and relatively unchanged. For the past decade, reports out of UCLA, USC, and Columbia document that the people (1) who own and run TV content, (2) who greenlight projects, and (3) who cast the programs, (4) who produce, write, or direct, and the guilds who provide skilled technical labor are populated by predominantly White, heterosexual, cis-men. As a consequence, the ideological and structural mechanism of inequality by which whiteness is maintained and reified in US film and television is color blindness. It is an ideology that depends on color-blind and multicultural ensemble casting—a casting strategy that uses race to erase racial specificity, engages ethnicity in order to silence, that makes queerness visible without subjectivity. Audiences, scholars, and producers need to demand and advocate for production and scholarship that is color conscious. As the producers of ELH recognize, we must “see” difference and in doing so be conscious of the filters and biases that are part of our automatic cognitive processes used every minute of our day to make sense of the world we experience and those who are different from us. Bedoya notes the advent of digital technologies, specifically streaming platforms, has placed everything in flux, “Now the game has changed. All of the shows are approaching subjects that they never would have before. I think that it’s a very exciting time. Nothing is completely off the table anymore.” Hulu and Netflix’s strategic targeting of ethnic and racial minority audiences through pre-existing—and popular with these audiences—and original programming specifically developed for them are placing unexpected pressures on advertiser-dependent networks and big budget film studios. The digital turn in entertainment media production is shifting power structures ever so slightly, since even on streaming platforms the decision-makers and the majority of original programming production is dominated by White men. Only the future will tell if digital media will result in the de-coupling of difference and power for the media at large. That said, programs like ELH indicate the possibilities that exist for transformations in production and content. Together the continuing pressure on Hollywood gatekeepers by academics, social media activists and media activist organizations may result in a new hegemonic formation, a hegemonic formation that substantially incorporates the interest of emerging ethnic and racial minority populations in the United States.

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Notes







1. I use the term “Hollywood” as an umbrella term for mainstream television and film production and texts, the majority of which are produced in the greater Los Angeles area in CA. Additionally, the majority of the executive offices for the major production studios as well as the entertainment divisions of the television and streaming networks are housed in the greater Los Angeles area. 2. h ttps://variety.com/2019/film/news/spike-lee-oscars-green-book 1203148178/. 3. Plus Media Solutions. (2014, June 27). New York: AG Schneiderman Announces Settlement to Ensure Greater Diversity in the Film/TV Production Industry, 27 June. Retrieved from Lexus-Nexus Database 21 January 2016. 4. Directors Guild of America, Inc., Joelle Dobrow, Luther James, Lorraine Raglin and Cesar Torres, Plaintiffs, V. Warnerbrothers, Inc., Defendant Directors Guild of America, Inc., Bill Crain, Dick Look, Sharon Mann, Susan Smitman, and Frank Zun-Iga, Plaintiffs, V. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Defendant. 1985 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16325; 2 Fed. R. Serv. 3d (Callaghan) 1429. 5. http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/hollywoods-biased-hiring-practicesagainst-women-subject-of-a-c-l-u-inquiry-1201493101/. 6. Author transcript. “Diversity in Casting: A Panel.” University of Southern California, Wallis Annenberg Hall, 18 June 2015. 7. http://variety.com/2016/tv/features/television-race-diversity-ratings1201712266/. 8.  Lee Daniels Production also produced Monster’s Ball (2001) and Precious (2009). 9. h ttp://www.dga.org/News/PressReleases/2015/150825-EpisodicDirector-Diversity-Report.aspx. 10. h ttp://deadline.com/2015/03/tv-pilots-ethnic-casting-trend-backlash-1201386511/. 11.  http://laist.com/2015/03/25/ethnic_castings_tv_White_shortage.php. 12.  https://twitter.com/shondarhimes/status/580592562781716480. 13. There is no public data on viewership for streaming platforms. 14. I discussed this observation more in-depth in http://www.flowjournal. org/2018/10/contemporary-television/.

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Siegemund-Broka, Austin. “Diverse Casts Deliver Higher Ratings, Bigger Box Office.” The Hollywood Reporter, February 25, 2015. Smith, S., M. Choueiti, and K. Pieper. Race and Ethnicity in 600 Popular Films: Examining on Screen Portrayals and Behind the Camera Diversity. Annenberg School for Communication Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative, 2014a. Smith, S., M. Choueiti, and K. Pieper. Gender Inequality in Popular Films: Examining on Screen Portrayals and Behind-the-Scenes Employment Patterns in Motion Pictures Released 2007–2013. Annenberg School for Communication Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative, 2014b. Smith, S., M. Choueiti, and K. Pieper. Race and Ethnicity in 600 Popular Films: Examining on Screen Portrayals and Behind the Camera Diversity. Annenberg School for Communication Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative, 2015. Smith, S., M. Choueiti, and K. Pieper. Inclusion & Invisibility? Gender, Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative. Annenberg School for Communication Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative, 2016. Smith-Shomade, B., and R. Means-Coleman. Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Squires, C. African Americans and the Media. London, UK: Polity, 2009. Squires, C. 2013. The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press, 2013. State of the Media: Advertising and Audiences Part 2: By Demographics. New York: Nielsen Company, 2012. http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2012-Reports/nielsen-advertising-audiences-report-spring-2012.pdf. Theatrical Market Statistics. Los Angeles, CA: Motion Picture Association of America, December 31, 2014. Valdivia, A. Latina/os in the Media. Polity, London, 2010. Wong, T. “Do Not Adjust Your Set; TV Shows Are Becoming More Diverse, But There’s Still a Long Way to Go.” The Toronto Star, November 19, 2015.

PART II

Colorblind Racism in Hollywood Films

CHAPTER 4

Living in Zootopia: Tracking the Neoliberal Subject in a Colorblind World Sarah Nilsen

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black male was pulled over while driving with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her 4-year-old daughter in the St. Paul, Minnesota suburb of Falcon Heights. This was the fifty-second time in his life that Castile had been pulled over for a traffic violation. Forty seconds after being asked to show his driver’s license by Jeronimo Yanez, a 28-year-old police officer from the suburban town of St. Anthony, Castile, was shot seven times while still sitting in his car. The shooting became national news when Castile’s girlfriend posted a live stream video on Facebook immediately after the shooting; the post was viewed nearly 2.5 million times by that afternoon. For Castile’s killing, Yanez was charged with three felonies and was acquitted of all charges on June 16, 2017. After the trial, Yanez’s attorney, Thomas Kelly, took a decidedly colorblind stance toward the charges, claiming that the “shooting had nothing to do with race” (Jacobo). Due to the national attention that the Black Lives Matters movement had brought to the issue of police killings of African-American males and its impact on the public discourse Sarah Nilsen (*)  Film and Television Studies, Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_4

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surrounding institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system, the racial aspects of the case were immediately recognizable to the thousands of people protesting his killing. The initial motivation for pulling over Castile was based on an explicit case of racial profiling. The day before the shooting, police had released images of suspects from a recent robbery and described them as “black men with shoulder-length or longer dreadlocks” (Mannix). The next day, while Officer Yanez was patrolling in the area of the previous robbery, he radioed to a nearby squad that he was planning to pull over Castile’s car because the “two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery…The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger” (Jacobo). Weeks of peaceful protests and vigils followed the shooting, and government officials joined in their support of the protests. Minnesota Governor, Mark Dayton, stated he was “shocked and horrified by what occurred last night. This kind of behavior is unacceptable…Would this have happened if those passengers would have been white? I don’t think it would have” (Chan). After Yanez’s acquittal, thousands again marched in protest.

Using Zootopia for Anti-bias Policing Almost exactly a year after the community of St. Paul dealt with the traumatic killing of Castile and the public outcry that followed, the local St. Paul police department chose to screen the Walt Disney Animation Studio’s film Zootopia to its 800 employees. Presented with the opportunity for the department to have a fact based and informative discussion about the systemic racism that persists within the US criminal justice system, the department selected a children’s animated film about a rabbit who decides she wants to become a police officer and is able to use her exceptional personal initiative and determination to achieve her dreams. Zootopia (2016) was an international blockbuster, winning the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and going on to become the fifth highest grossing animated film of all time and the thirtieth highest grossing film of all time. Film critics were overwhelmingly positive in their praise of the film’s handling of serious social issues with Rotten Tomatoes giving the film an approval rating of 97% based on 267 reviews. Many of the reviewers addressed the relevance of the film to the divisive cultural issues that surrounded the 2016 presidential campaign. In her review, “Zootopia: Disney’s Antidote to Donald Trump’s Racial Animus,”

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Melissa Leon argued that “in a year when the leading Republican presidential frontrunner has made xenophobia, Islamophobia, and general bigotry a core part of his platform of lunacy, Zootopia makes a gutsy (if at times jumbled) attempt at breaking down the evils of prejudice” (Leon). In an interview, Ginnifer Goodwin, the film’s voiceover star, also spoke to the divisive cultural moment out of which the film arose, arguing that the movie spoke directly to the “charged racial, religious, and gender rhetoric swirling around the current Republican presidential nomination campaign” (Siegel). The St. Paul police department echoed these readings of the film, justifying its selection as part of their anti-bias training due to its “handling of subjects like prejudice and bias” and its ability to “talk about some serious issues [police] face every day” (Glover). The film was a huge hit with the police department employees who thought that this “animated metaphor for race relations could help police in the real world see those same issues in a new light” (ibid.). Sgt. Amanda Heu, who chose the film after watching it with her young daughter, argued that “[w]hen you see the story, it has bias and prejudice woven throughout…It examines bias through a completely different lens…it boiled down the psychological construct that perpetuates discrimination and prejudice in America” (ibid.). The Zootopia bias training proved such a hit with the St. Paul police department that the police chief shared the idea with other city police departments and community groups to assist them in their own anti-bias training. This chapter considers the decision on the part of St. Paul’s police department to use Zootopia as part of their anti-bias training in order to analyze the ways in which the social ideology of colorblindness has been used to justify the persistence of racial injustice in the US criminal justice system. The Disney filmmakers created in Zootopia a comforting parable about the myth of colorblindness: through individual initiative and drive, a young bunny is able to surmount the prejudice of those around her and become fully integrated into an honorable, hardworking police station that does not judge people based on their racial or ethnic identity, but rather on their abilities and initiative. Consistent with many reactionary colorblind narratives, the film deploys both anthropomorphic and dehumanizing tropes that still rely on the most overt forms of racial stereotyping, including the racist myth of the superpredator,1 in order to present an image of an integrated animal utopia. As the legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez describes, colorblind politics presents itself as “steadfastly opposed to racism and ever ready to condemn those

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who publically use racial profanity. We fiercely oppose racism and stand prepared to repudiate anyone who dares to utter the n-word. Meanwhile, though, the new racial discourse keeps up a steady drumbeat of subliminal grievances and color-coded solidarity. But let’s be honest: some groups commit more crimes and use more welfare, some groups are mainly unskilled and illiterate illegals, and some religions inspire violence and don’t value human life” (Haney 2014, p. 4 emphasis in the original).

The History of Colorblindness in the US Criminal Justice System The Black Lives Matter movement came to national prominence during the Obama presidency after the shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. His death sparked widespread protests, prompted a White House commission to call for reforms, galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, and led many police agencies across the nation to examine their use of deadly force overwhelmingly against African-American males. As the Black Lives Matter movement garnered national attention, and award-winning books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015), and the documentary, 13th (Ava DuVernay 2016) entered the public discourse, there appeared to be a cultural moment of social recognition about the catastrophic effects of racial bias in the US justice system leading to the mass incarceration of African-American men in the United States. Two days after the killing of Philando Castile, President Obama, in a speech in Warsaw, Poland on July 8, 2016, turned to statistical evidence to highlight the persistence of systemic racism within the US criminal justice system. I want to give people a few statistics to try to put in context why emotions are so raw around these issues. According to various studies, not just one, but a wide range of studies that have been carried out over a number of years, African-Americans are 30 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over. After being pulled over, African-Americans and Hispanics are three times more likely to be searched. Last year, African-Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites. African-Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites. African-American defendants are 75 percent more likely to be charged with offenses carrying mandatory

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minimums. They receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than comparable whites arrested for the same crime. So if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population who make up only 30 percent of the general population make up more than half of the incarcerated population. Now, these are the facts. And when incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us. This is not just a black issue. It’s not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we should all care about, all fair-minded people should be concerned. (Rhodan)

President Obama’s call for Americans to recognize and confront the racism that permeates the US justice system in order to demand structural reform ran up against arguments centered on a reactionary colorblindness that initially arose in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the civil rights movement. The concept of colorblindness entered into the justice system in the famous dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 that created the “separate but equal” standard that allowed decades of Jim Crow segregation and racial oppression to become law. In his dissent, Justice Harlan wrote that “[o]ur constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens” (quoted in Haney 2011, p. 809). This concept of colorblindness and the law would be central to Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. By the 1960s and 1970s, though, colorblindness became a means to push back against attempts to use race and racism as a justifiable rationale for a legal ruling. People opposed to integration used the ideology of colorblindness as an argument against affirmative action programs and as a way to maintain a system of racial inequity by arguing that “colorblindness affirmatively prohibited race-conscious integration measures” (Haney 2011, p. 810). Colorblindness became a central part of Richard Nixon’s well documented “Southern strategy,” which allowed the Republican Party to come to power by attracting southern Democratic voters with “coded appeals to racial fears. Chief among these racial proxies was ‘crime,’ which served as a potent synonym for the threatening presence and demands of nonwhites” (Haney, p. 812). Calls of law and order were used to sanction a war on crime that disproportionately targeted poor, urban, minority neighborhoods. As a legal rule, colorblindness functions in two key ways. “The first, and most

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widely critiqued, involves opposing every express use of race, now overwhelmingly confined to remedial efforts [primarily affirmative action programs]. The second…entails upholding as ‘not-racism’ gross racial disparities corresponding directly to long standing racial hierarchies, today typical of structural racism” (Haney, p. 816).

The Black Lives Matters Movement and Colorblindness A major driver for the creation of the Black Lives Matters movement was the disproportionate number of African-Americans killed by police each year. Following the public uproar after the killing of Michael Brown, the Washington Post became the first organization to analyze news reports and other public sources to create a public database of fatal police shootings. According to their data, police have fatally shot on average 1000 people a year and there is a significant racial component to these killings. “Since The Post began tracking fatal police shootings, blacks have been shot and killed at rates significantly higher than their percentage of the overall U.S. population. Blacks make up about 13 percent of the population but 23 percent of those fatally shot by police since 2015. For shootings of unarmed people, blacks were 36 percent of those killed.” According to Haney Lopez, [c]olorblindness is a form of racial jujitsu. It co-opts the moral force of the civil rights movement, deploying that power to attack racial remediation and simultaneously defend embedded racism. It defends racial injustice directly, for instance by insisting that massive racial disparities are “not racism.” And it does so indirectly, and perhaps ultimately more powerfully, by providing cover for racial stereotypes expressed in cultural and behavioral terms, for example through images of minorities as criminals. (Haney 2011, p. 817)

President Trump’s presidency has been riddled with calls for the kind of law and order that plays on the fears of the criminality of minority groups. His appointment of the Republican Senator Jeff Sessions to head the Justice Department was intentionally meant to undermine the progress that had been made under the Obama administration to investigate racial bias in policing. As the Washington Post reported, “[u]-nder Session’s leadership, the Justice Department has rolled back efforts to

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investigate police departments before releasing public reports about their efforts—a practice put in place during the Obama administration after activists complained about law enforcement’s bias against people of color” (Scott). During the latter years of the Obama administration as the police shootings of men of color became national news, the Justice Department put in systems to “hold law enforcement more accountable for their actions” (ibid.). Session’s last act before his firing by President Trump was to sign an order “making it more difficult for the Justice Department to investigate and implement reform at police departments with patterns of abuse, questionable shootings, racism, and other constitutional violations” (Balko). Racial tensions and divides within the United States have become further exacerbated by Trump’s recourse to a “racialized fear of crime and a racialized distaste for the poor” that have “remained central elements of American electoral politics for the last four decades” (Haney 2011, p. 815). A Pew Research Center national survey, conducted in the fall of 2018, showed deep partisan divides in how people viewed the serious social issues facing the United States. In the survey, 71% of Democratic voters said the way racial and ethnic minorities are treated by the criminal justice system is a very big problem for the country, compared with just 10% of Republican voters. These stark differences between Republican and Democrat responses represent significant and sizable differences in perception about the persistence of racism in the United States and the conflation of policing with issues of law and order.

Creating Mickey Mouse: Anthropomorphism and the Walt Disney Studio Walt Disney Studio’s reliance on the anthropomorphism of animal characters was determined by the premier of a walking and talking Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928. His rise to fame as a global icon for the studio’s aesthetic and narrative style ensured that such characters would continue. By the time of the appearance of Mickey Mouse, many early film animators had learned that a heavy reliance on animal characters endowed with human traits, enabled them to create primarily short, comedic films imbedded in, and reflective of, the cultural mores and traditions of the period. Animal cartoons were significantly easier to draw than human forms, and they were immediately

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recognizable, particularly for a rapidly industrializing society that was still closely linked to its agrarian past and its close proximity to both wild and domesticated animals. Additionally, as research has shown (Sevillano and Fiske), audiences create immediate and close identification with nonhuman animal characters and, in particular, those characters that are most closely aligned with human characters. To illustrate, the creators of Zootopia chose to use a female “bunny” as their protagonist because of the positive and warm association most people have for rabbits when viewed as “bunnies” (e.g., the Easter bunny or the Playboy bunny). Animators frequently turn to animal characters to stand in for human characters and draw on popular stereotypes about well-known nonhuman species to caricature the character’s innate personality traits and physiology. The stereotyping of these animals provides a socially understood and simplified template for animators to draw on when seeking to create specific types of characters. This cinematic shorthand of early animation also allowed animators to reproduce stereotypes of entire species of animals while simultaneously bolstering popular stereotypes of specific racial, ethnic, and gendered groups. For example, Zootopia uses Italian-American stereotypes, making the crime boss, Mr. Big, a rat (actually an Arctic shrew), into a parody of Marlon Brando in The Godfather; Mr. Big’s dim-witted, frivolous, and materialistic daughter, Fru Fru Shrew, is a “shrew-sized send-up of Snooki from Jersey Shore” (Crewe 2017, p. 32). This process of using nonhuman stereotypes to reinforce human stereotypes has been particularly true in the history of the animated film, which from its origins in the 1900s, relied heavily on nonhuman species to create AfricanAmerican caricatures (see Lehman, The Colored Cartoon). Early animation, including the Mickey Mouse shorts and the Silly Symphonies, was primarily gag driven with limited concern about narrative continuity, and animators would frequently utilize animal characters to create short comedic events that were fully grounded in an anthropocentric world. These stereotyped animal characters reinforced an implied, stereotyped human form, and the reliance on nonhuman animal characters provided animators with greater latitude in creating characters so that audiences could easily laugh at these racially stereotyped nonhuman surrogates. The anthropomorphism of animals in animation provided filmmakers with the ability to reflect and reinforce contemporaneous social structures and behaviors, such as the racist practices of Jim Crow America, under the cover of animalistic caricature (see Lehman), while

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simultaneously encouraging the most excessive forms of dehumanization of minorities through the widespread circulation of racialized images of nonhuman animals to represent specific racial and ethnic groups. In many animated cartoons, “animals are humanized, one might even say hyperhumanized, by caricature: the fox is cunning, the lion is brave, the dog is loyal. Whereas the same stories told about humans might lose the moral in a clutter of individuating detail of the sort we are usually keen to know about other people, substituting animals as actors strips the characterization down to prototypes” (Daston and Mitman 2006, p. 9). The animation of human and nonhuman stereotypes has evolved over time, reflecting social and cultural transformations, and points to the ways that anthropomorphism in animation is socially constructed and historically determined. As the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould documents in his famous article, “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” the spunky and wisecracking Mickey Mouse of the 1920s eventually was replaced by a much more staid and domesticated mouse in the 1950s. Over the decades, the more rodent-like attributes of the original mouse were replaced with a juvenile looking and more respectable and straight-laced Mickey Mouse whose transformation occurred in response to changing social and cultural values. The evolution of Mickey Mouse exemplifies how “humans assume a community of thought and feeling between themselves and a surprisingly wide array of animals” and additionally how “they recruit animals to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of their own experience and fantasies” (Daston and Mitman, p. 3). The Walt Disney Studio’s creative model of utilizing the anthropomorphism of nonhuman agents to produce human stories that resonant with a worldwide audience reached its apotheosis with the merger of Pixar Studios under the leadership of John Lasseter.

Contemporary Anthropomorphism and the Walt Disney Animation Studios Under the creative direction of John Lasseter, Pixar Studios, in order to demonstrate the powerful storytelling potential of computer-generated animation, relied heavily on the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects in almost all of their early and immensely successful films including Toy Story (1995) and Cars (2006). Comparable to the use of nonhuman animals in animation, Lasseter was able to bring to life inanimate objects,

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such as cars and toys, by building characters for these objects through a combination of popular conceptions of the objects and the addition of often humorous human characteristics that depended on stereotyping (e.g., Italian stereotyping of Guido and Luigi in Cars). After the acquisition of Pixar by Walt Disney Studios in 2006, Lasseter was named the chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation and was the executive producer of Zootopia. Due to charges of alleged sexual misconduct with his employees, Lasseter left Walt Disney Company in 2018. Zootopia was first announced as an upcoming Walt Disney Animation feature film in 2013 and was released on March 4, 2016. The film was therefore in production during the second term of then President Obama, the first African-American president in the United States. This was a period that saw the rise of the Black Lives Matters movement along with a heavily racist backlash against the Obama administration, which then led to the presidential election of Donald Trump in November of 2016. The killing of Philando Castile occurred four months after Zootopia’s release. During this period of inflamed racial divisions within the country, Walt Disney Animation developed and produced Zootopia. Documenting the creative processes undertaken by the crew in their creation of the film points to the ways in which dominant racial ideologies become manifest in the creative production and manufacturing of Hollywood films. As psychologists have documented, in anthropomorphism, knowledge about humans in general, or self-knowledge more specifically, functions as the known and often readily accessible base for induction about the properties of unknown agents…Knowledge about humans in general, or the self in particular, is likely to serve as the basis for induction primarily because such knowledge is acquired earlier and is more richly detailed than knowledge about nonhuman agents. (Epley 2007, p. 866)

The individual knowledge base that the Zootopia crew brought to their creative choices for the film arose from the experiences of the three directors, Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush, and the seven writers, including Howard, Moore, Bush, Jim Reardon, Josie Trinidad, Phil Johnston, and Jennifer Lee; the main creative visionaries for the film, like the majority of the Hollywood film industry (see Darnell Hunt study), were overwhelmingly male, middle-aged, and all white. While constructing the narrative of Zootopia and its focus on racial intolerance and prejudice, the filmmakers drew on their own knowledge

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of prejudice and bias to create the nonhuman characters and world that the characters inhabit. Signaling the human knowledge base that forms the core of the film’s anthropomorphism, Lasseter noted that “[m]ost of the time, stories in animal films are really just human tales - if you replace the animals with humans, it would be exactly the same story…I challenged the filmmakers to imagine Zootopia as a world that is truly and uniquely animal, where there are no people and mammals have evolved to human levels of intelligence” (Lasseter). Lasseter’s challenge led the Zootopia creative directors and writers to draw on their own personal experiences of race and racism in the United States to produce an ideologically anthropocentric story about prejudice during a period of racial tension in the United States that functioned to celebrate the dominant racial idea of colorblindness while reproducing insidious racial stereotypes of human and nonhuman subjects.

Anthropomorphism in Zootopia In discussing the original idea for Zootopia, Lasseter emphasized repeatedly that the core concept of the film was to create a world that is “truly and uniquely animal, where there are no people and mammals have evolved to human levels of intelligence” (Lasseter). Lasseter’s stated claim that the filmmakers would create a biocentric world that foregrounds the choices and decisions of nonhuman agents points to the ways in which anthropomorphism is often used to bolster anthropocentrism and speciesism. Following Lasseter’s reasoning, once nonhuman animals have reached the apex of human intelligence, they would immediately choose to build themselves a utopian community based on the design and concept of a zoo. These advanced species of nonhuman actors would additionally choose to build a manufactured and artificial environment that relies solely on twentieth-century human architecture and technology, including carbon-spewing automobiles and manufactured environments that erase natural spaces and replace them with radically altered and non-native habitats. As these species have evolved to achieve human intelligence, they have also undergone significant biological transformations in order to inhabit the anthropocentric landscapes that the animators created. Only a select group of mammals have undergone significant enough evolutionary change to have the cognitive ability necessary to choose to inhabit this zoo-based society.

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As part of the pre-production research necessary for the production of the film, the team of animators relied on visits to Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, and the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos in order to “learn what an artificially created environment made by animals might look like” (Jules 2016, p. 44). The filmmakers drew on the aesthetic style and design approach of the Disney Imagineers to reduce nonhuman animals to consumable objects for human entertainment. In order for the film to be understandable to its children’s audience, Zootopia’s directors, Bryon Howard and Rich Moore, kept reminding their staff “to put things in Zootopia that people would find in their own lives. Apartment houses, ice cream parlors, even a sidewalk vendor selling bootlegged DVDs of titles like Wreck It Rhino” (Eagan). The selected animals were then placed into segregated neighborhoods based on the physical and biological traits of each species. By discarding the scientific and objective behavior of the animals in Zootopia, the filmmakers relied on symbols of ethnic identity to signal the natural range of the selected mammals in the film. In this process, the biological needs of the species were replaced with simplified, fabricated human markers of ethnicity. Each of the different boroughs in Zootopia were created so that they had a “distinct feel the filmmakers hope will delight the audiences. They’re animal environments mashed up with a human equivalent. Sahara Square is the desert plus Dubai, with lots of Moroccan architecture. The Rainforest District feels like the jungle plus Southeast Asia. Tundratown has a Russian feel” (Jules, p. 44). The neighborhoods within these districts are further segregated based on the physical size of the animals, such as the miniature rodent community, Rodentia, and the massive, elephant ice-cream parlor, Jumbeaux’s, Café. The film’s production designers “ultimately decided to stick to four main sizes: tiny, for mice; small, for bunnies; regular, which is comparable to human size and works for everything from sheep to cows; and jumbo, for elephants” (Jules, p. 16). Additional evolutionary changes were necessary so that the animals could inhabit the spaces of this anthropomorphized world. Therefore, the filmmakers decided that the animals have to “talk and walk upright, yet maintain the essence of the animal itself,” and all the animals have “opposable thumbs because they need to execute too many tasks that require thumbs. So [the animators] made it part of the logic of this world - they evolved that way” (Jules, p. 28). Howard’s original concept for the film was “an espionage plot along the lines of James Bond or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” According to

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Howard, “[I]t was a spy movie, and people told me the spy thing wasn’t new anymore, but that the first act, where all these animals are in this animal city—why don’t you just make that the whole movie?” (Eagan). The original concept was worked on by the Walt Disney Story Trust, a group of directors, writers, and heads of story at the studio; they “worked on the idea that this was Nick’s story, that we were seeing Zootopia through Nick’s eyes. He was an oppressed character. He’s a fox, kind of sneaky, a con man. He felt the world owed him something, that he was not treated well as a fox” (ibid.). When the film was well into production, the team decided to shift the story to Judy Hopps, the heroine bunny, whose dream is to become a police officer. “See this world through Judy’s eyes” is how Moore describes it. “Coming into it as an outsider who’s optimistic, who still believes in the credo of the city, that anyone can be anything” (ibid.). The filmmakers relied on popular folk knowledge about nonhuman animals in order to create a human-centered world that would be easily recognizable to its human audience. Physiological alterations were easily made if warranted by the conceptual designs of the film and yet one biological determinant the filmmakers considered essential to the story. Once the filmmakers decided to limit the film to mammals, they then discovered the big “aha! Moment” that became a central tenet of Zootopia: mammals are divided into groups of predator and prey. After taking field trips to the Natural History Museum “to examine animal pelts,” and visiting the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the team went on a “safari in Africa to observe animal behavior in the wild” (Jules, p. 10). On their safari research trip, the screenwriter and co-director Jared Bush was inspired by the sight of wild animals gathering around a watering hole. According to Bush, “All the animals hung out together. Natural enemies, predators and prey, were at peace. They weren’t fighting or eating each other. It made us understand that our city shouldn’t be divided along these lines either” (ibid., p. 44). And yet, as most adult viewers are aware, prey and predators typically do not peacefully cohabitate in the same environment.2 Bush’s construction of the watering hole as the central metaphor for Zootopia, in which predators and prey are at peace, arose from the desire of the filmmakers to create a narrative about prejudice and bias in our own society. Contextualized within the heightened awareness of racial injustices at the time of its development, the radical biological restructuring of the animal surrogates in the wholly manufactured and

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anthropomorphized world of Zootopia was necessary in order to create a children’s morality tale about the negative impacts of intolerance on society. In stark contrast to Lasseter’s claims that Zootopia was modeled on an animal-centered world, the filmmakers chose to alter radically the fundamental workings of the biological world in order to create a uniquely American vision of the utopic integration of mammals who are able to overcome their biological drives as prey and predator in order to live in harmony. Implicit in this vision of multispecies comingling is the necessity that the carnivorous predators learn to deny their biological need to hunt and consume meat. Just as the filmmakers rewrote the biological reality of a waterhole in order to espouse a colorblind ideology, they additionally chose to highlight the prey and predator divide that allowed for the anthropomorphism of prey and dehumanization of predators who cannot successfully fit into the dominant culture, thus reinforcing the racialized stereotype of minorities as (super)predators. In early versions of the story, “the division between prey and predator was overt, with prey animals exploiting their strength in numbers to dominate the predators, who were forced to wear collars that prevented accidental expressions of their natural aggression” (Jules, p. 28). But according to the director, Rich Moore, “the world was so negative. And [director] Byron [Howard] is such a positive person. We wanted the story to reflect his vision and personality more” (ibid.). The stability of ecosystems is dependent on the maintenance of prey-predator relationships with neither group a negative force that can be easily removed without significant disruption to the ecological system. But through a process of anthropomorphism, in Zootopia the prey became the positive, dominant species and the predators, the negative, oppressive species. As Howard explained, “It’s a buddy movie, so they had to be in conflict. Bunnies are very clearly prey animals—they’re passive, defenseless, and soft. And foxes are their natural enemies” (ibid.). “They began imagining how these mammals might evolve if they simply put a history of violence behind them but also asked the question of what happens if that fear might still be present in some way” (Truitt). Zootopia opens with a group of middle school animals performing in a school play. In the opening monologue of the play, a young bunny, Judy, walks nervously through a “dark, foreboding forest” (Zootopia script). Young Judy narrates that “Fear. Treachery. Bloodlust! Thousands of years ago, these were the forces that ruled our world. A world where prey were scared of predators. And predators had an uncontrollable

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biological urge to maim and maul and….” A jaguar leaps on stage attacking Judy. She continues in her stage narration to explain that “[b]ack then, the world was divided in two. Vicious predator or Meek prey. But over time, we evolved, and moved beyond our primitive savage ways. Now, predator and prey live in harmony. And every young mammal has multitudinous opportunities” (Zootopia script). The explicit divide between the savage and violent behavior associated with the predator minority and the peaceful, positive nature of the majority prey species continues throughout the script. As one critic noted, though the film was meant to be a “bright, bouncy movie made with a young audience in mind, Zootopia hits on some complicated questions. Can we master our nature, or are our actions determined by our genes? Can a predator choose not to kill? Are our instincts always right?” (Eagan).

Anthropomorphism and Stereotyping The animal characters that the Zootopia filmmakers choose to create and their roles and status in the community are consistent with the ways in which stereotypes impact human views of nonhuman subjects. Recent studies have shown that “human beings perceive animals similarly to the way they perceive other humans” (Sevillano and Fiske, p. 206). The evidence suggests that one of the best ways to learn about when and why people are likely to think of nonhuman agents as humanlike is to consider how people think about other people (Epley, p. 867). Thus, human beings are equipped with a set of social perception tools and generalize their use toward nonhuman animals. That is, “human beings turn animals into social beings” (Sevillano and Fiske, p. 209). Recent work by social psychologists reveals that animals are targets of “human social responses such as mentalizing inferences, emphatic reactions, pro- and anti-social behaviors, prejudice and discrimination, [and] group processes” (Sevillano and Fiske, p. 207). Social psychology has been moving away from focusing on the study of stereotype content and instead has begun to examine the process of stereotyping and the social and psychological forces involved. Recent scholarship has shown that stereotypes can be “captured by two dimensions (warmth and competence) and that subjectively positive stereotypes on one dimension do not contradict prejudice but often are functionally consistent with unflattering stereotypes on the other dimensions” (Fiske et al. 2002, p. 879).3 Thus, the Disney Story Trust decided to shift the focus of the narrative away

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from the fox, Nick, to the rabbit, Judy Hopps, because of her positive and cheery outlook. Moore explained that by seeing the world through Judy’s eyes, “coming into it as an outsider who’s optimistic, who still believes in the credo of the city, that anyone can be anything. When we tried it, the movie just kind of fell into place” (Eagan).

Creating a Colorblind Hero for Zootopia As the heroine and protagonist of the film, Hopps received the most attention and detail in her animation with a team of 70 animators working on the concept art for her animated form and the narratival development of her character. Kira Lehtomaki, the lead animator for the film, “studied rabbits and enjoyed picking out the qualities of rabbits that could be incorporated into an anthropomorphic version.” According to Lehtomaki, “prey animals, like Hopps, might have a hard time standing out from the crowd” but her character resonated with her “on a personal level. Judy Hopps has big dreams and everyone constantly told her that she wasn’t going to make it as a cop because she’s just a dumb bunny, but she preserved and held onto her big dreams” (Wagner). Choosing a female rabbit as the protagonist of the film is an effective way for the filmmakers to create social connection with the character by allowing younger audience members to mentalize the character, a “process by which we perceive an agent as possessing a mind,” and as a result, “cute entities become objects of moral concern and members of the moral circle” (Sherman and Haidt 2011, p. 248). Children, like adults, have been shown to have preference for cuteness, and the way to get a “child to socially engage with (e.g., befriend, play with) an animated or stuffed character is facilitated by making it physically cute” (ibid., p. 249). The Walt Disney Studio has codified this form of animation centered on cuteness for decades as can be seen in the evolution of Mickey Mouse (Stephen Jay Gould’s analysis). Hopps is drawn to emphasize her cuteness and warmth, with the prototypical Disney attributes of excessively wide eyes, soft fur, and diminutive size. Hopps, and her entire extended family of thousands of rabbits, are colored a neutral, colorblind gray, meant to represent the average, everyday individual (the man in the gray flannel suit). Audience identification with Hopps is further enhanced by emphasizing the ways in which she embodies neoliberal ideas of meritocracy, traditional family values, and individualism. Hopps’ parents are intimately involved in every aspect of Hopps’ life, providing her and her

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275 brothers and sisters with constant love and attention. She is able to achieve her dream of becoming a police officer by her exceptional drive and motivation to succeed. While Hopps is officially permitted to participate in the Zootopia Police Department Academy training program because of her participation in an affirmative action program, the Mammal Inclusion Initiative, her individual character is clearly established as the basis of her success. Because of Hopps’ perseverance, diligence, and hard work, she becomes the valedictorian of her graduating class; when asked to write 100 parking tickets, she writes 200; and as a new police officer, she is able to solve the major crime of the narrative: the unexplained return of predators to their primordial, animal state. As a parable of integration and overcoming bias and prejudice, Zootopia relies on a colorblind narrative by creating a protagonist that uses the animal stereotype of rabbits as high on warmth and cuteness. Hopps is also, according to the logic of the film, a member of a dominant group of prey with her own loving community and support network. While it would appear that gender is the cause for Hopps’ initial exclusion from the Zootopia police force, there are multiple female police officers on the force who are all large mammals. Therefore, it appears that the absence of rabbit cops is a product of biological determinations, in which law and order are associated with physical force and strength. Since the communities within the film are segregated by biological size and species, it defies logic why there would not be rodentsized police to patrol in the smaller animal communities. This actual inconsistency is made clear in the film when Hopps chases a “criminal” weasel into Rodentia. None of the regular cops are able to enter the community, and even Hopps has difficulty maneuvering through its streets and buildings. Hopps is able to succeed as a cop not because of an officially mandated integration program but because she displays exceptional merit-based qualities that justify her success. Following the logic of colorblindness, institutional prejudice can be easily overcome by those with the necessary stamina and integrity to push aside restrictions and boundaries. In the commencement speech, Hopps gives to new graduates at the Police Academy at the end of the film, she argues that “[w]e all have limitations. We all make mistakes…So, no matter what type of animal you are, from the biggest elephant to our first fox…I implore you…try. Try to make the world a better place. Look inside yourself, and recognize that change starts with you.”

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Systemic, institutional bias and prejudice can be erased by individual initiative and motivation, and therefore, by implication those who fail to integrate are individuals who have not tried enough. Zootopia offers its viewers a colorblind utopian dream in which the dominant group of prey animals are the victims of prejudice and bias, but they are able to achieve their dreams while overcoming the biases against them with the loving support of their family coupled with the bedrock American, meritocratic traits of individual hard work, perseverance, drive, and optimism. According to the filmmakers, the early “negative concept” of the film, in which the divide between prey and predator was so pronounced, was replaced in the film version with what Moore describes as a “nuanced story of a city torn apart by inadvertent, underlying bias…We wanted to see these characters living together happily at first, so the audience roots for the world to return to harmony. But we also wanted to show how bias and prejudice can so easily divide a culture” (Jules, p. 28). According to this logic, prejudice and bias are a social discomfort that can be erased by simply denying its existence; prey and predator can get along by choosing to live in harmony. Zootopia makes the human audience identify and empathize with Hopps, a member of a majority prey species, associated with warmth, cuteness, and vulnerability. Opposed to Hopps is the minority group of predators that make up 10% of the population. The minority is consistently characterized and visualized in the film as violent, savage, primitive, and bloodthirsty. In the origin myth of Zootopia, the predators, as the minority group, “choose” to leave behind their animalistic, biological roots in order to become more human (i.e., cute, sweet prey). The Disney Story Trust imagined how “these mammals might evolve if they simply put a history of violence behind them, but also asked the question of what happens if that fear might still be present in some way” (Truitt). The filmmakers’ repeated suggestion that the predators choose to become prey is infused with repetitive claims that because of biology or DNA, predators are inherently violent and that in order for them to function as animals with human intelligence, it was necessary for them to abandon their “primitive savage ways.” This negative commentary about predators continues throughout the film. Hopps is bullied in an early scene by a young fox, Gideon Grey, who is characterized by Cory Loftis, the art director for the characters, as embodying the “worst parts of bad children. He’s a bully, probably mean to bugs, and carries around a solid stick for breaking stuff” (Jules, p. 57). As Gideon threatens Hopps with

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his claws, he taunts her by telling her that “us predators used to eat prey. And that killer instinct’s still in my Dunnahh.” Hopps’s parents warn her that “we have bears to fear, too. To say nothing of lions and wolves.” Hopps’s mother then states that “it’s in their biology.” In a press conference about Hopps’ success at tracking down the missing predators who had gone wild, she reveals that all the animals that went savage are predators and that “predators survived through their aggressive hunting instincts. For whatever reason, they seem to be reverting back to their primitive, savage ways.” In the most terrifying sections of the film, the audience watches the terror of seeing a predator gone savage. As described in the screenplay, Hopps and Nick discover Mancha, a jaguar living in the Rainforest District, “hunched over and grunting…His eyes are dilated, he’s turned savage! He’s poised to pounce on Nick and Hopps…The Jaguar tears after them, he’s deranged, primal.” This scene is repeated again at the end of the film when it appears that Nick has also becoming savage and he appears to be stalking Hopps. But the reveal at this point is that predators have become predators because of the work of Assistant Mayor Bellwether, a sheep, who has masterminded the plan to create hate and distrust of predators by making them behave as predators. Being part of the dominant and majority group in society, according to Bellwether, prey has been “underestimated. Under-appreciated….90% of the population, united against a common enemy. We’ll be unstoppable.” Throughout the film, the characters repeatedly emphasize the idea that predators are biologically violent, savage, and untrustworthy when they return to their biological roots. The only way in which they can be integrated into the dominant prey community is by disavowing their horrid past of violence and savagery that came with hunting and eating meat and becoming sweet, passive, soft prey animals dressed in human clothing and inhabiting zoo-themed human designed cities. The divisions between prey and predator became the defining narrative trope of Zootopia, and it is this divide that severely problematizes the filmmaker’s repeated claims that “at watering holes, even though predators and prey don’t always get along, when they have stuff in common that they need, then everyone chills out. Everyone behaves. That led us to some very interesting ideas and parallels with our own society” (Truitt). In early versions of the story, the division between prey and predator was “overt, with prey animals exploiting their strength in numbers to dominate the predators, who were forced to wear collars

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that prevented accidental expressions of their natural aggression” (Jules, p. 28). The filmmakers rely on the most insidious stereotypes of predators, as untrustworthy, violent, and bloodthirsty, in order to actually advocate that these predator species eliminate their biological identity in order to fit into a well-behaved “chill” human world. While rabbits and other prey species are viewed by most people as high in warmth and low in competency, “prototypical carnivorous animals (lions, wolves, bears) are seen as aggressive, highly intelligent, and dominating other animals. Large carnivorous animals (lions, cheetahs, hyenas, wild dogs, wolves, bears) are evaluated negatively worldwide…Correspondingly, emotions linked to these animals are fear, fascination, and awe” (Sevillano and Fiske, p. 211). As surely all of the zoologists, animal behavior specialists, and scientists who study animal evolution that spoke with the filmmakers explained, humans are the apex predator in the world. Zootopia works very hard to make the audience imagine themselves as prey while demonizing and dehumanizing the predator characters. In actuality, humans are the apex predator, and in the United States alone, humans consume nine billion animals annually.

(Super)Predators as a Racial Stereotype The demonization of the predators in the film and the placid acceptance of prey as model citizens become particularly problematic when considered within the light of the history of racial stereotypes in animation. “Initial drafts of the film’s story centered on a world populated by talking, clothed animals and separated across prey/predator lines. The titular city was imagined as an ‘oppressive police state’ where predators – whose minority population reflected real-world predator/prey- were forced to wear ‘TAME’ collars that supplied electric shocks and kept the prey feeling safe” (Crewe, p. 27). Moore describes Nick as an “oppressed character. He’s a fox, kind of sneaky, a con man. He felt the world owed him something, that he was not treated well as a fox” (Eagan). The film actually explicitly portrays him as a con man who uses street smarts to hustle others out of their money. Hopps even praises Nick at one point for being “articulate,” a term used by Senator Biden to describe Barack Obama at the beginning of their presidential campaign: “I mean, you’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a story-book, man” (Thai and Barrett). Devoid of a home (at one point, he appears to be living under an

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abandoned bridge) or a family, Nick admits that “if the world’s gonna see a fox as shifty and untrustworthy, there’s no point trying to be anything else.” Duke Weaselton, the weasel that Hopps apprehends is described by Loftis as “a petty criminal, so we roughed him up a bit to make him seem shady. His joints are bonier, his fur is disheveled, and his whiskers are straggily. [sic] He was probably electrocuted once but he lived” (Jules, p. 89). The criminal element of Zootopia occupies a “shady” part of town, devoid of families and community, and the henchmen are all top carnivores, including bears and wolves. In a parable about the harmonious unity of a diverse society, the repeated demonization and dehumanization of the minority group as the cause of social discord reinforces the ways in which young African-American males have been characterized as superpredators. “No psychologist, or anyone else, can explain what it’s actually like to be a dog or a cat or bat, but we can explain when you might think something has a mind and when you might not. This means attributing a mind to a nonhuman agent is the inverse process of failing to attribute a mind to another person. Anthropomorphism and dehumanization are opposites of the same coin” (Epley 2014, p. 64).

Dehumanization in Zootopia Dehumanization is the “psychological process through which others are derogatively likened to ‘animals’ and perceived as ‘less human’…. Not surprisingly, dehumanization is also associated with heightened outgroup prejudices and greater acceptance of out-group directed violence” (Costello and Hodson 2014, p. 176). In Zootopia, the filmmakers dehumanize the predators who revert to their primal, animalistic origins: they walk on all fours, they stop wearing human clothes, they no longer speak, and they become linked with the jungle as their ancestral homeland. In the opening scene of the film, as the school children perform their skit about the history of their community (and the narrative logic of the film), we hear, as the script describes the “feral, primeval sounds of a jungle at night.” And when Hopps and Nick track down the jaguar Manchas, they go to the Rainforest District, a wild jungle setting at night. The racialized coding of this language directly references the rise of the racist figure of the “superpredator.” The term was coined by Princeton professor, John J. Dilulio Jr., in 1995 to describe young urban black men in America who were being disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. During the 1990s,

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deep into America’s War on Crime and Drugs, an incursion commenced against a target that had, to this point, remained largely outside the crosshairs. Prompted by rising crime rates and a handful of high-profile incidents, politicians, the media, and much of the public became consumed by what they characterized as a looming threat…The most violent, the most adult-like and the most amoral of adolescents were young black males. (Moriearty and Carson 2012, p. 281)

While colorblindness became the dominant racial policy within the criminal justice system, young African-Americans males were being disproportionately targeted by this system through a process in which they became dehumanized and stereotyped as violent and savage predators. In the infamous Central Park Jogger case in 1989, a young female jogger was brutally beaten and raped in Central Park. The five juvenile males (four were African-American and one was Hispanic) falsely accused of committing the crime were described at the time as participating in the new, brutal adolescent practice of “wilding.” As Tommy Curry argues, “the superpredator is a powerful mythologization of Black men and boys wherein violence and death of this monstrosity is considered the only solution to its existence…Many police officers reduce Blacks to the status of savages…Police officers in poor urban minority neighborhoods may come to see themselves as law enforcers in a community of savages, as outposts of the law in the jungle” (Curry 2017, p. 132). The image of the superpredator circulated and stoked fears within dominant white society about the animalistic, savagery of African-American youth, and it justified the rise of the carceral state in the United States. “In the case of the ‘super-predator’, however, it was not only the mental association, but also the mental disassociation that was critical. At the same time the ‘super-predator’ war amplified the American public’s predisposition to associate adolescents of color, and in particular young black males, with violence and moral depravity, it also led the public to dissociate young black males from the one trait that should not have been up for debate: their youth” (Moriearty and Carson, p. 283). The creators of Zootopia chose to make predators central to their narrative because they provide the most thrilling parts of the film. In order to create the necessary threat and conflict needed to drive the narrative, they chose to continually reinforce the idea of predators as being innately bloodthirsty, violent, and devoid of human rationality. This becomes particularly problematic when the predators are identified as a minority

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group, are linked with criminal activity, and are also overwhelmingly male. This demonization and dehumanization of young black males has had real societal effects: “the number of youth incarcerated in adult jails increased by 208% between 1990 and 2004 and that “four out of five youth newly held in detention between 1983 and 1997 were juveniles of color” (ibid., p. 301). Today, nearly one in three African-American males in their twenties is under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system (ibid., p. 282). In order to maintain peaceful harmony at society’s waterhole, Zootopia’s creators originally planned on using shock collars to tame the predators. These horrific images did not make it to the final film, but what did remain was the frantic policing and incarceration of the predators who had gone wild and returned to their primitive, animal state. In the world of the superpredator, “black males are not men at all; they are sexualized as animal and nonhuman…In being defined as savage, he is imagined to be outside civil society. Civilization has escaped him… He is created by the society and accepted by citizens as a threat to their existence. He is policed so the order can be maintained” (Curry, p. 133). Hopps, even as the model police officer, breaks the law in order to catch and contain the threat of the predators gone wild. She breaks into private properties in the criminal part of town and at one point threatens to have a witness killed in order to get them to talk.

Conclusion Zootopia was created and produced during the period that saw the creation of the Black Lives Matters movement in response to police killings of African-American men and the rising public recognition of the racial injustices of the criminal justice system in the United States. In a variety of ways, the film comes to exemplify and reinforce, in parable form, a vision of a colorblind society and colorblind solutions to racial inequality. In the process of making Zootopia, the Disney Story Trust transformed an early story idea about a fox as an urban detective in a world peopled by animals into a parable about overcoming prejudice and advocating for tolerance, and it did so by shifting the focus of the narrative to a much more optimistic story about how a young girl goes to the big city to achieve her dreams. The hero of the narrative, Hopps, is anthropomorphized as a “cute bunny” who is the victim of individual bias not due to institutional discrimination (remember she is the dominant species) but because no rabbits had ever tried to be police

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officers before. Hopps, through her hard work and drive (she works twice as hard as the other cops), by being the top student in her police academy, and by solving the major crime of the narrative, is able to overcome any opposition to her integration into the police force. The Zootopia filmmakers’ model of a utopian society was based on the image of a watering hole where the predators choose to leave behind their biological identities in order to behave and become part of a harmonious, integrated, color (species) blind society. The twist in this narrative of tolerance is that Hopps’s dream is to become a cop and the criminals are part of a minority group of savage predators and top carnivores. In marked contrast to the peace-loving prey that dominate the world of Zootopia, the minority species are doubly stereotyped, first as animal predators and additionally as dehumanized, racialized superpredators, reinscribing in a children’s animated film one of the most damaging stereotypes that have been used to justify the incarceration of thousands of juveniles of color. Zootopia was released a year after Philando Castile’s killing, and the St. Paul police department chose to use this film as a tool for teaching tolerance because the film celebrates the police (Zootopia’s screenwriter, Jared Bush’s father and grandfather both worked for the CIA) as agents of prosocial action whose primary goal is to make the world a better place by eradicating wild superpredators that threaten the stability of society. Not only does Hopps become a celebrated police officer at the end of the film but she also succeeds in transforming Nick, a predator, into a police officer by having him prove that he is capable of containing his savage, violent self. The film’s impact on teaching tolerance to its children’s audience can be seen in a young fan’s response to the film. After watching the movie “100 times,” the girl decided to apply to be a police officer in Lodi, California, so that she can also put those superpredators, who cannot learn to behave like intelligent humans, behind bars. In her application, she listed under her skills that “I think on my feet. I follow the rules. I like to catch all the robbers…I can blow my whistle very loud and shout “Stop in the name of the law!” (Cremen). Rather than seeing a watering hole where every animal gets along, she recognized the film’s celebration of the power of the criminal justice system to use law and order to incarcerate those savage and violent minority predators who are a threat to the peaceful harmony of the dominant colorblind society. As Donald Trump Jr. recently posted about the need for walls in our country, “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? Because walls work.”

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Notes 1. The term “superpredator” was coined by the Princeton professor, John Dilulio, Jr. “A superpredator is a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim, without giving it a second thought,” Dilulio said in 1996. 2. David Attenborough shows this very clearly in the “Great Plains” episode of the award-winning British television series, Planet Earth (2006), where a variety of animals are forced to mingle at a watering hole because of the droughts caused by human-made global warming. In the Planet Earth sequence, Attenborough describes the desperation of the animals who have traveled hundreds of miles in search of water. “These are tense times,” he states and “as night falls the balance of power will shift” between the thirsty elephants and the pride of lions. “Lion don’t usually hunt elephants but desperate times require desperate measures.” After the lions succeed in killing an elephant, Attenborough notes that “these drinking holes are dangerous but they have no choice. A savage reminder of how important water is for all life on these plains.” 3. The Stereotype Content Model is a theoretical framework that “integrates two basic and apparently universal dimensions of social perception, namely warmth or perceived intent (What is the intention- good/bad- of another person/group?) and competence or ability and general capacity (What resources- abilities, power- does a person/group have at their disposal to achieve their goals?)” (Sevillano and Fiske 2016, p. 210). They “argue that different combinations of stereotypic warmth and competence result in unique intergroup emotions—prejudices- directed toward various kinds of groups in society” (Fiske et al. 2002, p. 879).

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Thai, Xuan, and Ted Barrett. “Biden’s Description of Obama Draws Scrutiny.” CNN.com, February 9, 2007. http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/ 31/biden.obama/. Wagner, Maggie. “Inside the Animation of Disney’s Zootopia.” CU Independent, March 9, 2016. https://cuindependent.com/2016/03/09/ inside-the-animation-of-disneys-zootopia/. Williams, Joseph. “Segregations’s Legacy.” US News, April 20, 2018. https://www.usnews.com/news/the-repor t/ar ticles/2018-04-20/ us-is-still-segregated-even-after-fair-housing-act. Wolf, Christopher, and William J. Ripple. “Rewilding the World’s Large Carnivores.” Royal Society Open Science 5 (2018). http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/3/172235.article-info. Zielinski, Sarah. “Modern Humans Have Become Superpredators” Smithsonian. org, August 20, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ modern-humans-have-become-superpredators-180956348/. Zootopia. Directed by Bryon Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush. Walt Disney Feature Animation, 2016.

CHAPTER 5

The Paradox of Post-racialism: Black Hollywood’s Voice in Post-racial Discourse Omotayo O. Banjo

A paradox exists when there are two or more situations that are simultaneously opposing and true. When it comes to race in America, it is true that there has been much advancement for people of color since before the Civil Rights era. It is also true that racial discrimination, criminalization, and disenfranchisement persist and continue to have an impact on many African Americans’ lived experiences. Against the backdrop of marches and protests in defense of black Americans’ lives in recent years, there also seems to be a significant increase in black Americans’ presence behind and in front of the camera, chief among them the first black President of the United States, a realization of King’s Dream, and thus a symbol of post-racialism. While there continues to be racial inequality in communities across America, there also seems to be an advancement of African Americans in politics and entertainment, which may convey to some that race relations are improved. The entertainment industry is full of paradoxes. Although there is still much work to do, black lead characters made up the majority of films featuring underrepresented groups in 2014 (Smith et al. 2016), O. O. Banjo (*)  University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_5

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and to some that might look like progress. In 2015, three black women received Emmy Awards, including Viola Davis, who made history by becoming the first African-American woman (and the first AfricanAmerican since 1998) to win an Emmy for her leading role in the drama How to Get Away with Murder. Two years prior was dubbed by some as the “the year of Black (or Urban) films,” with a significant output of films featuring black lead characters or a majority black cast including box office hits like The Best Man Holiday, 42, Think Like a Man, 12 Years a Slave, and Fruitvale Station (Cieply 2013). The trend seemed to steady over the next two years, with films such as Straight Outta Compton and War Room dominating the box office and performing better than “mainstream” films during opening weekend (Harwell 2015; Zumberge 2015). However, the box office success of these two films was overshadowed by the #OscarSoWhite controversy, in which none of the 2016 Academy Award nominees were non-white. As Variety’s awards editor Tim Gray (2016) pointed out, it seemed strange that Sylvester Stallone, as the Supporting Actor in the film Creed, was the only person nominated in a film directed and written by a black male and starring a black lead. On the surface, there seems to be progress, but it is clear that these are merely incremental improvements and diversity efforts in the film industry continue to lag. According to the most recent Hollywood Diversity Report (2016), minorities continue to be severely underrepresented on screen and in leadership positions; moreover, a significant majority of decision makers in Hollywood are still white and male. The racial affiliation of a decision maker can be critical to how blacks are portrayed. Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki (2000) and Donald Bogle’s (2002) seminal works have revealed the historically disparaging depictions of blacks in majority white films. Past scholarship has found that negative representation of race can be correlated with low group worth or status, self-efficacy, and intergroup relations (Greenberg et al. 2002; Mastro 2015; Ward 2004), suggesting that more positive media representations can further validate group vitality (sense of group worth). It is also arguable that more diverse depictions of African Americans are possible with black creative power (Squires 2009). As Steven Renderos of the Center for Media Justice explained, “ownership is central to [black] communities’ struggle to push against stereotypes and misinformation” (Moore 2016). Black storytellers have been subjected to similar disenfranchisement and racial discrimination familiar to the general black community. At the very least, they are positioned

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to voice experiences of the black community on a larger platform. What does Black Hollywood have to say, especially in times like these where there exists a paradox of racial progress and apparent racial conflict? The following chapter positions Black-context films as a valuable site through which scholars can examine deconstructions of race and its relationship to mainstream, majority culture. By examining Black-context films, researchers can (1) give more voice to black creatives, such as writers and directors, (2) understand racial discourse and constraints within black entertainment, and (3) identify how black storytellers convey racial difference and interracial relationships. I pose the following research questions: Can Black-context films be colorblind? How do Black-context films deconstruct whiteness, if at all? More importantly, how do they define racial boundaries within a progressive post-racial perspective? I argue that at least two conflicts are occurring as in relation to Blackcontext films in a post-Obama era. First, the paradox of post-racialism: The perceived increased opportunity and visibility in valued institutions such as government and entertainment both creates access and sets limitations for people of color. On the one hand, it provides an avenue through which people of color can advance beyond systemic barriers. On another hand, for some, it dismisses very present social conditions in which barriers continue to exist. Another paradoxical relationship of post-racialism is that on the one hand, it suggests that societally we have moved beyond racial constructions such that we are blind to “color” and we presume a universality that is void of race; on the other hand, when black storytellers produce narratives featuring majority black talent, their art tends to be delimited by race, that is presumed to no longer be a barrier.

Whiteness and Shifting Boundaries On the surface, race is a superficial category relying mostly on physical features. Critical race scholars contend that today race functions mostly as a sociopolitical classification system, which serves to maintain the status quo (Rollock and Gillborn 2011). Racial classifications are systemically created and sustained. Within this classification system, individuals who identify as white or with aspects of the white majority culture are favored compared to black and brown others. White privilege is embedded within the fabric of our social system and therefore shapes aspects of daily living from education to housing (Ladson-Billing and Tate 1995).

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For decades, scholars have explored the presumptions and culture of the most privileged in the United States and thus identified a theory of whiteness that explains the benefits and meaning of white skin and identifying as a member of the white majority. According to Stuart Hall (1996), racial ideology is subject to the “shifting relations of difference” and therefore “can never be finally fixed.” In other words, the “white” race is a fairly contemporary concept within the context of civilization and has been defined and redefined over time. For example, scientists, artists, and clergymen negotiated the boundaries of Caucasians throughout the course of history, even at one point including North Africa and excluding Russia (Painter 2010). What was not Caucasian then, may or may not be considered white today. The shifting boundaries of the Caucasian social group as defined by individuals and institutions demonstrate the extent to which even white racial identity is socially constructed and perhaps can be negotiated. Frankenberg’s (1995) work reveals how white majority racial identity develops out of limited interactions with people of color whether interpersonal or mediated. Surrounded mostly by other white people and consuming films with only or majority white casts convey an identity that can be viewed as normative and homogenous. Historically, white normativity most notably included the practice of superiority, privilege, entitlement, assumptions of universality, ethnocentricity, and cultural appropriation (Martin et al. 1996; McIntosh 1990; Painter 2010). Portwood-Stacer (2007) contends that whiteness is also construed as economically established, and thus poor whites are often excluded when considering the lives of white people because discussions of class disrupt the purity and privilege associated with whiteness. Perhaps for this reason, portrayals of whiteness in mainstream media have mostly ignored poor whites to reinforce associations of economic success with being white (Foster 2012; Garner 2007). After the height of the Civil Rights movement and until the 2016 election, expressions of whiteness as superior have become less conspicuous, especially in films. Instead, white racial ideology had been expressed as a disassociation from white supremacy. After the election of Donald Trump, white supremacist sentiments have become much more visible in the news and social media. Hollywood has critiqued and distanced itself from supporting such bigotry as was demonstrated by actors’ responses to the president’s handling of the Charlottesville murder and celebrities’ commentary at award shows such as the 2017 Emmys. Nonetheless,

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the privileging of the white perspective remains whether through presumptions of universality as defined by the white majority or through questions or statements directed toward people of color, which subtly insinuate subordination. These are called microaggressions (Pérez Huber and Solorzano 2014). Lewis (2004) characterizes this aspect of whiteness as ignorant of itself, the realities of racial hierarchy, and the actual implications of white skin and its privileges in the United States. In other words, whiteness is presumably blind to difference while presuming authority over what is different. Thus, a critical component of whiteness is colorblindness, which explains the degree to which a white person disassociates from supremacist ideology thereby relieving themselves of any participation in systemic racism. Furthermore, colorblind ideology claims progress that appears not to be delimited by racial classification like the election of the first black president or the success of Black films in a given year, while ignoring the complications that the realities of race produce for racialized others. As Hollywood has long been determined to be a purveyor of racial ideology, at one time perpetuating racist assumptions about blacks’ temperament, intellect, and sexual drive, it seems appropriate to examine how contemporary cultural products may serve to reproduce an artificial image of progress. In some ways, Hollywood has presented a post-racial utopia substituting meaningful inclusion with mere stereotypes (Oh and Banjo 2012). In such cases, racial boundaries continue to ensure the status quo, and by doing so, film narratives minimize difference, privatize racism, and mask systemic racism perhaps, so as not to implicate itself.

Colorblind Culture and Post-racial Dilemmas Colorblindness is a significant component of post-racialism. Bonilla-Silva (2006) explains that to some extent comparing contemporary relations to that of the Jim Crow Era promotes an “artificial image of progress” and thereby denies the still very present realities of discrimination. Ono (2010) expands this concept by suggesting that post-racial assumptions deny a violently racist past and affirms a capitalist ideology that frames what is known as the American Dream. The American Dream presumes opportunity is available to all, even black creatives; however, it is not certain that this denial and affirmation of progressive logic is apparent in black narratives.

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Ian H. Lopez (2010) argues that colorblindness is “a form of racial jujitsu” (p. 87) suggesting that dismissing the meaning of race allows the denial of blatant racial injustice. Colorblind ideology removes systemic accountability by reducing racially motivated acts to an individual’s personal vices. Racism exists, but only in the minds of some. While denying racism, Simpson (2008) argues that colorblind discourse “perpetuates a system of thought in which white ways of being, knowing and experiencing are ‘morally neutral, normative, average, and ideal’ (p. 142).” Thus, post-racialism benefits from whiteness and vice versa. A year after Obama’s 2008 election, African Americans reported a more positive view of race relations in America and were more hopeful (Pew Research Center 2010). According to 2010 Pew Research data, 32% of whites reported that Obama’s election helped race relations, whereas 45% reported no significant impact of Obama’s election. Black respondents reported a perceived change in economic inequality, whereas other data showed that the economic gap between black and white American citizens had widened. For white respondents, the perception of discrimination against blacks had decreased a year after Obama’s election, and more black respondents tended to minimize systemic discrimination in favor of personal responsibility. A conduit of culture, mainstream media help to circulate these ideologies of post-racialism and colorblindness. For example, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis’ (1992) findings upon his exploration of audience responses to The Cosby Show reveal that exposure to positive role models seem to dismiss the realities of systemic racism and thus make it difficult to discuss the reality of racial discrimination. In her critique of the popular program Grey’s Anatomy, Warner (2014) argues that the producer’s approach to casting and writing creates characters that are devoid of racial contexts and experiences and thus dismisses cultural differences, which are real. Warner argues that the show’s colorblind strategies are motivated by a need to appeal to white audiences’ comfort. Bineham (2015) continues this argument by suggesting that films such as The Blind Side “provide symbolic resources for privileged audiences: the opportunity to identify with the [white] hero and thereby to ignore responsibility for systemic injustices and, and the opportunity to locate racism and ignorant individuals rather than social and economic inequalities” (p. 233). Therefore, colorblindness in film (and television) featuring a white majority also works to protect what is ideal and normative (i.e., whiteness). Whereas some scholars have examined the ways

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in which mainstream Hollywood, which include a majority white cast, has perpetuated colorblind ideologies (Russell 1991; Foster 2012), few have examined how Other-context films like Black-context films are positioned within the dialogue. How might black creatives disrupt or promote what is seen as normal? It can be conflicting to claim a racist and discriminatory society while consuming and enjoying entertainment produced by or featuring a person of color, especially those including mainstream favorites such as Kevin Hart or Will Smith. However, despite Will Smith’s universal appeal, he is associated with scripted blackness. Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo (2009) point out the anthropomorphic racialization of a fish named Oscar (played by Smith) in the film Shark Tales (2004). More than the mere casting of a black actor, Oscar’s dialect, affinity for hip-hop and big gold chains work to signify his race. Will Smith was also unable to avert the meaning of his race during #OscarSoWhite protest where he and his wife chose not to attend the event because no people of color were nominated for the two consecutive years (Wheat 2016). Executive producer Shonda Rhimes also found herself needing to engage in racial discourse. While Shonda Rhimes has historically taken a colorblind approach to casting and storytelling, she chose to cosign with actor Jesse William’s remarks regarding intolerance for racial injustice (Lasher 2016). Many black storytellers want to tell stories of all kinds while working in industries that serve white normativity, yet they seem to be unable to escape the meaning of their race in their lived experiences and the stories that they tell. It is worth exploring how some reconcile these discrepancies.

So What Is a Black-Context Film? Lewis (2004) contends that researchers should explore how people of color interpret whiteness, stating that because “[racial minorities’] lives have been contained, limited, [and] excluded [by whiteness], racial minorities are one potential source of insight into an effort to understand how whiteness works today” (p. 639). Black-context films are spaces through which we can both deconstruct whiteness and gain insight about black–white relations, especially in a post-racial context. The debate over the definition of “Black films” continues among scholars and industry insiders (Squires 2009). Black films are commonly understood to be written, directed, and/or starring majority African-American

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casts; however, this definition disqualifies movies popular in the black community such as The Color Purple (1985), Hustle and Flow (2005), or War Room (2015). Some contend that the label itself seems to set limits on the target audience, as well as make insinuations about the quality and profitability (Magee 2016; Seewood 2014). For example, after USA Today announced the success of Malcolm Lee’s The Best Man Holiday as “race-themed,” some took issue with the descriptor noting that the film centered on universal themes like families and friendships, not race, and thus could not be described as such (Huffington Post 2013). The director himself expressed frustration with the term stating: Black film is not even a genre. If you put that out there, that means it’s about black people and for black people exclusively, and that’s not the case. I’ve made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They’re very universal stories I’ve told – every movie I’ve done. (Tesfarmariam 2013)

Lee distinguishes the term by highlighting his focus on AfricanAmerican experiences; however, as he also points out, the films are not solely for African-American audiences. His delineation is important because it signifies the value of African-American storytelling as it portrays African-American experiences, which often includes non-blacks. Here, Black-context films are those written and/or directed by AfricanAmericans and featuring a predominately African-American cast or leads. These films are not exclusive to black characters and often include white characters. According to Banjo and Fraley (2014), white characters in Black films tend to play authoritative roles (i.e., judge, police officers, caseworker), and in cases where the white character has more of a prominent role, Banjo and Fraley argue that the white character’s role is likely to be problematized or satirized. Similar to the role of the Black Best Friend in white-majority-context films (Deggans 2012; Turner 2012), white characters are also featured as friends, a part of a black character’s everyday life. More contemporary mainstream Black-context films have featured more interracial friendships. Banjo and Jennings (2017) found differences in interracial friendships over two decades, with interactions seeming more cordial in the 2000s than they did in the 1990s. Although white characters were more prominent in recent Black-context films

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and were more cordial overall, Banjo (2015) points out a small undercurrent of tensions between black and white characters likely an indication of present racial relations. While contemporary Black-context films tend to portray prominent white characters as friends, a Washington Post survey reveals that most American friendships are racially homogenous (Ingraham 2014). According to the 2010 Pew Research report, black and white millennials have about the same amount of friends who are not their race. In fact, Clement’s (2015) findings suggest that although white millennials report lower means on questions measuring prejudice, millennials also reported negative attitudes about blacks’ motivations and intelligence similar to the Baby Boomer generation. For this study, I review a sample of movies ranging from 2013 to 2015. Movies that featured majority African Americans, but were written by a non-black person (e.g., War Room [2015], Black or White [2014], No Good Deed [2014]) were excluded from the sample; however, films starring a majority black cast and at least one black writer and a black director were considered. Also, popular movies based on reality (i.e., Straight Outta Compton [2015], Selma [2014], 12 Years a Slave [2013]) were excluded from the sample in order to only examine fictional depictions. Based on these selection criteria, the following movies were analyzed for review: The Best Man Holiday (2013), Top Five (2014), and Dope (2015).

Summary of Films The Best Man Holiday (2013) is a sequel to the Best Man (1999) written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee. The film is a story of community, family, and forgiveness. The main characters are Harper, Jordan, Julian, Quentin, Lance Sullivan, and his wife Mia Sullivan. Harper and Merch are married. Quentin is comfortable with being a player. The Best Man (1999) was released during an era of films that portrayed black urban professionals (Buppies), which offered a counter representation to the prominence of gangster rap films like Menace II Society (1993) or Boyz in the Hood (1991) at the time. In the sequel, all of the characters are successful in their respective fields, including professional football, media programming, brand management, headmaster at a school, and a best-selling author. The plot of the film centers on the restoration of the broken relationships, which ensued from drama in the past, and

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changing relational and professional status. The Best Man Holiday (2013) yielded over $30 million in the box office during opening weekend and grossed over $70 million worldwide (IMDb). Top Five (2014) was written and directed by Chris Rock. This film centers on the pressures placed on comics to produce in spite of the instability in their lives. The comic Andre Allen was known for his roles as an anthropomorphic bear, Hammy, who assisted the police force. Frustrated with being reduced to a stuffed animal for comical purposes, Allen decides to try a role that raises social consciousness, and he is met with much criticism. The plot involves a journalist shadowing the comedian to understand why he is no longer producing funny movies. Top Five yielded almost $7 million during opening weekend and grossed over $25 million in theaters (IMDb). Dope (2015) was written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, who is known for producing some of the most popular Buppie and friendship films in the 1990s like The Wood (1999) and Brown Sugar (2002). Dope (2015) is a coming of age film centered on high school student Malcolm, and his friends who live in Inglewood, California. Malcolm and his friends do not fit the classic stereotypes of Inglewood. Malcolm has proclivity for the English language, math, and science and aspires to go to Harvard. The plot centers on an interaction Malcolm and his friends have with a neighborhood drug dealer and its impact on his growth. Having an estimated budget of only $700,000, the film banked over $6 million during opening weekend with over 2000 screens and grossed over $17 million in theaters. Each of these films was successful and gained critical reception and included a majority African-American cast with at least one white character with a speaking part (IMDb). In each of the three films, white characters were heavily present as background characters. In The Best Man Holiday, white characters were on the street, at a frat party with hookers, receiving charity at a church during Christmas Eve, and serving at Lance Sullivan’s house party. In Top Five, white characters were fellow attendees at an AA meeting, a strip club, customer service representatives, investors, fans of Andre Allen, and law enforcement related to a case of police brutality. The white background characters in Dope were classmates, high school teachers, club patrons, and law enforcement. From the onset, it appears that white characters are natural to the environment and portray a range of characters in a myriad of space.

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Emergent Themes The following highlights the most common thread among white characters with speaking parts. In general, white characters are differentiated, and whiteness is deconstructed via acts of privilege, colorblind racism, and appropriation. In these films, racial boundaries are negotiated, reminding characters and viewers of the blurred line between ignorance and subjugation. Lastly, white characters are more than casual acquaintances or intimate friends; they are portrayed as the access point to the American Dream, which is defined here as achieving economic success and security. White Shit. A common thread among the three films is a classification of whiteness by actively distinguishing activities that are often associated with white people from those often affiliated with African Americans. For example, in the introductory scenes of Dope, the narrator juxtaposes Malcolm and his friends Jib and Diggy with the violence of their neighborhood in Inglewood, California by describing them as lacking athletic abilities and being unaffiliated with gangs. The narrator concludes that they are targets of derision in their school because of their interest in “white shit,” which he describes in bullet point form as Skateboards, Manga Comics, Donald Glover (Rapper Childish Gambino), Trash Talk, TV on the Radio, getting good grades, and applying to college. Their participation in whiteness extends to their defiance of doing the Harlem Shake (a dance associated with black urban youth) while in a marching band and choosing, instead, to start their own punk band called Oreo. The naming of the group alone marks Malcolm and his friends as not fully embraced by what is considered black culture. In another scene, where the band is performing at a college party with majority white people, Malcolm explains the band name as black on the outside and white on the inside, which signifies a socially constructed distinction. The band sings a song written by Pharrell Williams, in which they glorify good grades and mention the difficulties of being a teenager, which include identity management, looking for dates, and being misunderstood by parents. Perhaps the most striking line in the song is when they sing “I won’t act like a gangster would, but no you can’t fuck with my hood.” This scene sets the tone for the complexities and consistent racial negotiations that emerge throughout the film. These young people of color, although acknowledging their racial classification, affiliate with

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what is framed in the film as “white.” The students proclaim that they “march to the beat of [their] own drum” signifying freedom from social constructions about their identity and complicating the various layers of barriers. While they may be a representation of other forms of blackness, it is still very clear that there are complex negotiations with what is considered “white shit.” In so doing, whiteness is made visible which also counters the assumptions of colorblindness. Here, whiteness is categorized and defined, thus complicating post-racial thinking. The classification of “things white people do” also appears in the film The Best Man Holiday. When Harper, the author, visits his friend Jordan at her office at MSNBC, he discovers she has a boyfriend, Brian McDonald, who is designated white. Brian stops by Jordan’s office to inform her of canceled dinner plans because of a meeting with the boss. Brian also informs Jordan of his decision to reschedule his flight to Vermont to see his family so that she can reunite with her friends. Harper, standing behind Brian as he embraces Jordan, makes facial expressions throughout their interaction. After Brian leaves, Harper mimics Brian by slightly straightening his body posture, changing his vocal tone and enunciating his words saying, “I’m Brian McDonald. I like to ski in Vermont with my devices. I like dating chocolate girls.” Harper’s impression of whiteness includes proper diction, enjoying cold weather, having technological access, and exoticizing black women. This impression is more than an individual character’s assertion but resonates with portrayals of whiteness as economically and socially advantaged. Harper is not sanctioned for his remarks. Instead, Jordan (Brian’s girlfriend) feigns offense while laughing at Harper’s impersonation. In another scene, Brian explains to Jordan’s friends that he cannot stay for the entire weekend as he plans to “go to Vermont, ski, and hang by the fire.” Again, these are activities that seem to be associated with white people. Confirming this presumption, some of the characters smirk at Brian’s response. After Jordan explained that she would not be following Brian because she “and the snow don’t get along,” Quentin responds “You could have fooled me” identifying a clear distinction between what is seen as black culture and white culture. In this case, Quentin is sanctioned as Jordan smacks him on the arm. These scenes illustrate distinctions between what is categorically black and what is categorically white while blurring the lines via an interracial romantic relationship. Brian is not a mere prop. He is a person committed to Jordan as is typical of a romantic relationship. Nonetheless, his whiteness is visible

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and to some extent problematized, which also counters assumptions of colorblindness. The classification of whiteness in Top Five is not as explicit as in the other films. Throughout the film, Andre Allen is called out on the street and addressed by his character name, Hammy, by eager fans who are predominantly white. In contrast, white disc jockeys antagonize him about his decision to star in a movie about a fictional Haitian rebellion resulting in the deaths of white people. In some ways, this could read as a preference to avoid racially charged content to serve the comfort of white audiences. In one scene, a DJ asks Andre “… what do you have to say to the white audience here that is insulted, uh, disgusted, by your movie, watching 50,000 of their people be killed?” The question alone asserts defensiveness against accusations of racism, which can be classified as “things white people do.” Within a post-racial context, the film reminds audiences of the limitations of narratives available to black storytellers. That is, black actors often feel resigned to stories about slavery or supporting a white lead character. It would seem that the white audience in this film would rather perpetuate post-racial ideals, even at the expense of dismissing actual past or current events that undermine the assumptions of colorblindness. The ultimate goal is to protect whiteness. Similar to the real breakdown of comedian Dave Chappelle,1 when Allen challenges these expectations, he loses their support. Assertions about meanings of whiteness are present throughout these films. At the very least, it is clear that whatever whiteness is, it is constructed in opposition to what is considered black. Furthermore, it is deconstructed as defining what is normative and acceptable. However, all of these films are situated within a post-racial context in which blackness does not actively oppose whiteness. These films only identify whiteness as trying to negotiate itself within a majority black inhabited space. Within this space, black characters are constantly defining boundaries and checking or regulating white characters’ implicit racism to ensure a safe space for both parties. Checks and boundaries. The practice of examining and regulating White characters’ behavior in interracial interactions or expression about racial topics is present across the three films. For example, in the scene where the DJ asks Andre Allen about the death of white people in his new socially conscious film, Andre Allen retorts, “Uh, George Bush kills a lot of brown people.” And after one of the DJs scoffs, he continues “Nobody had a problem with that.” The DJ defends himself by

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refocusing the discussion on film representations, and Allen responds, “He (Bush) really killed them. I fake-kill white people, and it’s a problem.” By describing the contradiction in what might be seen as postracial thinking, Allen “checks” the white characters. Allen problematizes the actual deaths of people of color and juxtaposes the nonchalant attitude about these deaths with the outrage of murders of fictional white people. By doing so, Allen is setting a boundary in racial discourse with white characters, and reminding characters and perhaps viewers that racism persists even though it may not appear so. While the way racialism and the meaning of race are regulated seems to be exclusive in Top Five (2014), the other two films portray a more inclusive, yet negotiated boundary. In the film The Best Man Holiday (2013), two characters are checked and reminded of the boundaries of their racist assumptions. Stan, Harper’s publicist, encourages Harper by telling him his book was smart, “not just black people smart.” Harper raises his brow disapprovingly in response to Stan’s comment. Stan does not seem to recognize this expression; neither does he respond to this check. Nonetheless, the visual is there to acknowledge that a boundary exists regarding how white characters make sense of race or discuss things that affect black people. This is especially significant within a post-racial context, which presumes equality and denies even minute forms of racism via microaggression. Brian is checked while playing pool with Jordan’s four male friends when Quentin inquires about a presumed racial motivation behind Brian’s interest in Jordan. He asks if Jordan is his “first safari into the enchanted jungle.” The question signals a history of colonialism and the exoticism of black women. The character Quentin is identifying a boundary in defense of his friend to protect her from historical practices perpetuated against black women. A similar assertion is also represented in Dope (2015) where the white character William’s goal in life is to have sex with a black woman. In The Best Man Holiday, the black characters examine Brian’s association with whiteness. Brian looks shocked at the question and asks the other guys, “Is he serious?” None of the other friends defend him, which suggests a group interrogation, allowing Quentin to interrogate further, “How do we know this ain’t no Django Candyland fantasy?” Consistent with colorblind ideology, Brian positions himself as being equal opportunity by saying that he “dates all kind of women, but Jordan is pretty special.” Brian seems to dismiss the postcolonial assumptions of Quentin’s question by normalizing his black

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girlfriend as a woman who stands out to him. He does not seem to “see” Jordan’s race, but it is very clear that her black male friends do, suggesting that while the white character is blind to color, the black lead characters cannot escape the question of race. While Brian may seem to be out of the circle, it seems clear the black characters are merely testing and evaluating identification or disidentification with white supremacy. Ultimately, Quentin acknowledges that he likes Brian. At one point, when the four friends are sharing insider stories, Brian offers to excuse himself out of respect, and Lance tells Brian he does not need to. At this point, his affiliation with perceived whiteness as defined by white supremacy has been investigated, disproved, and he is welcome in that space. Nonetheless, the mere questioning of his motives signifies that although he is accepted within the circle, there is still a boundary. A similar negotiation appears in the film Dope (2015). William Ian Sherwood III, a white friend of Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib’s, casually uses the N-word in his interactions with his friends, regardless of race. Embodying post-racial discourse, William seems to assume that the historical association of the word no longer exists. The first time he uses this word Diggy smacks him. In one scene, William asks for permission to use the word because of his sense of connection with black culture and to his non-white friends. Diggy is offended by William’s insistence on using the word, and every time he tries to use the term, Diggy smacks him. Diggy’s reaction to William’s use of the racial epitaph illustrates a rebuking and regulation of white people using a word with an historically negative connotation. By doing so, Diggy is setting a boundary for William. In this case, William seeks to cross this boundary. Ultimately, the group decides to give William a pass in exchange for his help. Even after giving him a pass, Diggy smacks him at least one more time when he says the word to remind him of a shifting boundary. As much progress as it seems we have made, the scene seems to suggest that checks and balances are necessary to protect us from repeating our harmful, racist past. Again, black characters, even those who do “white people shit,” are aware of difference and the meaning of their race. Being among the majority in Black-context films seems to give them freedom to check post-racial assumptions. At the same time, Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib call William the N-word as a sign of friendship. The obvious contradiction signifies an openness to embrace white characters, provided there is a disassociation from white

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supremacist ideology. Although there is openness, there are still clear boundaries regarding the extent to which black characters will tolerate potential racism in their space. In the Black films I examined, white characters are reminded of their racial affiliation, and relationships are negotiated upon examination. Embodiment of access to the American Dream. Perhaps the most pervasive portrayal of whiteness in these films is the embodiment of access to the American Dream. In each of these films, relationships with white characters, whether casual or deep, provided access to resources that had the potential to help the black characters achieve upward mobility. In Top Five (2014), Andre Allen’s manager played by Kevin Hart learns that Zoolander (Ben Stiller) is in the building, and he was not informed. In response, he says, “These white people don’t tell me shit!” suggesting limitations to access as defined by the white majority. The statement assumes that had his manager been white, he would have been given an opportunity to network with a high profile, white celebrity. In the same vein, Julian in The Best Man Holiday (2013) experienced a threat to his charter school because he lost support from Elliot Gibson, a white philanthropist described as a “morality nut.” Gibson ended his support of the school upon discovering that Julian’s wife’s Candace was a stripper in the past. Throughout the film, Julian is stressed because he relies on Gibson’s two-million-dollar support to maintain the school’s success. It seems that Gibson is in a position of power to decide the future of a black character. In fact, it appears that the role of this white character is merely to provide or withdraw access to success. When a black character disrupts a moral code as defined by the white character, the black character is beholden to his graciousness. Regardless of their social positions, white characters (are assumed to) embody social capital and its benefits. In The Best Man Holiday (2013), Jordan’s relationship with Brian helped her secure an illustrator for Harper’s book. Toward the end of the film, Brian’s connections also seem to position him to be able to assist Julian in his donor crisis. He tells Julian “he has talked to a couple of people and got some leads.” Although one of the other black characters had already given him the money, there remains a mild dependence on white characters for access, even at the expense of losing friends. For example, Harper’s publicist encouraged him to exploit his friendship for the sake of making money. After Harper tells him writing a biography is not “his thing.” Stan responds, “Fuck your thing. This is a check. Exploit your friend for

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capital gain. This is America!” Here the character embodies capitalism above community, which in some ways counters black culture and is a main focus of the film. Harper struggles to take the advice. Eventually, Harper, who is already an accomplished published author, follows the advice and not only maintains his status as a successful author, but also his security at home. Had it not been for Stan’s advice, Harper would risk losing income needed to take care of his growing family. In Dope (2015), William is the access Malcolm and his friends need to get out of a predicament, which involves selling large amounts of dope. The three friends agree the only way to reach a market that would buy the drugs and generate the money needed was to “find the white people.” William is introduced to the audience as a musician, scholar, rake, and entrepreneur. He went to prep school, earned a perfect score on his SAT, but missed class because of his drug habit. Nonetheless, he was accepted into an Ivy League school based on who his father knew: social capital. Ironically, the three friends seek William’s help to sell the drugs because these Inglewood residents have no clue about the process. In this case, the black character is not seeking upward social mobility in a traditional way. Here, the roles are reversed: The black character is smart and college bound and the white character is a drug addict with social networks. Although Malcolm does not wholly trust a Mollyaddicted individual, he must rely on William’s access by virtue of his whiteness to achieve his ultimate goal, which is to make his payment so that he can continue his path to Harvard. As an institution, the school itself symbolizes access to a space respected by the majority. Although his education is not mentioned, Andre Allen occupies a space respected by the majority by having money and playing roles that appeal to the mainstream. Many of the white characters in Top Five are in awe of Andre Allen’s celebrity. One white character tries to approach him in a jewelry store, while another white character serving as security sends the fan away. As long as the comedian serves mainstream interests and avoids race altogether, he is protected, but when he challenges the mainstream, as was the case during his interview with the DJ, he is chastised. One woman yells to the comedian “I hope your dick falls off!” The film highlights what comedians, in general, might experience with fans when venturing off onto a new role. Nonetheless, it is worth considering how audiences might react in real life if prominent white comedians like Steve Carrell, Jerry Seinfeld or Ben Stiller were to star in a political film or one that specifically problematizes race. Arguably,

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the reaction to Allen’s socially conscious film signifies the amount of control his white audience has on the future of his career. After doing the film, Allen learns that he has lost sponsors and scripts and worries about his prospects. Another example of whites being an access point to success involves a scene with a Latina character, Chelsea, who is a well-known film critic. Although Chelsea is Latina, as a categorically Brown person she is more aligned with African-Americans in their position to white people in general. She shares a story with Andre about her white boyfriend flippantly commenting that she “would not get a loan even if Bill Gates co-signed.” The statement alone signifies people of color’s reliance on white people to access even simple aspirations like owning a home. Furthermore, her white boyfriend, who does not see the ways in which he dismisses her credentials and success, but assumes to be an expert about her financial worth, has no qualms making such a statement. In these three texts, whiteness is often portrayed as possessing wealth: an access point to upward social mobility. In so doing, these films also work to perpetuate a myth of classlessness, which disassociates low socioeconomic whites from the white ideal (Portwood-Stacer 2007). Although these characterizations of whiteness are one-dimensional, the portrayal of whites as access points in the three films identifies a racialized social stratification that counters colorblind strategies. In these Black-context films, white privilege is explicit and at times expressly articulated; thus, it seems difficult to maintain colorblindness in contexts defined by color and its implications.

Conclusion As diversity in the population increases, the demand for representation and diverse narratives also increases (Ralph J. Bunche Center 2015), yet, racial disparities in Hollywood persist. Furthermore, as the racial climate in the Trump era becomes more hostile, it is crucial that Hollywood take substantive steps to support and present more universal narratives that not only include, but center on non-white characters. The growth of black talent and black ownership in the entertainment industry presents an opportunity to examine marginalized voices as they become more centered and mainstream as well as their impact on race relations. Prior to the 2016 election, both white and black people seem to report a decrease in discrimination and progressive racial attitudes,

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which exemplified colorblind racial assumptions. By contrast, studies after the 2016 Trump election demonstrated a wakeup call for many who reported fear of worse race relations with black voters expecting the worst (Pew Research Center 2016). Whereas mainstream, white majority films have been seen or read as maintaining post-racial, colorblind assumptions, this analysis argues that by virtue of its cultural context, Black-context films seem more likely to expose faulty assumptions of racial harmony during times of civility. In some ways, the films reviewed challenge colorblind racial assumptions, and in other ways, they reinforce post-racial assumptions. The films show black characters in constant negotiation of their space with white characters. As each of these films was produced after the election of the first black president, the films seem to counter the assumptions and narratives of colorblindness by explicitly acknowledging distinctions between categorical blackness and whiteness and regulating interactions with white characters. Concurrently, the films also seem to suggest openness to forming friendships with white characters or doing things associated with white people. Acknowledging difference and engaging difference are not mutually exclusive, and thus, it can be argued that these films present a more modern racial discourse. It is one that involves seeing color, examining the boundaries, and choosing to engage with the difference, just like in any relationship. Another perspective, however, is that black characters benefit from the social capital associated with whiteness. The relationship between black and white characters in Black-context films may not always be intimate or suggesting close friendships, but instead they may be seen as partnerships that give social or economic access, most likely secured by a person who is white, thus reinforcing the status quo. Ironically, black storytellers do rely on more than African-American dollars to achieve global success. Arguably, many African-American writers and directors include white characters as minor characters in order to appeal to a broader audience. Storytellers also include white characters because, whether as bosses, colleagues, friends, family, service workers or neighbors, white people are a part of black people’s lives and thus are a part of Black-context stories. Furthermore, as black contexts have been informed by the assumptions of whiteness, it can be expected that racial ideologies could be located within the text. It is perhaps for this reason that these Black-context narratives are not blind to color. Moreover, Black-context films provide continual reminders of underlying racial

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tensions that flare up during times of social unrest, such as during the Trump era. The utopic assumption of a colorblind and “post-racial” world is that race will no longer be a barrier, and in some significant ways, there has been change. As Chelsey in Top Five (2014) states “People are changing. Wake up and smell the progress”; however, Andre Allen classically expresses a paradox of post-racialism when he replies, “Some things never change” while hailing a cab and expecting the driver to pass him by because he is black in New York, only to find the driver stops for him. Perhaps it is fair to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and Black-context films are in a position to continue to reveal these parallel truths. As we continue to examine Black-context films, scholars get a more critical sense of progress worth discussing as we interrogate whiteness through the lens of colorblindness. In addition to examining responses and consumptions of such texts, scholarship on Black-context narratives could reveal the extent to which such narratives either challenge or reinforce the status quo.

Note 1. In 2005, comedian and actor Dave Chappelle abruptly left the production of The Dave Chappelle Show on Comedy Central because of internal conflicts about his representation of black culture to white mainstream audiences.

Works Cited Banjo, Omotayo O. “Now You See Me: The Visibility of Whiteness in BlackContext Film.” Black Culture and Experience: Contemporary Issues, edited by V. Berry, A. Fleming-Rife, and A. Dayo, 257–270. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2015. Banjo, Omotayo O., and Nancy A. Jennings. “Content Analysis of the Portrayal of White Characters in Black Films Across Two Decades.” Mass Communication and Society 20, no. 2 (2017): 281–309. Banjo, Omotayo O., and Todd Fraley. “The Wannabe, the Man, and Whitebread: Portrayals of Whiteness in Black Films.” Western Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 1 (2014): 42. Bineham, Jeffery L. “How The Blind Side Blinds Us: Postracism and the American Dream.” Southern Communication Journal 80, no. 3 (2015): 230–245.

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Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 2002. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Cieply, Michael. “Coming Soon: A Breakout Year for Black Films.” The New York Times, June 1, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/movies/coming-soon-a-breakout-for-black-filmmakers.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&smid=tw-share&adxnnlx=1370195126-8xLda5qtkb+4AIeO+V1JkQ. Clement, Scott. “Millennials Are Just as Racist as Their Parents.” The Washington Post, April 7, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/ 04/07/white-millennials-are-just-about-as-racist-as-their-parents/. Cole, Olivia A. “Why The Best Man Holiday Isn’t ‘Race-Themed’.” HuffPost, November 18, 2013. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/the-bestman-holiday-race_b_4295853.html. Deggans, Eric. Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. New York: Macmillan, 2012. Entman, Robert, and Andrew Rojecki. The Black Image in the White Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema. New York, NY: State University of New York System, 2012. Frankenberg, Ruth. The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Garner, Steve. Whiteness: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2007. Gray, Tim. “Academy Nominates All White Actors for Second Year in a Row.” Variety, January 14, 2016. http://variety.com/2016/biz/news/ oscar-nominations-2016-diversity-white-1201674903/. Greenberg, Bradley S., Dana Mastro, and Jeffrey E. Brand. “Minorities and the Mass Media: Television into the 21st Century.” Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research (2002): 333–351. Hall, Stuart. Race: The Floating Signifier. Edited by Sut Jhally. Northampton: Media Education Foundation, 1996. Harwell, Drew. “Diverse Movies Are a Huge Business: Why Doesn’t Hollywood Make More?” The Washington Post, December 15, 2015. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/the-best-man-holiday-race_b_4295853.html. IMDb. “Box Office Mojo.” IMDb. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/. Ingraham, Christopher. “Three-Quarters of Whites Don’t Have Non-White Friends.” The Washington Post, August 25, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/25/three-quarters-of-whitesdont-have-any-non-white-friends/. Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder: Avalon Publishing, 1992.

110  O. O. BANJO Ladson-Billings, Gloria, and William F. Tate. “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.” Teachers College Record, 94 (1995): 47–68. Lasher, Megan. “Shonda Rhimes Responds to Petition Calling to Fire Jesse Williams Over BET Speech.” Time, July 5, 2016. http://time. com/4393095/shonda-rhimes-jesse-williams-bet-speech-greys-anatomy/. Lewis, Amanda E. “‘What Group?’ Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of ‘Color‐Blindness’.” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4 (2004): 623–646. Lopez, Ian H. “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama.” California Law Review 98, no. 3 (2010): 1023–1073. Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R., and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. “‘Look Out New World, Here We Come’? Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children’s Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.” Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies 9, no. 2 (2009): 166–178. Magee, N.Y. “Study Find Movies with Black Actors More Profitable Than AllWhite Cast.” EUR, April 9, 2016. http://www.eurweb.com/2016/04/ study-finds-movies-black-actors-profitable-white-casts/. Martin, Judith N., Robert L. Krizek, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Lisa Bradford. “Exploring Whiteness: A Study of Self Labels for White Americans.” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1996): 125–144. Mastro, Dana. “Why the Media’s Role in Issues of Race and Ethnicity Should Be in the Spotlight.” Journal of Social Issues 71, no. 1 (2015): 1–16. McIntosh, Peggy. “Unpacking the Knapsack of White Privilege.” Independent School 49, no. 2 (1990): 31–36. Moore, Antonio. “Why Ownership of #BlackMediaMatters More to Black America Than the Oscar Awards.” HuffPost, February 1, 2016. https:// www.huf fingtonpost.com/antonio-moore/why-ownership-of-blackmed_b_9123680.html. Oh, David C., and Omotayo O. Banjo. “Outsourcing Postracialism: Voicing Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Outsourced.” Communication Theory 22, no. 4 (2012): 449–470. Ono, Kent A. “Postracism: A Theory of the “Post-” as Political Strategy.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 227–233. Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Pérez Huber, Lindsay, and Daniel G. Solorzano. “Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research.” Race Ethnicity and Education 18, no. 3 (2015): 297–320. Pew Research Center. “Blacks Upbeat About Black Progress, Prospects.” January 12, 2010. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/01/12/blacks-upbeatabout-black-progress-prospects/. Pew Research Center. “Almost All Millennials Accept Interracial Dating and Marriage.” February 1, 2010. http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/02/01/ almost-all-millennials-accept-interracial-dating-and-marriage/.

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Pew Research Center. “Many Voters, Especially Blacks, Expect Race Relations to Worsen Following Trump’s Election.” November 26, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/21/race-relationsfollowing-trumps-election/. Portwood-Stacer, Laura. “Consuming ‘Trash’: Representations of Poor Whites in U.S. Popular Culture.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association Convention, San Francisco, CA, 2007. Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. “2015 Hollywood Diversity Report: Flipping the Script.” UCLA, 2015. https://bunchecenter. pre.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/82/2015/02/2015-HollywoodDiversity-Report-2-25-15.pdf. Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. “2016 Hollywood Diversity Report: Business as Usual?” UCLA, 2016. https://bunchecenter. pre.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/82/2016/02/2016-HollywoodDiversity-Report-2-25-16.pdf. Rollock, Nicola, and David Gillborn. “Critical Race Theory (CRT).” British Educational Research Association, online resource, 2011. Russell, Margaret M. “Race and the Dominant Gaze: Narratives of Law and Inequality in Popular Film.” Legal Studies Forum 15 (1991): 243. Seewood, Andre. “Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies.” IndieWire, January 17, 2014. http://www.indiewire.com/2014/01/why-white-peopledont-like-black-movies-162548/. Simpson, Jennifer Lyn. “The Color-Blind Double Bind: Whiteness and the (Im) Possibility of Dialogue.” Communication Theory 18, no. 1 (2008): 139–159. Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper. “Inclusion or Invisibility: Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment.” University of Southern California Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA), 2016. Squires, Catherine. African Americans and the Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Tesfamariam, Rahiel. “Interview with ‘The Best Man Holiday’ Director Malcolm D. Lee.” Rahiel, November 20, 2013. http://www.rahiel.com/2013/11/ interview-with-the-best-man-holiday-director-malcolm-d-lee/. Turner, Sarah E. “Disney Does Race: Black BFFs in the New Racial Moment.” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 5, no. 1 (2012): 125–140. Ward, L. Monique. “Wading Through the Stereotypes: Positive and Negative Associations Between Media Use and Black Adolescents’ Conceptions of Self.” Developmental Psychology 40, no. 2 (2004): 284. Warner, Kristen J. “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy Shonda Rhimes and Her ‘Post-civil Rights, Post-feminist’ Series.” Television & New Media (2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414550529.

112  O. O. BANJO Wheat, Alynda. “Oscar so White: This Is Bigger Than Will Smith.” People, January 22, 2016. http://www.people.com/article/oscar-diversity-notjust-will-smith. Zumberg, Marianne. “Box Office: ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ ‘War Room’ in Close Race Again over Slow Weekend.” Variety, September 5, 2015. http://variety.com/2015/film/box-office/box-office-straight-outtacompton-war-room-1201586864/.

CHAPTER 6

Colorblind Racism, The Trump Effect, and The Blind Side Charise Pimentel

Just prior to the fall semester, I attended a professional development workshop on my campus. It was just after the Charlottesville Attacks,1 which at the time were all over the news and on everyone’s mind, the workshop presenter’s included. As the presenter began to introduce herself and the goals of the workshop, she suddenly became overwhelmed with emotions and could not talk. She wiped tears from her face and struggled to produce words. After a brief moment of silence, she managed to say that she was simply in shock that these acts of racism [Charlottesville Attacks] were occurring in our present-day society… in 2017. Perhaps more compelling than the presenter’s emotional introduction, however, were the workshop attendees’ varied responses to the presenter. Most attendees immediately sympathized with the presenter (hugged her, wiped away their own tears, and/or verbally concurred that what was happening in Charlottesville was indeed shocking). Others in the session had no response at all and still a few others seemed shocked for an entirely different reason: They could not believe that so many in

C. Pimentel (*)  Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_6

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the room were oblivious to the fact that racism is still a problem. A black professor in particular rolled her eyes and muttered in a soft voice, “This should not be shocking at all. This [racism] is an everyday reality.” As this professor made clear and race scholars agree, the extent to which racism occurs in our society is widely underestimated (BonillaSilva 2014; Nieto and Bode 2018; Tatum 2017). In actuality, racism takes on many forms and permeates our society so much so that it has become normalized. In an effort to bring attention to inconspicuous forms of racism, this chapter examines the notion of colorblind racism— the subtle, everyday production of racial ideologies that go unmarked and thus unchallenged, yet may be more impactful in creating racist inequities than blatant forms of racism. To demonstrate how colorblind racism is produced, I deconstruct the racial messages embedded within the popular, heartwarming narrative presented in the motion picture The Blind Side (2009). Before I turn to my racial analysis of The Blind Side, I first situate the concept of colorblind racism in our current political context, which is defined in part by a President who not only openly makes racist remarks, but evokes colorblind racial ideologies as he dismisses the existence of racism and disparages anyone who attempts to bring attention to such issues, including the various National Football League (NFL) players who have protested racial injustices by silently kneeling during the national anthem prior to NFL games.

Racism and The Trump Effect What people most often recognize as instances of racism can be classified as acts of racial discrimination (Tatum 2017) or what Nieto and Bode (2018) identify as individual racism, which refers to an individual’s racist actions or behaviors (e.g., the actions performed by the “Unite the Right” group referenced above, a racist joke, or a racial epithet). Indeed, these types of racist acts have been on the rise since President Trump took office—a trend the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as “The Trump Effect” (Kaleem 2017). Richard Cohen, President of the Southern Poverty Law Center, states that “Mr. Trump ran a campaign marked by racism, xenophobia, crude racial stereotypes and anti-Semitic imagery…The combination of his racist campaign and the attacks on political correctness told many people that the gloves are off and they could act, unfortunately, with their worst instincts” (Kaleem 2017, para. 8). Cohen goes on to report that within only ten days after

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Trump’s victory in the presidential race, they received nearly 900 hate incident reports and these incidents continue to be higher than normal (Kaleem 2017). Arguably, since President Trump unabashedly and regularly makes racist remarks, he has given license to white supremacists to openly verbalize and act on their racist beliefs. Mahiri (2017) reasons that “Trump’s deliberate denigration of these groups [racial minorities] leading up to and subsequent to the election reinvigorated and validated White supremacists’ views that reject the value of multiculturalism and instead promote an imagined White, Christian European heritage” (p. 2). Indeed, Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was often interpreted as “Make America White Again” as it invoked a nostalgic imagery of a White America. Yet America was never white. White people always co-inhabited American soils with racial others. Thus, the nostalgia centers not on a time when America was white but rather on a time when white supremacy was proven by pseudoscience and enforced by law. Even though incidents of individual racism are on the rise and garner much media attention, it is important to realize that acts of individual racism are actually considered to be the least impactful in terms of producing the racial injustices that define our society (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Nieto and Bode 2018). Unlike the salient nature of individual racism, cultural and institutional forms of racism operate as business as usual, often going unquestioned as they powerfully shape the life experiences, opportunities, and outcomes of everyone in our racialized society (Tatum 2017). Bonilla-Silva (2014) explains how even though these subtle forms of racism inundate our everyday experiences, they are often explained away and rationalized through various colorblind racial ideologies.

Colorblind Racial Ideologies Bonilla-Silva (2014) holds that racism has evolved over time, with present-day racism being much more subtle and sophisticated than the coercive racism that typified the Jim Crow era. Due to the elusive and subtle nature of racism in today’s society, many people, and especially white people, are quick to claim they do not see race (colorblind), are not racist, and further that the USA is no longer a racist society. This captures, for example, the colorblind reaction to the Charlottesville Attacks that I documented at the beginning of this chapter. Despite this optimistic,

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colorblind perspective, there is ample evidence that racial inequities abound in all areas of our society, including drastic disparities in wealth, health, employment, criminal justice, and education (Bonilla-Silva 2014). Given the racial inequities that continue to manifest in US society, in combination with the overall lack of agents who admittedly produce racism, Bonilla-Silva finds our society facing a particular paradox when it comes to race—what he articulates as “racism without racists.” To rationalize the dissonance of living in a racist society yet not being racist, Bonilla-Silva explains that many people adopt colorblind racial ideologies. These colorblind racial ideologies explain away racism, and in doing so, reinforce white supremacy. That is, colorblindness creates the illusion that issues of race no longer matter and this erroneous transcendence of race becomes common sense where it is “ultimately false [but] fulfills a practical role in racialized societies” (Bonilla-Silva 2014, p. 474). Within this framework, Bonilla-Silva (2014) identifies four frames of colorblindness: (1) Abstract Liberalism relies on the belief that the US society is meritocratic and that every individual has an equal opportunity to succeed. This frame does not take into consideration the sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts in which people live. Put simply, if one does not achieve, it is because he/she is not working hard enough. (2) The Naturalization frame assumes there is a natural “likeness” among white people, and for this reason, white people naturally come together conceptually as well as spatially. The same is thought to be true of other races as well. Thus, racial segregation in schools, work, and housing is considered natural and unproblematic. As a result of living and working in close proximity over extended periods of time, BonillaSilva suggests that a “White habitus” has emerged in which there is a collective experience and perspective among whites who have had this extended, segregated contact with other whites. Bonilla-Silva defines the “White habitus” as a “racialized uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates Whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (p. 152). (3) Cultural Racism embodies the belief(s) that people of color “do not have it all together,” especially because of their cultural and/or biological inferiority. This frame points to racial minority’s lack of morality, responsibility, organization, motivation, and commitment. (4) The Minimization frame maintains that there is a declining significance of race within contemporary society. People working within this ideological frame are likely to argue: “We do not see race, we only see people.”

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There are many recent public examples of these colorblind ideologies at work, especially drawing from the abstract liberalism and minimization ideological frames. As an example, we can look to the colorblind responses to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, namely the very popular response #AllLivesMatter. Needless to say, this response minimizes the impact of racism and police brutality on black communities and obscures the specific sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts that give rise to these racial events, necessitating the articulation of #BlackLivesMatter in the first place. Alternatively, we can look to the various colorblind responses to the NFL players’ refusal to stand during the national anthem before NFL games. Many NFL players have decided to use their national platform to bring attention to not only police brutality on black communities, but also the racial injustices in other social institutions including education, housing, and prisons. However, their protests are often criticized as being unfounded and disrespectful to “our” country, as is alluded to in the many social media frenzies, including the hashtag #StandForOurAnthem that was blasted on Twitter. Of course, President Donald Trump has had quite a bit to say about the NFL players’ refusals to stand, including references to the players as “Sons of Bitches” as he minimizes the issue of race: “The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag, and National Anthem” (Allison 2017). Trump even calls upon the NFL owners to step up and fire any NFL player who disrespects “our flag.” Much like these examples of colorblind ideologies, I find that the ideological “film talk” in The Blind Side reinforces dominant racial beliefs, values, and attitudes that result in racial inequities. Even though the film was largely read as racially unproblematic, and arguably served as a testament to positive race relations in that it exemplified the very successful incorporation of a black child into a white family, I argue that The Blind Side serves to endorse colorblind racial ideologies thereby maintaining white privilege at the same time it dehumanizes black people. The questionable narrative presented in The Blind Side is undoubtedly culturally influential and enduring, yet dangerous in its cultural productions of race. In an effort to call attention to such productions of race in The Blind Side, I perform a critical, racial analysis of the film to demonstrate how this seemingly innocent and inspirational narrative reproduces dominant racial ideologies surrounding such issues as urban schooling, housing, and employment. Throughout my analysis, I apply Bonilla-Silva’s frames of colorblindness to demonstrate how the film narrative (re)produces the

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racial status quo. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of The Blind Side as well as Michael Oher—the person the film narrative seeks to represent. I then provide a detailed racial analysis of the film.

The Blind Side There is no denying the broad appeal for the narrative presented in The Blind Side. When initially released in movie theaters, The Blind Side was extraordinarily successful at the box office. While the movie cost $29 million to make, it took in more than $250 million nationally and $309 million globally from ticket sales, and has earned an additional $102 million in DVD sales (Montez de Oca 2012). It was the 8th highest grossing movie of 2009 and number 63 of all-time highest grossing films at the Hollywood domestic box office (Data Source: Amazon.com). The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Picture of the Year and Best Actress of the Year. Sandra Bullock won the coveted Oscar for Best Actress of the Year, as well as a Golden Globe, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a People’s Choice Award (Montez de Oca 2012). The film is based on Michael Lewis’s (2006) book with the same title, which largely focused on historical aspects of football and the evolution of the left tackle position. Lewis’s account of Oher’s rise to fame was attributed to his size and speed. It took little time for director, John Lee Hancock to adapt Lewis’s book to film claiming it to be a “wonderful Christian story” of a family with no boundaries (Vu 2010).

The Story of Michael Oher With little doubt, many people find the story of Michael Oher compelling. Indeed, there are several publicized narratives that center on Oher’s life: Lewis’s (2006) book The Blind Side; John Lee Hancock’s (2009) subsequent screenplay made for film, The Blind Side; Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohys’ (2010) book, In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving; and Oher’s (2011) memoir I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blindside, and Beyond. Part of the allure of Oher’s story is based on his amazing accomplishment of being a 2009 first round draft pick for the NFL, which is no easy feat to accomplish in the world of athletics. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only one in 5000 high school athletes, or even more daunting, only one in

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24,550 (0.00565%) of the general population, has a chance of becoming a professional athlete (Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010–2011 Edition). With these statistics in mind, the average person has a better chance of getting struck by lightning, marrying a millionaire, or writing a New York Times bestseller (11 Hardest Jobs to Get in America, College Times). Oher achieved what most athletes can only dream of, and yet this is only part of his story. There is no question about it; Oher’s success in the NFL is remarkable, but perhaps what makes Oher’s story most compelling is his childhood. Oher was one of twelve siblings who were raised in severe poverty to an absent and then later deceased father and a drug-addicted and mostly absent mother. Oher was often left alone to fend for himself as well as for his siblings. Later, Oher was bounced around to various foster care homes, was homeless from time to time, and throughout all these experiences, suffered greatly in school. Oher was able to turn all of this around by focusing on sports, namely basketball and football. During his senior year of high school, he made up several years of schooling so he could be eligible to play college football; then, he attended the University of Mississippi on a football scholarship. To say the least, Oher’s trajectory to the NFL was not an easy one. Throughout his childhood, he demonstrated resiliency, aspirations, commitment, and a hard work ethic. In light of Oher’s extraordinary life story, this chapter examines his character portrayal in the wildly successful Hollywood film The Blind Side. While the movie was well received and has garnered many accolades and awards, Oher himself is dissatisfied with the filmic portrayal of his life. Oher criticizes the movie for unjustly portraying him as slow, childlike, and with no athletic ability whatsoever (Oher 2011). He is most dissatisfied with the way the movie portrayed his football skills. In contrast to the movie, the reality is that football and basketball were central to Oher’s childhood experiences and future aspirations. In a report appearing in the Los Angeles Times after Oher and his team, the Baltimore Ravens, won the Super Bowl, he tells reporters, “I’m tired of the movie. Football is what got me here, and the movie, it wasn’t me….Sports is all I had growing up, and the movie made me look like I didn’t know anything” (Plaschke 2013, paras. 5 and 17). Oddly, even though Oher is the binding agent to The Blind Side narrative, he is systematically removed from the narrative in more ways than one. I first examine the impact of the White Savior frame from which the story is told.

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White Savior Film As a child, Oher demonstrated great resiliency as he resisted negative influences and carved out a pathway to make a better life for himself. Also important to his success were the several black families who helped out along the way, providing meals, a place to stay, guidance, and persistence to get Oher into a better school. However, the agency of black people, including Oher himself, is drowned out by the driving framework of the film: the White Savior. Hughey (2010) defines a White Savior Film (WSF) as a genre that “features a group of lower-class, urban, non-Whites (generally Black and Latino/a) who struggle through the social order in general, or the educational system specifically. Yet through the sacrifices of a White teacher [or other White saviors] they are transformed, saved and redeemed by film’s end” (p. 475). As Cammarota (2011) explains, a WSF undermines both the humanity and agency of people of color: In such cinematic treatments of race, people of color appear to lack the agency necessary to enact positive changes in their own lives. The underlying assumption is that people of color, on their own, fail to enact resilience, resistance, and success … Any achievements in these areas seem to result from the initiatives of the White savior. Furthermore, these Hollywood narratives often miss or ignore how people and communities of color do successfully resist and overcome marginalization through self-initiated agency. (p. 245)

By centering the narrative on the White Savior, namely Leigh Anne Tuohy (Oher’s white adoptive mother), the audience is denied a narrative that centers on the hard work, sacrifices, and character qualities that Oher exhibited throughout his childhood and adolescence. From Oher’s (2011) memoir, readers can glean great details from his childhood, such as the fact that he sold newspapers on Sundays starting at six o’clock in the morning on the street corner and remained on the street corner until every last paper was sold, which provided him enough money to buy food for a week and sometimes new clothes. Also detailed in his book is that Oher was very attentive to the way he physically presented himself. He explains in his book, for example, that he would iron out “every last wrinkle” on all of his clothes, including his practice clothes (p. 134). Also absent from The Blind Side narrative is Oher’s passion for sports that he developed at a very young age, including the years of training he put into learning and practicing basketball and football. The truth is,

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by the time Oher met the Tuohys, he was a highly skilled and competitive athlete who had accomplishments to speak of. Instead of a narrative that focuses on Oher’s hard work and dedication to athletics, The Blind Side presents Oher as an unskilled football player. Furthermore, in a very abrupt manner and as a result of meeting the Tuohys and receiving their few pointers, audience members see Oher suddenly “learn” football. Indeed, there are several embellishments of this sort throughout the movie that serve to overemphasize the savior effect the Tuohys had on Oher’s life. In his book, Oher discusses some of the embellishments: “Obviously, the movie makers have to make artistic choices to tell the story in the best way, but some of the details, like me having to learn the game of football as a teenager or me walking to the gym in November wearing cut-off shorts, just aren’t true” (p. xvi). Oher goes on to discuss the misrepresentation of his athletic abilities in The Blind Side: In the movie The Blind Side, you see S.J. teaching me different plays using ketchup bottles and spices. I know stuff like that makes for a good story on screen, but in reality, I already knew the game of football inside and out. Like I said before, I didn’t just watch it as a kid—I studied it, learning the plays and what each position did. When I was struggling with homework at school, studying sports was a subject where I could have been an honors student. I didn’t just learn the rules, but I studied every play and every position, trying to understand strategy and technique. (p. 150)

The movie makes it seem as though Oher had no athletic abilities whatsoever so that the learning curve for playing football was exaggerated, thereby amplifying the role of the White Savior and minimizing Oher’s hard work and dedication. Because the details of Oher’s life are lost in this WSF, the movie effectively maintains the already established monolithic, deficit-oriented personification of the black male that is captured in Bonilla-Silva’s cultural racism frame. Throughout the movie, Oher is presented as a passive, dumbed-down child who is wandering aimlessly through life and likely to follow the paths of his drug-addicted mother and thug friends. By presenting him in this manner, he easily fits within the genre of the WSF—a child who is need of being saved by the white hero. In The Blind Side, there are many White Saviors that obscure Oher’s agency. When Oher first enrolls in the white Christian school, we see Coach Cotton become completely frustrated because Oher seemingly

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does not know the first thing about blocking and fails to follow simple directions on how to block. Witnessing this, Leigh Anne marches out onto the football field in her high heels and designer dress clothes and breaks it down for him. She tells him “[p]rotect these players as if they are your family,” and then she proceeds to designate each offensive player as one of the Tuohy family members he needs to protect against the defensive line. After this 30-second speech, Oher magically gets it. He goes from being a “marshmallow,” as the coach refers to him, to blocking with the utmost of precision and strength. In this WSF, we see that Oher’s hard work and ongoing training is displaced by Leigh Anne’s mini lecture on the football field. In this narrative, Leigh Anne’s effort suffices in Oher’s ability to learn how to block. On many occasions throughout The Blind Side narrative, SJ (Leigh Anne’s 9-year-old son) also pitches in to help with Oher’s constructed deficit in football knowledge and skill. In several scenes, we see SJ serving as Oher’s personal trainer and coach—teaching him the fundamentals of football, going as far as moving around bottles of condiments on the kitchen table to teach him player positions and basic plays. Later in the film, SJ also counsels Oher as to where his top picks ought to be for college football and attends all the recruitment meetings with Oher where he not only negotiates with football coaches to get Oher the best contract, but he also manages to negotiate special perks for himself. From all these scenes, audience members see a simplified, childlike, black cultural projection of Oher—a version of Oher that is incompetent and clearly benefits from the guidance of the White Saviors in this narrative.

Whites Tell His(Story) In addition to the omissions and embellishments that amplify the White Savior narrative, the scope and development of the narrative conforms to the perspectives and experiences of the white people who are telling (his) story. Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) concept of White habitus is helpful in understanding how the voice, narrative form, scope, and physical camera shots conform to the white narrators’ experiences and sensibilities. While there is no inherent white experience or perspective that all whites are familiar with, Bonilla-Silva’s concept of White habitus conceptualizes what might be considered a collective white experience that results from the high rates of racial isolation and segregation among whites. As BonillaSilva explains, “Whites experience even higher levels of social and spatial

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isolation than Blacks” (p. 152). Because The Blind Side is informed by, written by, and produced by white people who admittedly live racially isolated lives, we can see how the White habitus, or a white collective cultural and racial experience, informs the narrative in a variety of ways. The Blind Side, consistent with other dominant historical narratives on people of color, begins the story when white contact takes place (when the Tuohys meet Oher). That is, audience members are introduced to Oher, not as a young child when his dreams of becoming a professional athlete and training began, but as a teenager who is already a few years into high school. This is the age, of course, when the Tuohys first met him. By starting at this point in Oher’s life, his full life story (what the Tuohys are less familiar with) is omitted. Indeed, Oher addresses this stripped version of his story in his book, I Beat the Odds: Most people probably know my name from The Blind Side. What they probably don’t know—what no one knows—is exactly what happened to me during my years in the foster care system, the years before The Blind Side picked up my story. The things in my life that lead up to it; the way I tried to fight back; the emotions that overwhelmed me and left me confused, scared and alone; all of the memories that no one was able to bring out of me; everything in my life that came before the happy ending. (pp. xvi–xvii)

Not only does Oher’s story supposedly begin when the Tuohys met him, but his character portrayal as a young adult is minimally developed. Most of the screen time and settings are dedicated to the character development of the Tuohys. Indeed, what we do learn about Oher is through the character development of white characters. A majority of the screen time, settings, and shots, for example, center on the Tuohys’ surroundings, including their home, the school their children attend, their car, and the restaurants their family and friends frequent. Whereas the Tuohys are shown in complex, well-developed shots, Oher is seen in decontextualized and fragmented shots. For example, in the contested shot of Oher walking down the street in the cold rain in November, we see him how the Tuohys saw him—in a fragmented and decontextualized perspective. We only know he is walking down the street. We do not know where he is coming from; where he is going; why he is walking out in the cold rain without a jacket; and so on. Unlike these underdeveloped and decontextualized shots of Oher, in the same scene we get a rich, detailed story of the

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Tuohys. We know, for example, that they are on their way home from SJ’s (the Tuohys’ son) Thanksgiving pageant at his middle school that started at 7 p.m. As the family converses from inside their car, we learn that SJ has a crush on his classmate Kenzie, that SJ performed as Indian #3 in the pageant, and that SJ actually tried out for the role of Indian Chief in the play, but the role went to a Chinese student instead, to which SJ claims might have been due to some kind of casting bias. These well-developed shots of the Tuohys occur throughout the movie, producing full-bodied white narratives and characters at the same time the movie takes a reductionist stance in developing the black narratives and characters. When Oher does appear on screen, he rarely speaks; he often looks down or into space when adults talk to him, and he is unlikely to respond to questions directed to him. What little audience members do learn about Oher is often articulated by white people—characters who represent real people but who only knew him for a few years prior to him being drafted to the NFL. The first voice audience members hear in the movie is that of Sandra Bullock, the actress playing Leigh Anne Tuohy, as she provides a voiceover that explains the importance and physical attributes of a left tackle as images of Oher’s physique are displayed on the big screen. In the absence of Oher’s voice, audience members learn about Oher’s academics from white teachers who read off his academic record, including his GPA, IQ score, various assessments of his academic progress, and potential as well as other documentation that define his identity (or lack thereof) as a student. In terms of athleticism, white coaches and white spectators size up his athletic ability in the game of football. When audience members finally gain some insight into Oher’s perspectives on his own life, we hear about these feelings, not from Oher himself, but from one of Oher’s white teachers. She reads his words from a white page—an essay he wrote, entitled “White Walls,” about being surrounded in whiteness. From this essay, it becomes clear that Oher has much to say, especially in regard to his transition to an all-white family and school. As can be seen, The Blind Side reinforces race relations whereby white people speak on behalf of black people—a historically racial practice whereby the knowledge produced by whites circumvents the knowledge produced by blacks, thereby undermining blacks’ perspectives, experiences, and agency. By eliminating Oher’s voice or anyone who could provide insights into any lived black experiences, The Blind Side quietly reinforces the racial status quo whereby whites collectively and authoritatively tell (his)story.

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A Spectator’s Gaze at Black Life Not only is the script unproblematically transferred to white writers, producers, and narrators/cast, but also many of the physical elements of the visual text, including the positioning of the camera, reinforce the naturalization frame of Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) colorblind racial ideologies. The naturalization frame in this case assumingly renders white experiences as comprehensible, normal, and familiar to a viewing audience, while rendering black experiences as unfamiliar. More specifically, we find that the distant camera shots, the alignment of the camera with the Tuohy’s gaze, and the constant camera shots through objects to see Oher and other black characters in this film create a spectator’s gaze of black life. Essentially, audience members find themselves looking at Oher, not with Oher. Through the use of camera angles and shots, audience members are forced to get to know Oher in the way the Tuohys got to know Oher—as outsiders and from a distance. Within this framing, the White habitus is supported in that there is an unspoken solidarity and understanding between the white narrators and the “white” lens audience members are assumed to have. In the movie, we notice that the camera naturally and unproblematically aligns with the vantage point of white characters. Even in scenes when Oher is central to the development of the narrative, such as when he picks up popcorn that has been left behind in the bleachers after a volleyball game, the audience is not physically aligned with Oher. Rather, the camera shot is aligned with Sean Tuohy, who is across the gym from Oher. The physical placement of the camera produces an assumed solidarity between the audience and Sean Tuohy, one where the audience (assumed white) observe with Sean Tuohy from a large distance, trying to figure out what Oher is doing and why. Like Sean Tuohy, audience members are left to question Oher’s actions: Is he cleaning the gym? Does he have a job as a janitor? Is he picking up the popcorn so he can eat it later? Scene after scene introduces new aspects of Oher from this distant, unknowing, white spectator’s gaze. The physical alignment of the camera with whites’ visual field is consistent throughout the movie. So in the scene when Oher goes missing shortly after meeting the Tuohys, the written narrative and the physical camera stay with Leigh Anne Tuohy. Audience members see her feelings of concern and frustration unfold as she searches but fails to locate Oher. Obviously, while the story and camera stay with Leigh Anne Tuohy, they

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fail to capture the feelings and trajectory of Oher’s character. Even in the rare occurrence of the Tuohys not being part of a scene, the movie does not break from this distant spectator lens in which audience members look at Oher, instead of with Oher. For example, when the audience watches Oher wait for his shirt to dry at a laundry mat where he steals dryer time from a woman, the angle from which audience members look is from outside the laundry mat and through a window, watching and trying to make sense of his life circumstances. Similarly, when Oher runs into his brother Marcus (whom he has not seen since he was a young child) at a restaurant, the cutaway shot of this reunion is from outside the restaurant and through a window, aligned with the Tuohys’ point of view. Physically aligned with the Tuohys through camera shots and a written script, audience members are left not knowing to whom Oher is talking and are unable to hear what they are saying. As these examples illustrate, Oher’s life experiences, perspective, and overall character development are physically and conceptually muted. Through the constant use of distant camera shots, alignment of the camera with the Tuohys’ gaze, and camera angles that shoot through things to look at Oher, audience members are invited to coalesce with the Tuohys—to experience Oher as they experienced him, the unfamiliar, the decontextualized, the curious—the life of a young black man. The idea that there is a collective white experience that perceives Oher and other black characters as unfamiliar reinforces the idea of the white collective perspective embodied in Bonilla-Silva’s concept of the White habitus. From the concept of the White habitus, there is a presumed “white” perspective from which this narrative unfolds, and it is assumed that audience members all agree that the experiences of the racial other (black) are distant, unfamiliar, and must be gazed upon to gain some kind of comprehension.

YOU Fail School, Not Schools Fail You Consistent with the underdevelopment of Oher’s character in general, Oher’s early schooling experiences are omitted from the narrative in The Blind Side. While it is made clear that Oher experienced school failure and was several years behind by the time he reached high school, audience members are denied even the briefest glimpse of those early schooling experiences to judge for themselves what contributed to his school failure.

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The story of Oher’s schooling, or lack thereof, draws from several frames of colorblind racial ideologies including abstract liberalism, cultural racism, and minimization, thereby shaping how audience members make sense of not only Oher’s schooling experiences, but also urban minority schooling in general. Huckin (1995) argues that omissions— what is left out of a text—are possibly more influential to how a text is “read” than what is foregrounded in a text. Huckin explains that an omission is “often the most potent aspect of textualization” because that which is not included as part of the narrative is unlikely to enter audience members’ minds at all, and thus is not subjected to scrutiny. Audience members are likely distracted by what is in the foreground and must make sense of complex social issues, such as urban minority schooling, with the limited aspects of the foregrounded narrative. The partial narrative of Oher’s schooling is not without its racial implications. While the narrative could have revealed the structural inequities that are embedded in schools and society and that contribute to an ongoing achievement gap, what we have instead is a story that relies on the ideology of cultural racism. Because the narrative narrowly centers on child neglect, abandonment, immorality, the erosion of a work ethic, all of which is contained to the urban black ghetto, audience members can rationally mobilize the cultural racism ideology of minority academic achievement: namely, genetic deficit theories, cultural deficit theories, and the culture of poverty. These theories have long been criticized for being racist and for justifying the school policies and practices that recreate the achievement gap they try to explain (Delpit 2012; Valencia 2010), yet the partial narrative of urban minority schooling presented in The Blind Side rests squarely within this cultural racism logic. In a narrative that omits Oher’s early schooling experiences, audience members are not prompted to consider the structural inequalities that impact urban minority schools. These structural inequalities are not embedded in the home and community but in school and societal policies and practices. Some of these structural inequalities include: school funding, physical conditions of school buildings, lack of equipment and materials, teacher experience, culturally irrelevant pedagogies and curriculum, test bias, tracking, retention, the lack of long-term developmental bilingual programs, and disciplinary policies (Nieto and Bode 2018; Kozol 1991). Because these institutional factors do not make their way into the narrative, they are unlikely to enter audience members’ minds as possible contributing factors and thus continue to go unexamined by the

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larger society, thereby upholding the colorblind ideology. In the absence of a narrative that unpacks the sociopolitical and historical aspects of schooling, Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) ideology of minimization is likely to be employed. If society in general is left unaware of how structural issues and teacher expectations impact students’ achievement at a racial level, people, and especially those who are not affected adversely by structural inequalities, are likely to deny that race and racism have anything to do with academic achievement. Instead, we are pushed to rely on the ideology of abstract liberalism, which convinces us to simply believe that we get what we work for. Unlike the narrative presented in The Blind Side that solely relies on cultural deficits to explain Oher’s school failure, the narrative in Oher’s memoir (2011) focuses on the school as a central part of his and his peers’ academic failure. He explains: Mine [My teachers] pretty much didn’t care if I was there or not. They just kept passing me so that they didn’t have to deal with me anymore, or answer questions as to why I was failing—and it wasn’t just me. That was true for so many kids. We would just be held in the classroom for the period and the teacher would go over the material, but nobody (including the teacher) seemed to care if it stuck or not. No one checked for homework or book reports or even gave many tests. When no one around you, at school or at home, seems to think learning is important, it’s pretty hard to think that it is important yourself—especially when you’re a teenager. (pp. 82–83)

The (un)portrait of Oher’s early schooling years is offset with the foregrounding of Oher’s academic transformation once he leaves the black urban ghetto and is in an all-white home and school. The posturing of white schools as the safe grounds for minority children uncritically justifies the social practices of bussing and integrating students of color into white schools. This narrative is consistent with other highly influential Hollywood narratives [e.g., Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007), and Finding Forrester (2000)], which suggest that the best thing for students of color to do is to flee their homes, families, schools, and communities in order to be successful. We also see this narrative being endorsed at the national level as US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, proposes school vouchers and charter schools as the means by which we can effectively address educational underachievement. According to this logic, a few students of color—those able and

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willing to physically move, commute, pay extra fees, and possibly have to ideologically assimilate to a Eurocentric school and neighborhood—can be successful. Instead of addressing and transforming the institutional factors that impact public schools, the push for vouchers and charter schools encourages parents and their students to withdraw from public schools altogether, leaving public schools with even less funding and having to face the same structural problems. Needless to say, this approach to school transformation fails to address the educational equity of the majority of minority students who remain at public schools.

Hard Work Pays Off in Memphis The binary portrayals of Hurt Village and the white Memphis suburb where the Tuohys live are oversimplified and give further life to the racial logic that sustains inequitable living conditions. There is no arguing that Memphis, like most US urban centers, is segregated by race and socioeconomic status and that people experience different life outcomes in terms of educational achievement, occupations, and socioeconomic status along these racial and socioeconomic lines. However, the rationale for the differentiation in life chances and outcomes in The Blind Side is portrayed as natural, rational, and justified. While audience members see portraits of a racially and socioeconomically segregated Memphis, what is completely omitted from this narrative is the sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts that create and sustain the physical and conceptual boundaries that exist in cities like Memphis. Void a historical context as well as insight into ongoing structural inequities, the film discourse relies on the (1) naturalization ideology, which suggests that people naturally segregate based on racial similarity, (2) the ideology of abstract liberalism, which holds that black people live in urban ghettos and poverty because they have not worked hard enough to achieve something else for themselves, and (3) cultural racism, which maintains that blacks and other people of color live in undesired life situations because they lack the core cultural characteristics that are needed to achieve, including, morality, hard work ethic, and family responsibility. The Blind Side narrative rationalizes these colorblind racial ideologies. Presented within the visual text, audiences are provided evidence for such reasoning. Hurt Village, as the name implies, is a place of suffering. In the few scenes that take audience members into Hurt Village, we

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see young men throwing their lives away to drugs, violence, and other criminal activity. They are portrayed as animalistic, hyper-masculine, and sexual predators to white women. These men do not have jobs, which is illustrated in scenes that show them in the middle of the day sitting on their door stoops chatting about strippers, drinking beer from brown paper bags, and playing card games. Similarly, the women do not have jobs, as evidenced by their walking around outside in the middle of the day in bathrobes and slippers. The women are also portrayed as drug addicts, promiscuous, and negligent to their children. The living spaces in Hurt Village are unkempt and even unsanitary. The only scene in Ms. Oher’s apartment, for example, is careful to show its disarray. The camera pans a full 360 degrees so that the audience might take in the empty beer cans and wine bottles, dirty dishes piled high, the mattress on the floor, and dirty clothes strewn across the apartment. The scenes that focus on Hurt Village are in sharp contrast to the scenes that focus on the white Memphis suburb where the Tuohys live. In the white suburb, we see images of white professionals at work, obsessively well-maintained yards and homes, and loving families who are together and have caring relationships. The Tuohys, for example, are presented as a loyal, peaceful, caring, charitable, Christian family. In the Tuohy household, we see a loving family with two doting parents (especially Leigh Anne). The Tuohys attend their kids’ sporting events, school performances, drive their kids to school, read books to their kids, watch football games together, and take Christmas family portraits in their home. Their love and caring are so insurmountable that they all come together very effortlessly to bring a homeless teenager into their home. In addition to the love and care that can be found in the Tuohy home, there is also a sense of tranquility and calmness to each of the Tuohy family members and how they interact with each other. They never have disagreements, bicker, or argue. Even in the most horrifying moments in the film, such as when Oher gets into a car accident that almost kills the Tuohy’s son, SJ, the Tuohys still maintain their cool with no outbursts or otherwise expressions of anger. There is also a strong work ethic that is displayed in the scenes of the white Memphis suburb. Audience members see young children (as young as 8-10 years old) selling lemonade from a homemade stand in the portrayed white suburb. From these images, we get a sense that white folks, even when they are not struggling to make ends meet like those in Hurt Village, have a desire to work, make money, and be successful at a young age.

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In the absence of a narrative that delves into the economic and race relations that historically and currently exist in Memphis and that could provide a rationale for the observed racial disparities, audience members are left to make assumptions about why poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, and gang activity have settled in Hurt Village, the white Memphis suburb notwithstanding. According to Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) ideology of abstract liberalism, everyone, regardless of race, is given an equal opportunity to achieve. According to this meritocratic stance, it only takes hard work and dedication for anyone to emerge from the dire circumstances that are portrayed in Hurt Village to achieve insurmountable amounts of success academically, economically, and socially. According to this logic, it is reasonable to assume that blacks are unwilling to work in legitimate jobs, are morally corrupt, and do not desire to improve their lot in life. The people in the white suburbs, in stark contrast, are hardworking and responsible and thus deserve the living conditions and material resources allotted to them because they have earned them.

The “I” in RacIsm Within The Blind Side narrative, there are a few instances of individual racism. The insertion of individual racists into the script, however, fails to take up race critically and actually reinforces Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) minimization frame of colorblindness. Sprinkled here and there in the film are these marginal characters, all of whom are seen as distasteful and offensive, who say racist comments or exhibit racist behaviors. There is the Tuohy cousin, Bobby, who after “downing five cold ones,” leaves an obnoxious message on the Tuohy’s answering machine: “Ya’ll know there’s a colored boy on ya’lls Christmas card?” There are also Leigh Anne’s elite country club friends, one of whom expresses her concern over Oher staying with the Tuohys, explicitly stating her concern about a large black boy sleeping under the same roof as Leigh Anne’s daughter, Collins. Later in the film, audience members see instances of name calling when the “redneck” football team, the Crusaders, and their parents, refer to Oher as “blue gums.” One of the Crusader players, #66, obsessively provokes Oher throughout the game, and in one play in particular that resulted in Oher falling face down on the ground, #66 yells to Oher, “Fat, black piece of crap!” and then proceeds to kick Oher in the head.

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By placing these clearly identifiable racist characters in the movie— characters who are set apart from all other whites—racism is minimized to a few racist outliers in an otherwise non-racist society. As BonillaSilva (2014) argues, “The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the Birthers, the Tea Party, or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process (we are all in this game) and that the main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits!” (p. xv). To reduce the complexity of racism down to a few offensive individuals is to deny the deeply ingrained and largely invisible forms of racism that are not embodied in individual performances, but rather in our institutional, economic, and discursive practices at a societal level. These types of racism function regardless of individual desire or intent, implicate all members of a society, have the most profound effects in producing inequities, and yet are never taken up or represented in the movie. It is important to point out, however, that even though this film shows instances of racism, the minimized conception of racism to individual performances actually benefits whites. Keeping the idea of racism harnessed to single, isolated, individual performances is arguably comforting to the largely white audience who watched The Blind Side. Instead of being confronted with the omnipresent, insidious, and elusive nature of racism, white people are erroneously led to believe they have an option when it comes to racism. Narrowly conceived as distasteful, individual performances, racism is conceptualized as something whites can participate in, which would grant them the status of being a racist, or they can opt out of those performances, thereby self-relegating themselves to the status of not racist. This simplified binary notion of racism lets white people off the hook. The logic goes as follows: As long as white people behave well by not participating in racist thoughts, behaviors, or comments, they are not racist. Whites’ decision to be “not racist” is one that is futilely pursued because systematic whiteness is an “embodied racial power” where those regarded as white “receive systemic privileges just by virtue of wearing the White outfit…that nonWhites are denied” (Bonilla-Silva 2014, p. 145). So while most people claim to be “not racist,” racial inequities continue to persist. In a society that has an economic and labor market system that relies on racism, not only nationally, but globally, the idea that one can simply opt out of that system by “behaving well” is extremely problematic. Movies like The Blind Side that only represent the distasteful individual performances of race serve

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to console white audiences. As white audiences consume these narratives of individual racism, they can simultaneously express disgust at the displayed acts of racism and yet relief that they are not one of “those people.” What good, non-racist whites can do about racism is also guided by the narratives of individual performance. Instead of confronting the concept of racism as part of a complex social system, “good whites” confront racism by confronting “racists.” In the movie, which only displays individual performances of racism, we have the “not racists” step in and stop racism. For example, when the “redneck” parent yells out, “66 is kickin that blue gum’s ass,” Leigh Anne stands up, turns around, and addresses this man’s comment: “Hey, Crotch Mouth! Yeah you! Zip it or I’ll come up there and zip it for you.” Subsequently, the man then settles down and has no more racist comments after that. Similarly, when number 66 calls Michael a “fat, black piece of crap” and kicks him in the head, Coach Cotton gets into a referee’s face and yells at him, “This young man plays for me. On my team. My team! And I will defend him like he’s my own son against you or any other redneck son of a bitch.” After this, not only does the harassment stop, but Michael conjures up physical strength that he has yet to display on a football field. In the very next play, Michael blocks #66 by pushing him out of bounds and then over a fence into a parking lot, subsequently stating, “He [#66] needed to go home.” Problem solved. There is no arguing that openly racist individuals exist. They do exist and they need to be confronted. However, the idea that racism can just be put out like a fire by people who are not racist is an overly simplified solution to a very complex issue. It is the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a skin sore, thinking a person has been cured from an ailment, when in reality the entire internal body is suffering from cancer. When it comes to racism, we cannot only fight what is visible; we have to dig deep to fight what is functioning at the discrete level but nonetheless has severe implications for us all.

Black, but Not “BLACK” I wrap up this analysis with a theme that problematizes the innocent, saintly depiction of Oher. In The Blind Side, Oher is unlike any other black character we see in the movie. Even though Oher was raised in the same housing project (Hurt Village) as were his black peers, he is the

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antithesis to everyone else we see living there. In contrast to the ultraaggressive, sexualized, and generally distasteful demeanor displayed by the other black males at Hurt Village, Oher is not violent (except in rare cases when he needs to protect his white family), and he does not use curse words. He is polite, has excellent table manners, does not carry a gun or any other weapon, does not drink or use drugs, is not a sexual predator, and in fact displays no sexual desires at all. Essentially, Oher is portrayed as passive, simple-minded, and childlike. If it was not for Oher’s large 6′ 4″, 300+ pound frame, he could be mistaken for a 7- to 8-year-old socially awkward child. This passive and innocent portrayal of Oher might be read as a muchneeded break from the stereotypical angry, violent black characters who overwhelmingly dominate media. However, Oher’s demeanor is not without its own racial implications. The exceptional portrayal and even acceptance of singular minority members from all others who embody stock negative characteristics are what Wise (2009) refers to as “Racism 2.0” or more aptly “enlightened exceptionalism” (p. 23). According to Wise, enlightened exceptionalism is a form of racism “that allows for and even celebrates the achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those individuals generally are seen as different from a less appealing, even pathological Black or brown rule” (p. 9). Wise further explains that enlightened exceptionalism occurs when “Whites hold the larger Black community in low regard and adhere, for instance, to any number of racist stereotypes about African Americans—and yet carve out an acceptable space for individuals who strike them as different, as exceptions who are not like the rest” (p. 9). In essence, whites can identify with and even come to adore exceptional black and brown individuals because those exceptional individuals have successfully transcended their blackness or brownness. Upon Barack Obama’s election to presidency, Wise reasons that many whites came to like, respect, and vote for Obama despite him being black because he does not embody the stock “negative” characteristics of blackness, or what Bonilla-Silva (2014) refers to as the deficit thinking encapsulated in the cultural racism ideology. As an example of enlightened exceptionalism, Wise discusses why so many white people fell in love with The Cosby Show (1984–1992) in the 1990s. Even though the Huxtables were identifiably black, they did not embody what blackness signified to most whites: “uneducated, dysfunctional, and lower-class” (p. 100). Moreover, the topic of race rarely entered into the life experiences or the stories that unfolded on The Cosby Show.

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Effectively, the Huxtables faced the same problems as any other white American family. Thus, even though they were black, their performances were raceless (colorblind) and thus likeable by a large white American audience. Those who qualify as the exceptions must not only be void of the imagined cultural deficiencies and pathologies of blackness and brownness (violent, criminal, gang members, promiscuous, uneducated, unemployed, and so on), but he/she must be void of any cultural performances of blackness or brownness as well, including mannerisms, ways of speaking, dressing, language use, that can be coded as black or brown. As such, racism evolves from a system of inequities based on color or phenotype, to a system of inequities based on the perceived performance of race. This racism sends the message that in order to be civilized and acceptable, you need not be white in phenotype, but must be able to perform whiteness. Enlightened exceptionalism is arguably more powerful than “old-fashioned bigotry” (Wise 2009, p. 9) because it flies under the radar of what is considered to be racist. In the case of old-fashioned bigotry, people make their thoughts about race evident, which is then open for public scrutiny. However, in the case of enlightened exceptionalism, racist ideologies stay intact, yet are masked by the acceptance of a few “sanitized” minority members. These binary portrayals of blacks further reinforce racist ideologies, because the characterizations are one-dimensional. Instead of portraying black people as complex, ever-changing, multidimensional human beings, audiences get these extreme, one-dimensional depictions.

Conclusion There is broad appeal for the rags-to-riches narrative presented in The Blind Side. It reinforces some of the most coveted ideals embedded in the American Dream: hard work pays off, anything is possible, and equal opportunity. Part of the allure of Michael Oher’s story is the extreme early-life experiences Oher endured and eventually overcame (e.g., poverty, no adult supervision or mentors, the foster care system). However, Oher’s childhood experiences are by no means isolated. Delpit (2012) points out that black males, more than any other US subgroup, are likely to face a number of undesirable life circumstances. She states that black males are consistently at the bottom in educational achievement; lead the nation in homicides, both as perpetrators and as victims; have the fastest

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growing rate of suicide; contract HIV/AIDS at a faster rate than any other segment of the population; are the only US population who are experiencing a decline in life expectancy; and are the least likely to be hired in the labor market and most likely to be unemployed. Specifically, in the area of school achievement, black males are more likely to be suspended and expelled, less likely to enroll in college, more likely to be classified as mentally retarded or as having a learning or emotional disability, most likely to be placed in special education, and least likely to be placed in advanced placement and honors classes. Even in subject areas where males have traditionally performed strongly, including math and science, black males are underperforming. In examining these unfortunate life circumstances, Delpit is careful to point out that none of these outcomes, as some researchers once thought or may even still think, are genetic or cultural. Rather, they are the result of historical and ongoing racial inequities that are embedded in everyday individual and institutional practices, including low teacher expectations. In this chapter, I expand upon Delpit’s (2012) argument by claiming that in addition to racism being embedded in individual and institutional practices, it is embedded in our discursive practices. That is, the logic that underpins and continues to breathe life into the concept of race is embodied in language, as well as other forms of communication. The narrative communicated in The Blind Side is only one small example of the ubiquitous and insidious nature of racial discourses that obscure and eliminate from view the systems of oppression that create the outcomes Delpit speaks of. Rather than illuminate the social relations of power that create and sustain racial inequities, the narrative in The Blind Side produces ideologies of colorblindness in an imagined ahistorical, free world that is open to all possibilities. As such, the life outcomes we see in The Blind Side, including black people as drug addicts, gangsters, and uneducated, and the contrasting images of whites as educated, hardworking, and wealthy, are decontextualized from any systems of oppression or privilege, appearing to be outcomes that simply and directly result from individual choice and responsibility—an exemplar of the abstract liberalism ideology (Bonilla-Silva 2014). The ideologies of colorblindness, which are again stripped of historical and structural lenses, shape how members of a society understand and address disparate life outcomes, such as those portrayed in The Blind Side. As Cammarota (2011) argues, what we see in The Blind Side is the White Savior trope—an approach to helping wherein privileged white

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individuals rescue or save individual minorities from their community and help them transcend their blackness/brownness. Drawing from the work of Freire (1998), Cammarota (2011) conceptualizes the “White savior syndrome” as “false generosity” because the help comes in the form of saving an individual or group often from a perceived deficit home or community context, and not on transforming oppressive structures that maintain white supremacy (i.e., racism, lack of affordable housing, unemployment, inferior education). Cammarota states, “The focus on ‘saving’ instead of ‘transforming’ fails to address oppressive structures and thus the privileges that maintain White supremacy” (p. 244). According to Montez de Oca (2012), the White Savior, or what he calls the charity approach to helping, not only leaves oppressive systems of inequities in tact but also obscures the power relations that make the charity and saving possible. He states, “Ultimately, charity operates as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity” (p. 131). Arguably, the sensationalizing of individual acts of racism in media, whether in reference to Trump’s incessant spouting of racist comments or the racially violent acts that erupted during the Charlottesville Attacks, further serves to obscure the insidious nature of institutional and discursive productions of racism, as these forms of racism are omitted from the media script and thus from the larger American consciousness. In response, Cammarota calls for a revisioning of white help—a revisioning from White Savior to white ally. White allies work in concert with people of color to transform social systems of inequities instead of as lone White Saviors who rescue people of color from their perceived cultural deficits. In The Blind Side, we see the White Savior approach—a story of a white family saving a black child, not transforming an inequitable school, economic, or social system. Thus, despite the Tuohys’ good deed, the system of inequities that impact Hurt Village as well as the white suburb in which the Tuohys live remains hidden from view, unchallenged, and fully functional.

Note 1. The Charlottesville Attacks occurred on August 12, 2017, and entailed specific acts of violence by a white supremacist group, “Unite the Right,” who rallied, physically beat a black bystander, and drove a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one person and injuring 19 people.

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Works Cited “11 Hardest Jobs to Get in America.” College Times, November 18, 2009. http://collegetimes.us/11-hardest-jobs-to-get-in-america/. Allison, A. “Why Do NFL Players Protest During National Anthem? A Timeline: from Kaepernick to Trump.” USA Today, 2017. http://www.tennessean. com/story/sports/nfl/titans/2017/09/25/why-nfl-players-protest-nationalanthem/700004001/. Bonilla-Silva, E. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and Racial Inequality in Contemporary America, 4th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Cammarota, J. “Blindsided by the Avatar: White Saviors and Allies Out of Hollywood and in Education.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2011): 242–259. Delpit, L. “Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children. New York: The New Press, 2012. Freire, P. The Paulo Freire Reader. Edited by Araujo Freire, Ana Maria Macedo, and Donald Macedo. New York: Continuum, 1998. Hancock, J.L., dir. The Blind Side. USA: Alcon Entertainment, 2009. Huckin, T.N. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” The Journal of TESOL-France 2 (1995): 95–112. Hughey, M.W. “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films.” Social Problems 56, no. 3 (2009): 543–577. Hughey, M.W. “The White Savior Film and Reviewer’s Reception.” Symbolic Interaction 33, no. 3 (2010): 475–496. Kaleem, J. “‘There’s a Virus in Our Country’: The ‘Trump Effect’ and Rise of Hate Groups, Explained.” Los Angeles Times, 2017. http://beta.latimes. com/nation/la-na-southern-poverty-law-center-05312017-htmlstory.html. Kozol, J. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 1991. Lewis, M. The Blind Side. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Leonardo, Z. Race, Whiteness and Education. New York: Routledge, 2009. Mahiri, J. Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind. New York: Teachers College Press, 2017. Montez de Oca, J. “White Domestic Goddess on a Postmodern Plantation: Charity and Commodity Racism in The Blind Side.” Sociology of Sport Journal 29 (2012): 131–150. Nieto, S. and P. Bode. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education, 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2018. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010–2011 Edition. Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos251.html. December 9, 2010.

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Oher, M. I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to The Blind Side and Beyond. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. Plaschke, B. “Michael Oher Prefers His Super Bowl Role to Being in ‘Blind Side’.” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013. http://articles.latimes. com/2013/feb/01/sports/la-sp-plaschke-super-bowl-oher-20130201. February 3, 2013. Tatum, B.D. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Tuohy, L.A., and S. Tuohy. In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010. Valencia, R.R. Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2010. Vu, W. “Interview: The Blind Side Director John Lee Hancock.” The Christian Post, March 19, 2010. www.christianpost.com. West, C. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Wise, T. Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and the White Denial in the Age of Obama. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009.

CHAPTER 7

Will Smith: A Global Brand of Blackness Leah Aldridge

There exists in Hollywood a systemic belief, or what Timothy Havens calls an “industry lore” (2013), that blackness in Hollywood produced films and television shows generally does not perform well in international markets. As such, many film/television producers in this riskaverse industry have been and continue to be reticent about investing in films with blackness being central to their narratives. Although scant in comparison with white talent, there have been black stars and black narratives throughout Hollywood’s cinematic history that have garnered wide international attention: Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, and Will Smith, the subject of this discussion, among them. Genre films (i.e., action, science fiction) have provided Smith with some of his most successful endeavors. As a star-building strategy, Smith has expanded black access, participation, and visibility in the entertainment industry at the international level.1 Pointedly, this essay seeks to trace the emergence and convergence of certain elements contributing to Smith’s success including those historical, cultural, and industrial, in effect problematizing Hollywood lore that “black doesn’t do well in foreign.”

L. Aldridge (*)  School of Film and Television, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_7

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To fully appreciate Smith’s success, a brief discussion of Hollywood’s historical relationship in shaping cinematic blackness is helpful. After the corporate reorganization and conglomeratization of the film industry, and the emergence of the cinematic blockbuster, in the 1970s and early 1980s, international box office receipts figured more prominently into Hollywood’s bottom line. During this transition, “starpower” became a key factor in producing films that would receive wide global distribution and were intended to generate large international receipts. Star power came to be associated with a performer’s “bankability,” or their capacity to garner sufficient film financing and “open” a film internationally. Star power is also measured by a performer’s “ability to generate consumer excitement and interest,” or create “buzz” (Karniouchina 2011). Typical methods heightening talent visibility, i.e., “buzz,” among consumers include: promotional appearances, trade industry publicity, paid endorsements, and, increasingly, social media. These methods operate intertextually, constructing a public persona and narrative of the performer with whom diverse consumers may connect across various platforms. In addition, star-building typically occurs within narratives that demonstrate “universality,” an ability to bridge differences (cultural, social, geographic, linguistic, and so on) and connect with the essence of humanity. This then begs the question—to what degree has whiteness embodied and exhibited themes of universality on the silver screen compared to blackness? While much has changed, historically, industrial, race-based restrictive practices made it difficult for African American performers to grow their bankability, buzz, and ability to embody universal themes among majority white American audiences. Consider this point within the following context. During Hollywood’s classical studio period, arguably a foundational moment in American cinema, movies reproduced the effects of real-world anti-miscegenation laws and thus codified regulations within the Production Code that would dictate on-screen black social interactions with white players, or the casting of “mulatto” performers. Further, Hollywood was subject to local/regional censorship standards prohibiting the exhibition of movies that undermined local ordinances or values reflective of Jim Crow America. As James Snead (1988, p. 16) observed, early Hollywood could have used its technological power to advance race relations at the turn of the twentieth century, but instead engaged in the “systematic, determined, and almost hysterical persecution and defamation of blacks and other minority groups” concretizing blackness

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as embodying a “servile behavior and marginal status.” Donald Bogle famously recorded the tropes as the toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks, which negatively seeded ideas about black socioeconomic status, intellect, sexuality, authority, and citizenship, elements necessary to create narrative plausibility when constructing cinematic heroes. Snead’s observation can be explained as a product of what sociologist Joe Feagin (2010) characterizes as the “white racial frame,” or, an accounting for American racial segregation and discrimination “shaped by white decisionmakers’ actions over centuries” and situates whiteness at the center of “an overarching worldview, one that encompasses important racial ideas, terms, emotions and interpretations” (p. 16). With films culturally inscribed and reflective of their contemporaneous racial attitudes, the early twentieth century Hollywood lens was used to shape a cinematic blackness typically seen and understood as servile, visually positioned near the margins, if present at all, and witness to whiteness. Domestic and global geopolitics would contribute to the heightened visibility, types, and quality of roles for black performers in the postWorld War II and Civil Rights eras. But breaking free of the classical period’s structured absence/stereotyping/marginality toward a black stardom was a gradual process of increasing black visibility. However, those images were still framed via white lenses with narratively centered white characters. For example, the post-classical period saw an uptick in adventure/jungle films—descendants of colonial filmmaking—whose conventions included exotic lands, expeditions, and endangered white women, such as Mogambo (1953), White Witch Doctor (1953), and numerous Tarzan films, where global audiences see more black bodies for longer periods of screen time, but largely as backdrops in primitive habitats that resonate as “logical.” Alternately, social problem films of this period position blackness as a catalyst for white anxieties of race mixing, identity crises, and coming into awareness of their own racism.2 And, it would seem that while there was indeed more of a black presence, there could only be one black star at a time. Consider the film career of Ivan Dixon, who worked steadily in episodic television throughout the 1960s, but was eclipsed by his co-star in both Raisin in the Sun (1961) and Patch of Blue (1965) Sidney Poitier, the black male film star in the 1960s.3 And after the release of Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Harry Belafonte would disappear from the big screen and not appear in film again until 1970. Gradualism gave producers a way to be “edgy” and “cutting edge” as compared to its chief competitor, television, without

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creating systemic or institutional change: Blackness could be dispatched when no longer needed, subject to the whims of audiences. Other performers experienced gradualism via television, where some of Bogle’s tropes evolved into the plucky sidekick/best friend, such as Bill Cosby’s Alex Scott on I Spy (1965–1968), or endowed with essential skills as part of an ensemble, such as Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura on Star Trek (1966–1969), or Greg Morris’ Barney Collier on Mission: Impossible (1966–1973). As a commodity, American blackness becomes “something new” and “edgy” in its increased centrality and visibility as exemplified by the soon-to-appear Blaxploitation films, but blackness is also contingent and easily dispatched as cinematic popularity waxes and wanes throughout the ensuing decades. As such, this gradualist approach toward narrative centrality makes it difficult for black stars to grow their star texts.4 Just like star power, universality, and other intangibles such as the pedigree of above-the-line talent, and good connections, race is also calculated in terms of profitability. Consider the degrees to which Hollywood cinema and its racial ideological positions have been distributed globally, and with it, its perceived value of black performers. When considered within the larger formation of colonial imperialism and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Hollywood’s global distribution of blackness depicted as subjugate and subordinate join the larger constellation of western produced imagery and spectatorship of black bodies, such as colonial propaganda postcards and other ephemera, and the body of Sara Baartman.5 It is within this broader understanding of the globally projected, objectified, and devalued black body that one should consider Hollywood’s contribution to its own conundrum of not being able to “sell” Black films abroad. Meanings associated with these signs of subordination and subjugation persist, and one wonders if these images are part of the uphill battle black actors must climb toward star status. The international exportation of American-style racism via cinema has been and continues to function as a powerful determinant in the aforementioned industry lore. Unfortunately, many industry players remain ignorant of, or fail to recognize, the industry’s contribution to this conundrum of commodified race and culture with producers as recently as 2014 debating the economic viability of A-list performer Denzel Washington in The Equalizer (Fuqua 2014) with one producer’s emphatic belief that “the international motion picture audience is racist” being made public via the

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widely reported hacking of Sony Studio’s emails (Denham 2014), or 2015’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy. How then does one explain the success of Will Smith, who at one time had eight consecutive films top $100 million (surpassing Tom Cruise) at the box office certifying his bankability, and commanded $20 million salary per film? Since the mid-1990s, Will Smith has built a career as an international superstar entertainer with forays into rap, acting, and producing film, television, and live theater. Given Hollywood’s fickle relationship with black American talent, Smith’s success story commands greater observation and appreciation. Superstar Hollywood status frequently hinges on the international marketplace’s consumption of mainstream productions. However, when Hollywood’s bottom line intersects with race, the odds can be mightily stacked against the black performer seeking a substantive long-term career. While it is not possible to definitively state why any single performer soars above the next, it is possible to identify characteristics and conditions that contribute to an individual’s success.

Early Establishment of a Global Black Persona As one of the four children of Caroline and Willard Sr., Will Smith, born in 1968, grew up in West Philadelphia. By all accounts, it appears that Smith had an uneventful middle-class upbringing that, up until the age of thirteen, included a two-parent household and attendance at a majority white private school, followed by a stint at Overbrook High School, which was largely populated by a majority black student body. During his childhood and adolescent development, Smith’s class clown persona earned him a measure of popularity. In doing so, Smith discovered that, while blacks and whites generally laughed at the same things, their laughter was for different reasons. This astute observation on Smith’s part suggests an early awareness of how he was perceived by diverse others, an awareness of his own “twoness” (i.e., double consciousness6) that would prove beneficial to Smith’s career. Smith received the nickname “The Prince” from a teacher who noted his consistent ability to charm (as in Prince Charming) his way out of trouble. At sixteen, Smith connected with Jeffrey “DJ Jazzy Jeff” Townes at a party, and after adding the slang term “fresh” (i.e., cool) to his moniker, the pop hip-hop duo was born. With music video industry engines such as MTV most assuredly providing an assist in popularizing

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their brand and style of hip-hop, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince were the first rap artists to win a Grammy in 1989 for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” (Grammy.com). The brand of hip-hop produced by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince had wide, mass, commercial appeal, which cut large swaths across race and class. Theirs was simplistic yet memorable music with catchy beats that regaled fans with tales of house parties, girlfriends, and joyriding in their parents’ cars. By the time “Summertime” arrived in 1991, sampling Kool & The Gangs’ 1974 classic “Summer Madness,” the rap duo had expanded their youth theme to include anyone who could fondly reflect upon summers of their own youth. More importantly, by adopting a realist aesthetic, the accompanying video for this nostalgia-laced song stakes its claim to a familyoriented black authenticity with the depictions of familial traditions and reunions that look and sound like actual gatherings shared and practiced by many black Americans. For those who have participated in such gatherings, “Summertime” becomes a validation of black cultural experience via a “structure of feeling,” name-checked visually and aurally. We are told to “sit back and unwind” as The Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff point out the finer moments of youth life whether it is in the contemporary moment or as nostalgic reflection: remembering the flirtations that happen in parks and on basketball courts, and listening to music in tricked out cars, there is no mistaking that the tone is one of fun and reflection as the rap duo declare that “There’s an air of love and of happiness / And this is the fresh prince’s new definition of summer madness.” With this aesthetic shift from previous hits, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince continued to shape their personae as middle-class fun-loving guys that know how to “authentically” represent functional black families set in an early 1990s Philadelphian urbanness. While embraced by many black Americans, Smith’s quotidian brand of hip-hop can be read as a departure from contemporaneous racialized hip-hop rhetoric marked as black and urban, toward one that focused on generational and class distinctions and conflicts (Havens 2013). To be sure, Smith’s use of “lite” urban slang (“My mom started bugging with the clothes she chose…I picked up my car phone to perpetrate like I was talking”) mixed with wider, or white cultural references (“I said, ‘This isn’t Sha na na, come on Mom, I’m not Bowzer/Mom, please put back the bell-bottom Brady Bunch trousers’”), vocabulary of at least average intelligence (“I got dressed up in those ancient artifacts”), performed by Smith’s 6′2″ cool swagger (i.e., head gestures, gait, physicality, black

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body), point to Smith’s own sense of twoness and an appeal to a wider audience. This appeal to a wider audience facilitates the possibility of crossover, or the artist’s ability to hold onto his/her core audience, while hailing audiences whose connections stem from something other than the typical or assumed cultural bond, in this case race. And, much like the music, as Nelson George points out, Smith’s early public persona appears to have very closely mirrored his private life and middle-class experience: The biggest raptor [sic] ever is, not coincidentally, one of the least street-oriented MCs. Will Smith, once the Fresh Prince… never lied about who he was. Unlike other pop rappers such as Hammer and Vanilla Ice, who aspired to a veneer of toughness even as they recorded scores for teeny bopper dances, Philadelphia-born Smith was always a middle-class kid. (George 2005, p. 111)

By emphasizing the “middle” in middle class, Smith positioned himself for the best possible access to all consumers regardless of their class and/or cultural status. As someone who draws us toward him and makes us smile, Smith impresses us by a youthful worldliness; he can strike a cool pose, but is not afraid to make himself the butt of his own jokes. In effect, audiences are made to feel they “know” the “real” person behind the mask. This aura of “authenticity” resonated with working- and middle-class folks, the socioeconomic majority of American households. In other words, in the world of competing identity ideologies, for Smith, class is foregrounded over race. To further the promotion of this private-“authentic”-selfrevealed-as-public-persona, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996) became a mechanism by which this likable guy was invited into our homes in over seventy international markets (Havens 2006, p. 46). He edged past The Cosby Show by establishing a weekly level of intimacy with Will Smith (the actor? The character?) for six years on a global scale. It is no accident that the main character in the fictional show bears the same name and hails from the same city as Will Smith. In a 2012 appearance on the UK’s The Graham Norton Show, Smith proclaims that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air remains what he is most known for around the world, and graciously credits co-star Alfonso Ribeiro with suggesting that Smith name the show’s main character after himself (The Graham Norton Show 2012). However, given Smith’s strategically calculated career, it seems

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unlikely that he would not have thought of this himself. One of the outcomes from the show’s success was his name and face recognition around the globe, not just to consumers, but more strategically, to local distributors and buyers as a conflation of his public and private self, crafting a brand of blackness characterized as an authentically affable, funny “prince” charming who happens to be black.

Hollywood’s Racial Ideology and Universality Revealing aspects of Hollywood’s racial ideology in the service of capital provides a helpful context for grasping the significance of Will Smith’s success. What is at stake here can be observed materially and symbolically: The aforementioned Hollywood lore, as the circulation mode of industry practices, determines the authors (i.e., writers, directors, actors, producers, executives), the types of stories (i.e., genres), and the means and thereby quality of production afforded Black films and television (i.e., access to financing, marketing, and promotions). Additionally, acting upon such lore within a white racialized frame frequently determines which black images and representations are manufactured and exhibited, along with where they can be consumed by domestic and global audiences (i.e., distributors, exhibitors, marketing, critics). What emerges within this culture producing industry is a systematic management of blackness from conception through production to circulation, the outcome of which is one that assigns social and economic value to racial difference, including that of whiteness, which organizes itself hierarchically. A typical example of this thinking within the US domestic market occurred in 2008: comedian Dave Chappelle, who is black, and his producing/ writing partner, Peter Tolan, who is white, walked away from a television pilot at Fox starring Chappelle due to differences in opinion about the number of white faces on the proposed show, as reported in Variety: Tolan and Chappelle are claiming that they walked away from their ‘Dave Chappelle’ sitcom, which Fox had ordered for midseason, because network executives felt the show was too black and wanted more white characters. Fox disputes that version of events, saying execs merely made suggestions to broaden the show’s appeal. (Variety 2008)

The perception that white faces “broaden the show’s appeal” can be interpreted as a need to reach out to white and other non-black viewers;

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or, conversely, white and non-black viewers (domestic and abroad) will not watch the show if it has too many black faces suggesting a narrow or niche demographic keeping in mind that demographics are tied to advertising or cable/streaming subscriptions and economic profitability. Though never explicitly stated, it also points to the varied cash values associated with diverse races. Big screen examples involve representations or absences thereof of black actors in the marketing efforts of studios and distributors: Couples Retreat (2009), Takers (2010), and Twelve Years a Slave (2013) all saw significant alterations between their domestic US marketing and those posters and trailers used in markets outside of the USA, where black bodies were reduced in size, relegated to lower positions on graphics, or eliminated altogether. Universal Studios’ response to criticism for deleting images of the black couple, Faizon Love and Kali Hawk, from its UK marketing materials of Couples Retreat, a Vince Vaughn vehicle about four couples who go on vacation together, rationalized that such action was an attempt to “simplify the poster to actors who are most recognizable in international markets” (The Daily Mail 2009). More recently, the China marketing campaign of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams 2015) reduced the size of John Boyega’s image, a black British actor and one of the film’s co-leads, and moved it from its more prominent positioning as seen in US marketing materials. What becomes evident with examples such as these is Hollywood’s constant negotiation of race and industry in the service of capitalism. Marginalization, erasure, and exclusion of blackness become strategies for optimizing returns on investments particularly in international markets, while simultaneously reasserting a privileged position for whiteness. While the previous examples may be seen as isolated incidents, Hollywood as an industry cannot dispute the overrepresentation of white labor and decision-making power throughout various facets of the business. A recent Directors Guild of America (DGA 2012) report revealed that only six (6) out of 598 films released in 2011 were directed by black directors (only two were studio supported and two were directed by Tyler Perry). Among half-hour television comedies, Caucasian males are reported to have directed 73% of all television episodes; Caucasian females directed 11% of all episodes; minority males (i.e., non-whites collectively) directed 13% of all episodes; and minority females (i.e., non-whites collectively) directed 4% of all episodes. Among one-hour television series, Caucasian males directed 76% of all episodes, and in

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half-hour series, Caucasian males directed 69% of all episodes. Similarly, the Writers Guild of America West’s (WGAW 2011) reports stagnation in employment and wage earnings among minorities and women. A 2012 Los Angeles Times (Horn et al. 2012) study reveals that the Oscars organizing body, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science (AMPAS), to be 96% white and 77% male. Four years later, a 2016 New York Times analysis of the actors’ branch of AMPAS voting membership reported a demographic composition that was 87% white, 6% Black, approximately 4% Hispanic, and fewer than 2% Asian; and 53% male (Cieply and Barnes 2016). The 2016 study of a racial and gender inequality in Hollywood conducted by the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism’s (USC-ASCJ) examined creative talent and labor and found that 73% of speaking roles in the top one hundred grossing films where performed by white actors (Smith et al. 2016). In February 2017, USC-ASCJ released its study of Hollywood directors for diversity inclusion of the 1000 top-performing theatrical films from 2007–2016. It discovered that “females are grossly underrepresented in the director’s chair,” “distribution is distorted for female, black and Asian directors,” and that “the director’s chair is white and male,” with 5 and 3% occupied by Black and Asian directors (Smith et al. 2017). Hollywood’s clearly established dominant culture of whiteness and maleness speaks volumes about the culture of the industry, while simultaneously establishing a rationale for the perceived lack of desirability associated with Black film and television. Hollywood dominates a significant portion of the cinematic global market share, yet must still compete with other “national” cinemas and local domestic productions vying for the same screens. Domestic and foreign acquisitions/distribution representatives consistently point to a need for “universality” for foreign market sales and consumption. Timothy Havens (2002) outlines how, “distributors market their programming as ‘universal’ in an attempt to convince buyers that it can surmount cultural barriers.” Films and television shows that have blackness at the center of their narratives, particularly black expression connected to histories of oppression or steeped in a cultural vernacular, are routinely categorized as lacking “universality”; too niche or too narrow in their cultural specificity for mass global appeal, they therefore frequently receive lower budgets which impact aesthetics and production values, and, separately, may be less economically valued (based on aesthetics,

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themes, or both). What can be observed is how over time, “universality” for international film and television buys, has come to denote a product’s ability to appeal to as broad an audience as possible by flattening cultural specificity and difference, and elevating certain ideals, truths, values, and themes. Actors that plausibly signify these elements are more easily consumable across cultural boundaries, and if in the process of emotionally engaging audiences via performance can achieve international star status. As such, buyers and sellers heavily rely upon “star power” and casting to help sell and market their films and television shows abroad. Given the overrepresentation of white talent in Hollywood, “universality” according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) is simply racist code language for white stars. Richard Dyer (2002) addresses how whiteness is rendered invisible and thus normative by colonizing other societal standards. With race the vector for analysis, Hollywood’s cinematic whiteness emerges as having been coded as the normative embodiment of hegemonic ideals, with “universal” aspirations and struggles, and, an assumed elevated cash value. Given the racialized industry conditions summarized above, it is necessary to ask: How does Hollywood, as an industry and cultural producer, grapple with its historical coding of cinematic blackness while simultaneously bemoaning its inability to commoditize blackness? Among the stereotypes and tropes, “exceptions” would find their way to the big and small screens. Smith, along with Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier, all of whom had unprecedented success in the face of enumerated challenges, was in some way popular because they signified a blackness that was subversive yet legibly consumable to white (and black) audiences in their respective historical moments; in a word, they became crossover talents. Rutgers letterman Paul Robeson achieved international stardom during Hollywood’s classical period and America’s Jim Crow era, becoming a standout among contemporaries James Lowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1927), Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Rex Ingram (The Green Pastures, 1936), or Canada Lee (Lifeboat, 1944). And in the post-World War II, Cold War, and Civil Rights era, Bahamian -born Poitier, the first black actor to receive a Best Actor Academy Award for Lilies of the Field (United Artists, 1963) and the “biggest box office star” of 1967 (Guerrero 1993), as previously mentioned, found himself distinguished from fellow black thespians, Harry Belafonte, Ivan Dixon, Bill Cosby, and others such as Ossie Davis, and Sammy Davis Jr. While no one element determines stardom, cultural and political pressure

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for greater inclusion of black faces in postwar Hollywood films created a space for a black male star to emerge with wide crossover appeal. Borrowing from Cindy Patton’s (2007) discussion of how in the postWorld War II period, the presence of black method actors meant that the film would be “about race,” the presence of these actors’ appearance in a feature intentionally signaled blackness as constructed and understood by whiteness. Amid postwar Red Scare anxieties and anti-American Soviet propaganda, Poitier appeared in a 1950’s race-based drama, No Way Out, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. From here, Poitier was able to steadily build his career throughout the decade in a series of films as an articulate yet sympathy-inducing symbol of the nation’s moral legibility, who posed no material or ideological threats to an increasingly heterogeneous whiteness, yet remained racially legible to blacks. Both Dyer and Guerrero address Robeson’s and Poitier’s relationship to mainstream and subcultural media outlets during their respective periods and suggest that black and white audiences interpreted codes of blackness differently. Indeed, as Dyer observes, “there are discourses developed by whites in white culture and by blacks in black culture which made different sense of the same phenomenon, Paul Robeson” (Dyer 1992, p. 66). Robeson is noted for being an early yet complex example of crossover, but this did not come without criticism from some contemporaries who would attribute Robeson’s white popularity as resulting from his integrationist or self-serving personality. Having performed as everything from “smiling Sambo” to “black nobility” from the late silent era to the early 1940s, Robeson’s blackness was seen as a “positive quality, often explicitly set over against whiteness and its inadequacies” (Dyer 1992, p. 66). In the civil rights era, Poitier’s crossover appeal would also complicate perceptions and readings of his blackness. His popularity among whites and bourgeois black would mark him as a “model Negro” during a period of growing black nationalism and militancy (Guerrero 1993). The Cold War, anti-Vietnam war sentiments, postwar postcolonial shifts in global powers, and other global game changers did much to foster domestic changes, including the galvanizing of the Civil Rights and counter-cultural movements. During this conjuncture, a destabilized Hollywood compelled the industry to not only respond to changing times but to also seek out “edgier” and “different” content. This period brought about Gordon Parks, Sr., the first black director of a major Hollywood production with The Learning Tree (1969) which was

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followed up with Shaft (1971). With the success of Shaft and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAsssss Song (1971), edgier and different became generically commoditized as Blaxploitation. Central to black representations at this time was how blackness was no longer interested in its secondary position on the screen and in broader society; instead, Blaxploitation demonstrated the cultural popularity and financial viability of black narrative centrality as resistance to white supremacy and for the promotion of black self-determination. Throughout the history of cinema, audiences have decoded blackness through the historical circumstances of their moment of production and distribution. Not only do the stars change generationally, but audiences do as well. Within each historical moment, with its specific set of concerns about race relations, a “new” brand of blackness emerges, one that is distinguishable from previous iterations, but not so much that it is no longer recognizable as a sign that is distinct from whiteness. Similarly, any reading of Will Smith’s success should include the epochal lenses of post-civil rights/affirmative action and its attendant backlashes, globalization, neoliberalism, and the blockbuster film. At this conjuncture, Hollywood has been reconfigured by corporatization, consolidation, and conglomeritization and emerged with a firm bead on the production of entertainment products sold across multiple platforms and formats for global consumption. High concept filmmaking with synergistic marketing, cross-promotions, and tie-ins compel the industry to double down on universality, genre storytelling, and hightech styling in its formal aesthetics. Blackness thus undergoes a process of decontextualization/recontextualization that is symptomatic of postmodernism. Visual culture divorces the black body from the moorings of its historical formation (i.e., the dominant form of representation by mainstream Hollywood until the late 1960s) and re-situates blackness within typically all-white worlds. However, this recontextualized brand of blackness means something different once divorced from its ur-text coding of colonial subjugation. If this postmodern brand of blackness is to travel abroad, it will typically eschew historical verisimilitude in favor of genre filmmaking, action, or an overall popular cultural sensibility that bears the markings and vernacular of the familiar, rendering it still legibly black.7 These extenuating conditions and rationales have provided the sociopolitical and cultural conditions at play in shaping Will Smith’s persona as well as domestic and global audiences that are responsive to his brand of blackness, a brand that signifies Smith as an action hero

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divorced from the racial. Will Smith arrives with a blackness evacuated of its historical or political conditions that allows him to be placed in the universal themes of the genre film that facilitated his crossover success. This concept of a blackness evacuated of its constitutive politics will be explored later herein.

Will Smith, Star Power, and Navigating Racial Politics On- and Off-Screen Given their individual brands of blackness, which garnered international success, crossing over for Robeson, Poitier, and Smith should not be confused with a wholesale “selling out” or denial of blackness. Robeson, at great risk to his career and safety, was publically vocal about the plight of blacks globally, racism in America, changing events in Africa, and was sympathetic to Soviet policies, which eventually led to him being ensnared in McCarthyism.8 Poitier was considered more symbolically active than radically active. Poitier, marching with Belafonte and Charlton Heston in 1963 for civil rights, and speaking at the SCLC national convention in 1967, a paramount year in his career, leaned more toward a Negro Uplift ethos, choosing to focus on the positive accomplishments of blacks (instead of the radical upheaval) and the refusal to be distilled down to a single characteristic—his “Negroness.” Despite his celebratory status in the industry, Poitier understood that there were certain limitations and tradeoffs associated with his success. Responding to a New York Times interview, Poitier emphatically understood that in order to maintain his status, that there were certain things mainstream Hollywood would not allow a black man to do in 1967, specifically related to black male sexuality: [G]uys who write these parts are white guys, more often than not; they are guys in a business, and they are subject to the values of the society they live in. And there are producers to deal with who are also white. And a studio with a board of directors, also white. So they have to make him – the Negro – kind of a neuter…His sexuality is neutralized in the writing. But it’s not intentional; it’s institutional. To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know? And the reasons why…are legion, and too many to go into. (Barthel 1967)

Nearly four decades later, Will Smith was met with similar industry constraints for the film Hitch (2005). When a black actress was suggested for his love interest it was denied, the rationale being that the film would

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then be viewed as a “Black film” thus limiting its international profitability due to the aforementioned industry lore. In one interview, Smith discusses this experience when he suggested Cameron Diaz as his leading lady. “How are you not going to consider Cameron Diaz? That becomes massive news in the USA. Outside America, it’s no big deal. But in the USA, it’s still a racial issue, … Ironically, Hollywood is happy to do it if the film is about racism. But they won’t simply do it and ignore it” (Yamato 2015). The casting compromise for Hitch became Latina actress Eva Mendes, who represents what Priscilla Ovalle (2010, p. 10) has characterized as an “inbetweenness” or neither black or white. Ten years later Smith, still susceptible to anti-race mixing sentiments, experienced as much for his film Focus (2015) co-staring white Australian actress Margot Robbie (Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad) this time from anti-miscegenation Internet trolls. Thus, Willard Christopher Smith, Jr., despite being one of the biggest, most likable and non-threatening bankable stars in Hollywood, was still a black man who had to adjust to the limits put upon him based on industry lore. This is not to say that Will Smith has not anticipated the troubling terrain that race creates and it appears that he has at least contemplated what space he occupies as a black man in Hollywood (a reality white actors do not necessarily have to consider … yet). From various media accounts, we can glean aspects of Smith’s ideological framework that informs both what happens behind the scenes as well as what we see on the screen. For example, Smith understood the importance of versatility relative to longevity in the industry. This is evinced by the dramatic and controversial choice in his first starring role in the screen adaptation of John Guare’s Broadway play Six Degrees of Separation (1993) while his fun-loving, 4-quadrant (appealing to four primary demographics: males and females under 25, and males and females over 25 years of age, which garners the widest audience possible), primetime network show was still on the air. Smith’s reflections upon an aspect of his business strategy provide us with some insight: The key, says Smith, was range – range as an actor, range in the business. So my strategy from the start was that I would lay down markers, so that I would never be in a situation in which someone considering me for a role would say, “He can’t do that.” And the same with Overbrook: Range of projects means there are no pigeonholes you can slot us into, whether it’s Lakeview Terrace or The Secret Life of Bees to name two that (we’ve done) just this year. (Variety 2008)

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Indeed, versatility allows performers a wider range of possibilities, but Hollywood continues to strictly limit those possibilities for actors of color. Smith’s role as Paul Poitier in Six Degrees was clearly a move to demonstrate range that extended beyond that of The Fresh Prince of BelAir. The plot centers on a black, college-age gay hustler who poses as Paul, the Ivy League son of actor Sidney Poitier (who does not exist in real life) in order to con wealthy Fifth Avenue white socialites in New York. After seeing the film, it might have been easy for audiences in 1993 to feel that the “authentic nice guy” persona that Smith had cultivated up to this point was all an act. The film was released in the Reagan-Bush era, a time of rising resentment toward public policies such as affirmative action and Public Assistance (i.e., undeserving blacks gaming the system, receiving unearned benefits, “welfare queens,” and so on), our growing awareness about AIDS, and a rising Queer Rights movement. Given strains of conservatism and homophobia within the black community, and concerns about how whites may no longer view Smith as the “non-threatening likable black guy,” the film was a risk for maintaining his popularity and the ratings for his bread and butter show, Fresh Prince. The fact that Six Degrees was based on the real-life exploits of David Hampton may have mitigated against the more controversial elements of the film, allowing Smith to add complexity to his persona and legitimacy to his star potential.

Persona + Genre: Will Smith Hides Blackness in Plain Sight The widely recognized ‘Sidney Poitier syndrome,’… ‘a good boy in a totally white world, with no wife, no sweetheart, no woman to love or kiss, helping the white man solve the white man’s problem.’ —Clifford Mason

Will Smith does not make black movies in the way that Black films have come to be characterized as too culturally niche or ethnic specific. Smith does, however, make genre films that have broad general concerns that are relatable across various populations around the globe: in a word, “universal.” The nature and characteristics of Black film have been theorized and written about extensively, and the topic is much too large to discuss herein, however, for the purposes of context a distinction is warranted.

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By and large, when Hollywood refers to Black film and television, it typically means black bodies in identifiable social relations (i.e., family, dating/romance, drama) at the center of the narrative, driving the action (e.g., Think Like a Man, Obsessed). By and large, these types of Black films need not be as politically oriented as described above; they can simply be films about everyday life as experienced by characters who happen to be black. Black films also refer to films where the narratives are considered too narrowly focused on, too culturally specific to the black experience, or a black liberation politics, and thus limits access to the story for cultural outsiders, which then limits its profitability (e.g., The Great Debaters, Get on the Bus). “Transcends race” is a phrase that pops up frequently in both popular and critical discourses chronicling Will Smith, race, and Hollywood. Despite long-standing industry belief in the limited economic viability of black talent and black themed stories, Will Smith has somehow “transcended” Hollywood’s racial hurdles to emerge as a number one box office draw. His Q-rating—an advertising industry ranking system that “measure[s] consumer appeal of personalities, characters, licensed properties, programs and brands” (qscores.com 2011)—aligns him with Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Johnny Depp, ostensibly due to his performance of race: There is something in advertising we call, ‘Q Scores’ [which] is how an advertiser and media people determine how a celebrity, whether male or female…would be regarded by the viewing audience. So Q Score would make Will Smith very high, because he’s a non-threatening black guy. Q Scores really show the Asian female as highly acceptable across the board. I go all over the country, and you will see Asian females as newscasters. (Advertising & Society Review 2005)

This statement by an advertising executive at an educational roundtable discussion on race, ethnicity, and advertising reveals an accepted matter-of-factness, a priori, about the ways in which identity markers, in this instance race and gender, are encoded and decoded for optimal targeted and mass-marketing strategies. At play here is how race, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers work with or against consumer attitudes or stereotypes in the service of capital: Asian females, it is later revealed, for their hyper-femininity, and for Will Smith, because he is perceived to be “non-threatening.” If non-threatening blackness is part of what

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it means to “transcend race,” by this logic, a component of blackness assumes and asserts an embodiment of danger: The persistent white fantasy about the inherent danger of black men assumes, first, that black men are supposed to be threatening, and second, that in particular texts and through particular strategies, they have now been contained … [a] formulation of the black body as always already dangerous. (Kakoudaki 2002)

Thus, the call to transcend race carries with it a certain speciousness; when connected to black bodies, on some level it becomes a gesture toward erasure. It asks for a performance of the racialized self that is disconnected from its historical and sociopolitical conditions, compelling some to think, “when I see a black person, I don’t see color.” This is not to say that Smith does not appreciate a blackness that embodies the resilience, traditions, values, and cultural expressions of African descendants with a collective history rooted in trauma and dispersal. Smith demonstrates his appreciation of an intentional blackness with portrayals of real-life figures. However, while racism permeates the worlds of David Hampton (Six Degrees of Separation), Muhammed Ali (Ali), Chris Gardner (Pursuit of Happyness), and Dr. Bennet Omalu (Concussion), these films do not narratively center black uplift in the face of racism (e.g., Hidden Figures), or bear witness to racism’s attendant injustices (e.g., 12 Years a Slave). Instead, Smith’s bio-pic stories focus on the experiences of “exceptional” black men, an exceptionalism that acknowledges the distinct experience, and the lingering effects of US Slavery, yet simultaneously points to how their success (often thematically attained) paradoxically disproves the idea that those historical conditions continue to negatively impact black people. Overcoming overt, systemic, and/or institutional racism (e.g., Malcolm X) is sublimated to their overcoming personal crises of status (Six Degrees, Happyness), or conscience (Ali, Concussion). As redemption stories, global audiences are able to read them as personal achievement vs. struggle against racial degradation and oppression. Smith, in effect, hides blackness in plain sight as an embodiment of American Dream ideals. In subtlety distinguishing Black films from those with black casting, we have a conceptual starting point for productively situating black cultural production within the contemporary global market place. These distinctions take on greater significance as Hollywood moves toward

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more multicultural casting as a strategy to appeal not only to growing demographic shifts in the domestic audience but also in an effort to capitalize on global audiences in both established and emerging markets such as India and Brazil. For example, the multi-billion dollar Fast and the Furious franchise is widely embraced as a global cinematic brand that has successfully managed multicultural casting and international locations to appeal to multi-ethnic global audiences, despite lingering traces of a distinct white presence, with what Mary Beltran (2005) called the “new raceless aesthetic.” Considering the potentiality of a raceless aesthetic, and understanding that Will Smith does not make Black films, per se, his highly visible embodied brand of blackness posits some critique of whiteness, despite having been constructed through the white racial frame. Nevertheless, when situated in the center of majority white worlds, this critique becomes attenuated as the films capitulate to white sensibilities and understandings of blackness (i.e., liberal, non-threatening, etc.). For further exploration of this attenuation, some interesting observations about Smith’s filmography should be pointed out first: • Significant numbers of roles were originally written for white actors or could have been played by non-black actors: Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz were the original law enforcement duo for Bad Boys; Chris O’Donnell as J in Men In Black; Tom Cruise in Enemy of the State; George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon considered for Hancock; Hugh Jackman for Collateral Beauty; Wild, Wild, West, I Am Legend, and Suicide Squad were remakes/adaptations of established works conceptualized and previously represented by white males. • Science Fiction hybrids with comedy, fantasy, and drama (Independence Day, The Legend of Bagger Vance, MIB 1, 2, and 3, I Am Legend, I Robot, Wild, Wild, West, Hancock, A Winter’s Tale, After Earth, Suicide Squad, Bright), and melodramas (Seven Pounds, Pursuit of Happyness, Six Degrees of Separation, Collateral Beauty) are his most common genres. • Love interests or female co-stars are typically non-black except for early films (Independence Day, Enemy of the State); after A-list star status, black love interests in fictional films depart from the story in the first act and are “replaced” by non-black women (I Am Legend, Seven Pounds), or are narratively distanced (After Earth, Collateral

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Beauty). As previously mentioned, the idea of a black love interest marks the film as black; socioculturally, the black American nuclear family is symbolically annihilated from Smith’s cinematic universe. • Smith has thus far never worked with a Black film director, but has worked with numerous directors from other national cinemas (who theoretically have reputations in their respective locales). This is particularly interesting given Smith’s penchant for being the primary black body in his films. A recent USC study revealed that when a film is helmed by a black director, there is a tendency for there to be more black characters of significance within the films (Smith and Choueiti 2011). Given this snapshot of Smith’s acting/producing career, one can generalize that Will Smith has not staked his career on blackness in the way Tyler Perry or Spike Lee have. Indeed, Smith could be said to suffer from what Clifford Mason coined in 1967 as the “Sidney Poitier Syndrome” where “a good boy in a totally white world, with no wife, no sweetheart, no woman to love or kiss, help[s] the white man solve the white man’s problem.” In an ideal world, any ethnicity/gender should be able to play any non-racially/gendered specified role. But casting blacks in more substantive yet still subordinate characters in films with whiteness at its narrative core takes on an unsettling Classical era familiarity, and makes problematic the “notion of not seeing color” or “colorblind” casting. As more blacks appeared in mainstream films in the post-Civil Rights era and Reagan years, this type of selfless blackness in the service of whiteness would evolve into one lacking in subjectivity and agency, yet unlike the plucky sidekick, is prominently featured as whiteness’s moral rectitude, or the “magical negro,”9 offering opportunities for white redemption or revenge. Consider this instance of cultural appropriation and racialized casting. The Legend of Bagger Vance’s author, Steven Pressfield, admits that his story of a World War I veteran who needs to get his pre-war golf swing back to win a prestigious tournament in depression era Savannah, Georgia was based on the Hindu sacred text Bhagavad-Gita where god-like entity Bhagavan aids Prince Arjuna on his epic quests. Released in 2000, Will Smith and director Robert Redford commented in interviews that they believed that they were telling a story about a spiritual journey, with Smith as the godlike Bagger Vance (Bhagavan) to Matt Damon’s traumatized and disaffected Junah (Arjuna). But given colonial, and then cinematic coding of

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blackness globally, Bagger’s self-sacrificing devotion to Junah, appearing from and disappearing into darkness somewhere beyond the golf course, is largely read by domestic audiences as a remnant of Uncle Tom, with mystical insights, his sole interest is in supporting his white master’s return to grace. When considered as part of a storytelling trend in the postmodern period, this type of casting can be characterized as an attempted historical corrective, intended to contemporaneously mollify past racial injustices. Spike Lee who lampooned such tropes in Bamboozled, also appearing in 2000, publicly expressed his ire for cinematic renderings that whitewash the 1930s American south, and called the film “Driving Mr. Damon” a reference to Driving Miss Daisy, starring Morgan Freeman as a selfless, devoted chauffeur to an elderly Jessica Tandy (Miss Daisy) in the Jim Crow south (ABC News 2000). Other examples include Gabriel Casseus in Bedazzled (2000), Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile (1999), Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty (2003); and on the small screen, Andre Braugher in City of Angels (1998), and Della Reese in Touched by an Angel (1994–2003). As one online spirituality blogger noted, “There’s nothing wrong with African-Americans playing celestial types; it’s just that after a while, it begins to feel like stereotyping and emotional manipulation” (Beliefnet.com). The Legend of Bagger Vance, in both novel and film form, is what happens when those in the global west attempt colorblindness instead of color conscientiousness. In this contemporary moment, star status and race are inextricable as evidenced by Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance. But as has been discussed herein, Smith has developed a brand of blackness aimed at global consumption, largely blind to blackness as historically constituted, but recontextualized as a universal, legibly black hero unable to escape the trace of race. The centrality of Smith’s black body in worlds populated by all white (i.e., Six Degrees of Separation, The Legend of Bagger Vance, I Am Legend), mostly white (i.e., Independence Day, I, Robot, Wild Wild West, Hancock), or mixed “ethnic” worlds (Hitch, MIB, Seven Pounds, Collateral Beauty, Bright) cannot be lost on even the casual viewer of his body of work. As such, some of the popular and critical discourse suggests that woven through Smith’s star text are threads of aspirational whiteness that deny him connections to black social relations (Tolliver 2012; Gillan 2001; Hicks 2007; Wong 2005). And, it is understood, that in order to hold this central position in these narratively white

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worlds, Smith’s cinematic blackness embodies a sexuality that is either neutered, has a racial ideology that is at least on the surface, non-threatening, safe, transcendent, and/or is contained and monitored by white authority figures. However, while attempting to tease out Smith’s difference, these critiques frequently reinforce binary characterizations of blackness: to say that Smith is non-threatening reinforces an undercurrent of thought that blackness is threatening. Further, while Smith may fall prey to the same racial attitudes and barriers that affected Poitier’s persona, the variables that currently shape Smith’s career are differently weighted. The advent of hip-hop, the increased significance of global audiences, and the primacy of blockbusters and action-oriented films allow Smith’s career a certain relevancy that changes the dynamics of being black in fictive white worlds. Hollywood has from the silent era forward engaged in practices of star-building and genre (re)formulation established by and for its “universalized” white talent. These elements and traditions of star-building in the business were not lost on Smith. As such, Smith tactically sought to extend his persona geographically across the globe, a move that does not transcend race, but allows Smith to sidestep Hollywood and its attendant racial barriers, on his path to stardom. In various articles, Smith consistently revealed his understanding of the business end of entertainment, which meant getting to know the global fan base directly. As reported in Variety, Smith shared that “Tom [Cruise] and I always battle (about) who can spend more time on foreign red carpets,” and revealed that mega action star mentors such as Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger hammered home the importance of the global market. Smith recounts that while at the opening of Planet Hollywood, Australia, Schwarzenegger shared, “No matter how big your movies are in America, you are not a movie star until your movies are big around the world” (Variety 2008). Like Schwarzenegger, much of Smith’s trajectory to stardom was facilitated by science fiction films. Perhaps this is because this genre is inherently open to possibilities, imaginings, exploitation, and displacement of historical racial formations and their coded meanings. Many industry observers mark Independence Day (1996) as Smith’s star turn, the moment in his career that made the industry stand up and take notice of his potentiality. As Vivian Sobchack observes, science fiction “dramatizes the social consequences of imaginary science and technology in speculative visions of possible futures, alternate pasts, and parallel presents.” Thus, with the overt presence of heavily accented/affected

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speech or black skin, science fiction allows for a displacement of xenophobia (or class issues) and racism (and locate it elsewhere, i.e., a “monster” or “universal” enemy) in favor of new ways of understanding the characters within their alternative universes. The use of melodrama has also served Smith well; it ensures a level of diversity (i.e., women, older adults, and so on) in his audience, rendering him all the more viable to the industry and expanding his star text to one that includes levels of depth, complexity, and empathy among his legion of fans. Pursuit of Happyness (2006) earned $307 million worldwide (on a $55 million budget) and earned Smith his second Academy Award nomination (the first being for Michael Mann’s Ali). The film also co-starred Smith’s second son, Jaden. Seven Pounds (2008) earned $168 million worldwide (against $55 million budget) despite generally negative reviews. Finally, Smith’s first starring role as hustler Paul Poitier in Six Degrees of Separation (1993) based on John Guare’s stage play, is what Smith used to diversify himself as a commodity, stretching very far up field from his primary image as the Fresh Prince. While the film did not generate big box office receipts, it caught the attention of filmmakers who would go on to catapult Smith’s career, Michael Bay (Bad Boys) and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day).

Conclusion As a global brand of blackness, the career of Will Smith deserves analysis because he is frequently held up as proof that being black in American is no barrier to Hollywood success, yet, a mixture of fortuitous conditions and conspicuous choices of material determined Smith’s success. His emergence as half of a rap duo aligned with middle-class youthfulness at a time of growing global awareness of hip-hop catapulted his name into international stardom. Parlaying his musical career into a national situation comedy with autobiographical elements cemented his authenticity with fans who felt a sense of “knowing” the real Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Rare for any sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air did well internationally and had a long life in syndication, furthering his popularity with domestic and international audiences. Will Smith’s brand navigates racial politics on- and off-screen, which simultaneously decontextualizes and recontextualizes a heroic blackness deliberately infused with American ideas of western democracy and universality, largely forged via Hollywood genre filmmaking (action, sci-fi, melodrama), to be championed and rooted for by global audiences.

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When considering America’s track record regarding black citizenship in the face of the nation’s own aspirational mythology—freedom, democracy, inalienable rights, all men are born equal—the figure of the quintessential hero repeatedly represented by a black body is quite an accomplishment. For critic Amy Taubin, Smith’s performance in Independence Day serves as “proof that black culture has become the sign of hipness, coolness and above all in-touchness not just for subversive types (from beatniks to skateboarders) but for the mainstream middle-class” (Kakoudaki 2002, p. 128) With Smith having already established mainstream (i.e., crossover) appeal, one can also see a complicating of black nationality and citizenship at the national and global levels. In other words, not only is blackness associated with American heroism, but also with global heroism. At the global level, in a very limited sense but nonetheless present, blackness is repurposed as no longer antithetical to but instead as a representation of American hegemony.

Notes 1.  However, even this is not without controversy. Examples include the “buzz” of Idris Elba as James Bond as well as his actual casting as Heimdall in the Thor franchise, and Amandla Stenberg as Rue in Hunger Games (Ross 2012). 2.  As examples, consider films like Pinky (1949), Lost Boundaries (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Island in the Sun (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). 3. Compare this to the volume and diversity of white male stars such as Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, Jack Lemon, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Elvis Presley, Tony Curtis, and so on, who were all Poitier contemporaries. 4. Compare the demonstrated bankability of contemporary leading men like Jamie Foxx, Idris Elba, and up-and-comer Michael B. Jordan, to those of Denzel Washington or Will Smith. Black female protagonists (or female protagonists who happen to be black) are even less represented as leads in internationally bound films. Efforts to make Zoe Saldana, Thandie Newton, Sanaa Lathan, Taraji P. Henson, and Viola Davis into bankable black actress have ways to go to match the level of bankability and star power once generated by Halle Berry, a one-time leading Hollywood actress. 5.  Sara Baartman, a South African black woman, taken to Britain and exploited in human oddity shows (aka “freak show”) for Europeans in the

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early 1800s. Baartman’s steatophygia, a condition that results in an enlarge buttocks, and enlarged genitalia, were the source of fascination to carnival goers as she was forced to tour throughout Britain. After her death at age 26, these same body parts along with her brain were dissected by French scientists and displayed at Paris’s Museum of Man until 1974. Her remains were repatriated to South Africa at the request of President Nelson Mandela. Also known as the “Hottentot Venus,” Baartman’s exhibition and dissection were indicative of Europeans’ drive to prove their racial superiority, first via subjugated dehumanization (her freak show display) then via evidence in the form of “race science.” For more on Baartman, see Sadia Qureshi’s piece “Displaying Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus,” in History of Science (2004), or The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman, Born 1789—Buried 2002, by Rachel Holmes (2007). 6.  “Double Consciousness” is a concept coined by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the fragmented sense of self, an alterity, where one consistently sees oneself through the lens of the other and is therefore continuously performing “self” in ways acceptable to the other lens. For black Americans, this generally meant having a constant awareness of how white Americans saw blacks and how that awareness then shaped the actions of blacks. For more, see “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. Du Bois (1903). 7. Note this characterization differs from post-racial era slavery/plantation genre films, which cannot divorce themselves from the Atlantic Slave Trade as a constitutive element. Instead, films such as Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012), and 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Hollywood films produced for global audiences render a historical blackness that reflects contemporary understandings of history. 8.  McCarthyism refers to a period in US history where anti-communist pursuits in all facets of society, including Hollywood, were causing anxiety and widespread accusations of subversive, anti-American activities. Named after Senator Joseph McCarthy who led the congressional hearings as part of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), it was most active in the decade after the end of World War II. Anyone could be accused of being a communist sympathizer, including those with left leaning politics. 9. TVTropes.com provides a good, quick summary of “The Magical Negro,” which could be played by any ethnic minority who carries with them “deep spiritual wisdom … enlightened … has no desire to gain glory for him [her] self.” Ultimately, the character is a narrative plot device that helps whiteness realize their own failings and points them in the direction of being a better person. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ MagicalNegro.

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Tolliver, Willie. “Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith’s Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation.” Bright Lights Film Journal, 2012. http://brightlightsfilm.com/76/76postlude_tolliver.php. TV Tropes. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro. Vogler, Chris. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007. Wasko, Janet. “The Political Economy of Film.” In A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Stam Robert. Malden: Blackwell, 2003; Blackwell Reference Online, March 11, 2013. http://www.blackwellreference.com/ subscriber/tocnode.html?id=g9780631206453_chunk_g978063120645312. “Will Smith’s ‘Hancock’ Fiasco.” AlterNet.com, 2008. http://www.alternet. org/story/90473/will_smith%27s_%27hancock%27_fiasco. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”. Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wolfe, Thomas. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York, NY, USA: Scribner (Simon & Schuster) 1934, 2001. Wong, Victor. “Man in Black: Does Will Smith’s Race Matter?” Alternate Takes, 2005. http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/?2005,7,6. Yamato, Jen. “Racists Attack Will Smith’s ‘Focus’ over Film’s Depiction of An Interracial Relationship.” The Daily Beast, February 27, 2015. http://www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/27/racists-attack-will-smith-s-focusover-film-s-depiction-of-an-interracial-relationship. Yearwood, Gladstone, L. Black Film as a Signifying Practice. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2002. Zeitchik, Steven. “Fox Searchlight Tweaks Its Urban Efforts.” Los Angeles Times, 2010.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/06/fox-searchlight-david-talbert-tyler-perry-urban-movies.html.

CHAPTER 8

Tricks of the (Colorblind) Trade: Hollywood’s Preservation of White Supremacy in the Age of Obama John D. Foster

Shortly after the naming of the nominees for the 2016 Academy Awards, people took to Twitter to express their outrage over the lack of nonwhite nominees, including a complete shutout of all 20 acting nominations, which led to the creation of the Twitter hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite.” The “snubs” included the films Creed (2015) and Straight Outta Compton (2015), two films with black leads that were both critically acclaimed and successful at the box office. Instead, all acting and all but one directing nominees were white, non-Hispanic. In fact, as if to rub salt in the wound, the only nominees for the aforementioned films were white: one for acting (Sylvester Stallone for Creed) and one for writing (Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff for Straight Outta Compton). A variety of black actors and directors expressed their outrage over the nominees, while others went further and called for a boycott of the televised program. The situation worsened when it was revealed that 94% of the Academy—more than 6000 members—were white, and just two of the 51 Board of Governors were nonwhite. In response to the criticism, J. D. Foster (*)  University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Pine Bluff, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_8

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the Academy announced that three new governors would be minorities (Slattery 2016). Among those who added their two cents to this discussion was Steven Spielberg, the famed director/producer of classic Hollywood films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), both of which earned him Best Director nods from the Academy. While Spielberg expressed his surprise that Straight Outta Compton had not been nominated for Best Picture, he noted that the Academy was taking steps to diversify its membership. “I think we have to stop pointing fingers and blaming the Academy,” Spielberg argued. “It’s people that hire, it’s people at the main gate of studios and independents. It’s the stories that are being told. It’s who’s writing diversity—it starts on the page. And we all have to be more proactive in getting out there and just seeking talent” (Feinberg 2016). Furthermore, he argued that the responsibility lies with the filmmakers more so than the Academy members, particularly the writers. Speaking to his own perspective, he said, “[L]ook, I have two black children, you know? I’ve been colorblind my entire life…when you just look at the films I’ve made, and look at the people who’ve worked on those films—look at the diversity within the crew, within the cast—I’ve always [had it]” (Feinberg 2016). In his statement, Spielberg insists that he is “colorblind,” which is presumed to mean that he believes race does not matter in determining one’s abilities. Since he has two black children and is “colorblind,” he feels he is uniquely qualified to speak to the issue of diversity in Hollywood and, for the issue at hand, to defend the Academy against the charges lobbed against it. Unfortunately, Spielberg got it only half right about Hollywood filmmakers and the diversification, and in turn, the recognition, of its workforce. Indeed, Hollywood studio executives and others in influential positions have a role to play; however, his statement fails to account for the Hollywood productions that have used stories depicting diverse characters who have been whitewashed, as well as stories depicting racial minorities in exotic lands who all too often play second fiddle to the white (usually male) hero of the story. In fact, Spielberg himself has spearheaded films that fit the latter model, including Amistad (1997) and the Indiana Jones films, in which nonwhite characters are often portrayed in unflattering ways and who require assistance from a white savior to find civilization and righteousness (Vera and Gordon 2003;

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Hughey 2014). Thus, while it may be too easy to say that Spielberg is defending the Academy merely for the recognition he has received from it, his viewpoint fails to recognize that how a filmmaker portrays nonwhites matters, in addition to having a diverse cast and crew. How common are the views of Spielberg, as expressed in the interview, among Hollywood filmmakers? More importantly, is there evidence that Hollywood filmmakers have changed their methods and presented a more realistic picture of race and race relations in US society since the election of Barack Obama, and if so, how have they changed? In this chapter, I argue that Hollywood filmmakers employ tactics to present a diverse (i.e., multiracial) face while simultaneously reproducing the same storylines of the past, (i.e., narratives that produce positive presentations of whites and negative presentations of racial “others”). I present two primary categories of films that endeavor to accomplish this task: first, films that cast biracial actors in lead roles and more diverse casts in general; and second, movies that promote the aura of diversity via alien, animal, or make-believe species. Whether intended or not, whiteness remains exalted and preserved, while otherness is diluted and sanitized. Meanwhile, other films continue to play by the same rules as in the past,1 whether done so flagrantly (in conjunction with the anti-Obama backlash) or inadvertently, thereby leaving the traditional narratives intact, since the “new” films lack the rigor necessary to effectively counter the ones that abide by the same old rules. However, my focus in this chapter will be on films released since 2009 that maintain white supremacy without white supremacists, or as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva 2013).

Is Hollywood Racist? Few people would dispute the claim that the 2008 election of a black president was a significant event in US history. Shortly following the election, some commentators wondered aloud if President Obama’s election was proof that US society had become “post-racial.” Among the evidence to support such a claim were the movies produced by “liberal” Hollywood, with their diverse casts and storylines (e.g., there is no doubt that Spielberg’s Amistad was considered among them upon its release). Hollywood movies produced by filmmakers such as Spielberg and others were (and still are) used to promote the image of “liberal” America, particularly by conservative commentators.

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However, this viewpoint has been challenged in recent years, coinciding with the beginning of the Obama presidency, by a race-conscious narrative that acknowledges both race and its significance in US society. With the assistance of new technology (e.g., social media), ordinary people bring issues to light that previously were ignored by “mainstream” media outlets. One issue of recent interest is the outrage over the continued “whitewashing” of nonwhite character roles by casting white actors to play them. For example, recent Hollywood productions such as Prince of Persia (2010) and Noah (2014) cast white men as the leads in roles portraying Middle Eastern men. In response to the criticism for casting white actors for the leads in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), director Ridley Scott told Variety magazine that “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So, the question doesn’t even come up” (Foundas 2014). Scott’s statement appears to be a commonly held belief among Hollywood filmmakers: that big-budget films are not bankable with nonwhite actors in leading roles. But does Scott’s claim that “Mohammad so-and-so from such-andsuch” cannot headline a blockbuster film stand up to scrutiny? In other words, should consumers be blamed for the casting choices of employers (i.e., filmmakers), rather than the employers themselves? According to one study (Kuppuswamy and Younkin 2016), Scott is wrong to hold this view. They found that films with black leads were actually more bankable than films with no black leads, while no penalty appeared to exist in terms of Academy Award nominations or international box-office numbers when employing black actors in leading roles. They concluded that “either employers are acting inefficiently by selecting homogenous casts when the audience prefers diversity or they are sacrificing money to employ on principle” (Kuppuswamy and Younkin 2016, p. 12). How do we make sense of this disconnect among filmmakers such as Spielberg and Scott between their perceptions of diversity in Hollywood and the reality? Two sociological concepts are useful in understanding what is going on: structuration theory, as developed by British economist Anthony Giddens, and the “white racial frame,” a term coined by American sociologist Joe Feagin. By “structuration,” Giddens (1984) argues that individuals and social structures interact with each other in order to reproduce society. In fact, “they are interrelated to such an extent that at the moment they produce action, people produce and

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reproduce the structures in which they exist” (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2013, p. 181). The relationship is relatively equal in terms of influence meaning that while people are not merely “puppets on a string,” they are not in total command of social structures, either. In fact, people “are as much producers as they are products of society’s structurations” (Guess 2006, p. 659). Moreover, the amount of power one has differentiates one’s abilities to bring about significant structural changes to society. For example, an accomplished director like Spielberg or Scott is likely in a better position to bring about change in Hollywood than little-known directors. Meanwhile, after decades of research on race and racism in US society, Feagin argues that a void exists in the study of race relations, so he created the concept “white racial frame” to help fill that void (Feagin 2013). The white racial frame is a kind of “master” frame that consists of beliefs, values, images, and even emotions related to matters of race. It permeates throughout all major institutions in US society, including media structures such as Hollywood film. The white racial frame promotes positive views of whiteness, such as white people and white culture, often in juxtaposition to the negative presentation of nonwhite people and cultures. This frame is so deeply embedded within the subconscious that much of its contents remain hidden to the individuals who harbor such beliefs, values, or feelings. Indeed, “the white racial frame is so institutionalized that all major media outlets…operate out of some version of it” (Feagin 2013, p. 141). Is it reasonable to suggest that many Hollywood filmmakers, both in the past and present day, make casting or other filmmaking decisions utilizing the white racial frame, whether they intended to or not?

Explaining Hollywood Representations of Race Hollywood has a long history of (re)producing negative images of nonwhite people. Why has this been the case? Various theories have been employed to understand this phenomenon, but here, I will discuss two explanations that I believe complement each other and are useful in this analysis: the reflection hypothesis and gatekeeper theory. The reflection hypothesis posits that media produce images they think consumers want, a motive that would likely intensify if in a global capitalist economy. Since media are increasingly dependent upon securing funds from private sources, they must give the audience what it wants (i.e., produce media products that reflect the values of their

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customers) (Tuchman et al. 1978). Furthermore, producers of movies, television, and other media products must attempt to produce images that appeal to the largest possible audience in order to maximize profits. Ridley Scott’s comment that consumers will not want to watch a film starring “Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such” provides support for this hypothesis. Despite its appeal, the explanatory power of the reflection hypothesis is limited. Critics have charged that the theory fails to consider the possibility that media institutions actually create values, and not merely parrot them back to their consumers. Furthermore, as anyone familiar with Hollywood movies knows, media images tend to present fantastical images as much as, if not more than, realistic ones. Another approach that may be used in conjunction with the reflection hypothesis to better explain media representations of race comes from organizational theories of inequality, and more specifically what I refer to here as “gatekeeper theory.” Inspired in part from the insights of German sociologist Max Weber, social institutions develop bureaucratic organizations as they grow larger as a means to become more efficient. Among the characteristics of bureaucratic organizations is a hierarchical division of labor, in which hiring and promotion decisions are decided by “gatekeepers.” Once established, bureaucracies are resistant to change, and in a society in which white men from privileged backgrounds tend to occupy positions of authority in these institutions, these gatekeepers are more likely to hire and promote other white men from privileged backgrounds. Thus, a kind of “echo chamber” is created, which only furthers the divide between the interests of bureaucrats and public demands for change. The comments delivered by Spielberg appearing at the beginning of this chapter reflect this approach: If you change those in positions of power, then there will be more diversity. While the gatekeeper theory provides an improvement over the reflection hypothesis in understanding the representations of race in Hollywood, its explanatory power is limited due to the fact that more minorities in positions of influence do not always bring about sweeping change (Anderson 2014). One reason is that minorities are socialized to support the values of the institution even if such values may reproduce negative stereotypes of one’s own group. Moreover, research has found that the only minorities allowed to join the ranks of the powerful are those who share the same interests and perspectives as those already in power, creating a kind of “irony of diversity” in that this presence of token minorities actually strengthens the power

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of those who have always had it in US society—namely wealthy white men (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1998). Additionally, careerism—the attempt to achieve career advancement at any means necessary, including the sacrifice of one’s integrity—can also hamper substantive change due to those employees who wish not to “rock the boat” or risk promotion through the ranks. Finally, this approach places too much emphasis on the role of institutions, while neglecting the role individuals, in bringing about social change. Ultimately, while both the reflection hypothesis and gatekeeper theory have something to offer in explaining why Hollywood and other media institutions present race the ways they do, they are limited in their explanatory power, at least in isolation. For this study, I present an integrated theory of media influence, informed by Giddens’ structuration theory and Feagin’s concept of white racial frame, as well as the reflection hypothesis and gatekeeper theory. While media organizations such as Hollywood, operating within a global capitalistic economy, resist change due to their bureaucratic organization and pursuit of profits, they are nonetheless susceptible to change due to the demands of the consumers of their products (including Hollywood movies).

Method Have the electoral victories of Barack Obama compelled Hollywood filmmakers to change their methods and present a more realistic picture of race and race relations? In order to answer this question, I conduct a content analysis of Hollywood films released since the 2008 Election that best characterizes contemporary Hollywood representations of race. In my research, I find two basic categories of film emerge that present race in a way that perpetuates white supremacy while masquerading as colorblind: (1) present a large, multiracial cast of characters who practice and celebrate white values, often with a white or “near white” lead; and (2) promote diversity via alien, animal, or make-believe species, often for films targeting children, while actually validating whiteness. This study consists of a “critical reading” of Hollywood films, which exposes both the images (structure) and storylines (content) that legitimize and reinforce dominant beliefs and values of society. A critical reading of a film requires that the viewer “identify, quantify, and analyze themes, symbols, visual discourses, and meanings, and analyze the relationships between themes and make inferences about the messages within the texts”

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(Liberato and Foster 2011, p. 371). Furthermore, I conduct a thematic analysis that “moves beyond a textual analysis by emphasizing context (such as social ideologies) and its relationships with texts (that is, with the films)” (King et al. 2010, p. 10). The films for this study were Hollywood productions released between 2009 and 2015. I wanted to focus on films that received significant attention and were watched by many people, so I limited my sample to films that were either commercially successful, critically acclaimed, or both. Similar to the study conducted by King, Lugo-Lugo, and BloodsworthLugo, I focus on wide releases “available to wide audiences” that have become “pervasive entities in our society” (King et al. 2010). In order to determine a film’s level of critical acclaim, I used the so-called “Tomatometer” reading from the website Rotten Tomatoes (Fandango). The “Tomatometer” is the percentage of film critics approved by Rotten Tomatoes who gave the movie a positive review. A film is considered “fresh” if it is liked by at least 60% of reviewers. In addition, to evaluate a film’s level of commercial success, both the estimated budget and box-office gross of a film were collected from the Box Office Mojo website (IMDb). I ultimately selected ten films for the analysis (see Table 8.1). All films used for the analysis were profitable for their respective film studios, and all but one have generated a “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Table 8.1  Sample of films, 2009–2015 Film Avatar (2009) Fast and Furious (2009) Fast Five (2011) Fast and Furious 6 (2013) Furious 7 (2015) Inside Out (2015) The Lego Movie (2014) Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012) Rio (2011) Turbo (2013)

Tomatometer rating

Worldwide box officea

Budgeta

83 28 78 69 81 98 96 79

2787 363 626 788 1516 857 469 746

N/Ab 85 125 160 190 175 60 145

72 67

484 282

90 135

aBoth figures listed for worldwide box office and production budget are in millions. Production budgets are estimates bWhile the production budget for Avatar is listed as not available at Box Office Mojo, other sources estimate the cost to produce Avatar at approximately $300 million

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(E)racing Blackness and Advancing Whiteness in the “Multiculti Action Film” One important type of film that came to prominence during the Obama era is what Beltrán refers to as the “multiculti action film” due to their “multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings” (Beltrán 2005, p. 50). Despite the fact that the first installment was released in 2001, the Fast and Furious series did not become a worldwide box-office phenomenon until the political ascension of Barack Obama. While other films fit the profile well, none comes quite as close as the Fast and Furious films in accomplishing what I argue is its primary goal (besides making money, of course): to advance whiteness under the guise of multiculturalism. It is important to note that the three Fast and Furious films released between 2009 and 2013 were directed by Justin Lin, who is Taiwanese American. Lin was able to revitalize the fledgling enterprise—the second and third installments failed to match the box-office success of the original—by transforming the series through a fusion of racing movies with heist movies, so that by the time the seventh installment was released in 2015 (directed by Malaysian-born James Wan), the film topped the one billion dollar mark at the box office globally. The presence of Lin is critical to this analysis because it provides insight into the impact a filmmaker of color may (or may not) have in the representations of race in the movies they make. Does the race of the filmmaker make a difference? When directing the third installment of the series (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift [2006]), Lin objected to the way the studio was planning to film the movie in Japan and portray Japanese people in stereotypical ways. Despite his resistance to allowing such images in the film, the structure of the traditional Hollywood film prevails in Tokyo Drift: the white man prevails, often with people of color assisting him in his endeavor. This model continued for the subsequent films in the series: once Lin announced he was finished with the series after the sixth film, James Wan stepped in and essentially continued Lin’s model for the films, including casting choices, characters, filming locations, and storylines. Throughout the Fast and Furious films, two rules tend to hold true: (1) white characters tend to receive more screen time, lines, and character development, and (2) the protagonists of the film tend to be fairer than those cast as the villains. For example, in Fast & Furious (2009) the two antagonists receiving the most screen time are heroin dealer Braga

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and drug runner Fenix. Both are Hispanic, but Braga can be described as white Hispanic, and Fenix as black Hispanic. Although the majority of actors in the film are multiracial, the bulk of screen time is doled out to the actors who are white (or at least can pass as white2), while the villains cannot pass as white. Furthermore, while the Fast and Furious films display an aura of multiculturalism, with their use of music with Spanish lyrics or scenes with characters speaking with English subtitles, English remains the dominant language spoken by the main characters, casting these other languages as nonessential. Most importantly, blackness remains suppressed or condemned, since it rarely appears on screen, and when it does, it is either associated with wickedness or is simply tokenism. Given the dichotomous nature of race in US society, in that whiteness and blackness are opposites, with others falling somewhere in between, such a devaluation of blackness assists in the exaltation of whiteness. The series reached the stratosphere with the addition of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for the fifth installment in 2011. Like Vin Diesel, Johnson is also racially ambiguous. He plays a federal agent who chases after the gang who attempt to pull off one final heist before calling it quits. In this film, the “lily-white” cop leaves the force to join his new “family,” who are on the other side of the law. When asked how it feels to be on the other side, he remains silent. Ironically, films such as this show that white men, or those who pass as such, remain unsullied, regardless of the legality of their actions. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Johnson in the mix acts as a prop for increasing the film brand’s longevity while maintaining the white man’s ego, even if he has left the force for criminality. Such a message insinuates that the nature of whiteness transcends the legal codes of mortals. In sum, despite some changes in content, the structure of the Fast and Furious films is hardly new. These films echo 1980s films like Cobra (1986) and Year of the Dragon (1985) in which a “white ethnic” male character, usually a cop, breaks the rules in order to get the “bad guys,” who usually are people of color. Such characters were able to provide cover for whiteness if they were criticized for their actions, yet they would produce the end result that whites wanted, which usually entailed the killing of nonwhite villains. The difference between films then and during the age of Obama is that the latter continues to please white moviegoers, while tinkering with the content in order to appeal to nonwhite audiences (in both domestic and overseas markets) as

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well. As a result, you have a multi-billion dollar enterprise that not only fails to challenge white supremacy but also, in reality, contributes to its preservation.

Whites Rule, Nonwhites Drool: White Supremacy in Animated Worlds In addition to the multiculti action film, the proliferation of animated features3 began to occur during the Obama era, due to a variety of reasons. Besides the advancement in technology making such films possible, as well as the growing demand from moviegoers, such movies allow filmmakers to send messages to viewers, including young children, about which values are most important, and who rules (or should rule) the world. Meanwhile, increased economic growth and consumption of US media products, particularly in countries such as China, India, and Brazil, have prompted Hollywood studios to increase their product appeal to these foreign markets, while maintaining a foothold here at home. In addition to discovering more markets abroad, studios also have found a new cash cow: the animated children’s film. Such films target children but their distributors recognize that these consumers likely will be accompanied by their parents. As a result, films in the age of Obama increasingly use more diverse characters in terms of language—or at least accent—and nationality. Sometimes these characters and caricatures might be offensive to some viewers. In order to minimize any displeasure, studios use non-human characters to get the same messages across and anthropomorphize them. They talk, wear clothing, dance the mambo, and drive cars. They often do these things in comical ways to keep children’s attention for the better part of 90 minutes. Technological advances in filmmaking of the past 20 years or so have also increased opportunities to produce films that target adult audiences, as well. Such films may not be completely animated, but may include computer-generated imagery (CGI) to produce images previously unavailable, while retaining similar messages to their predecessors. No movie better represents this type of film than the 2009 blockbuster Avatar, which was directed by James Cameron and released by Twentieth Century Fox. As of May 2016, Avatar remains the highest grossing film of all-time (note that it has the highest worldwide gross of all-time; Star Wars: The Force Awakens has the highest domestic gross to date).

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The film depicts a foreign world called Pandora, which is populated by an alien species that has human-like features, though they are much taller than humans and have blue skin. In the interests of big business, US soldiers labor to pacify the Na’vi in order to extract a profitable mineral found on Pandora. The protagonist of the film is a white soldier who comes to empathize with the Na’vi and ultimately commits treason in order to save the Na’vi and their home. Avatar is little more than Dances with Wolves (1990) with CGI of indigenous peoples. In Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner plays a Union soldier who befriends Sioux Indians and eventually rejects white society for theirs. Instead of a conservative view of indigenous peoples standing in the way of “progress,” the view of films like Wolves and Avatar are of the liberal kind, but white supremacist nonetheless. In both films, indigenous peoples are viewed as one and the same as the flora and fauna in the lands they inhabit: naïve and virtuous. Stereotypes tend to be double-edged in that such typifications may produce seemingly positive as well as negative outcomes; in this case, while indigenous peoples may be viewed as vicious savages on one hand, on the other they are viewed as environmentally friendly simpletons. Still, both conservative and liberal views are built on the foundation of a white racial frame, which places whites above nonwhites in the global racial hierarchy. One of the key themes to come out of this analysis was the structure of the films in terms of casting, or “casteing” (Ketchum et al. 2011, p. 200). In Avatar, whites occupy roles of leadership including both protagonist and antagonist, whereas nonwhite characters play secondary roles: whites give the orders, while nonwhite characters take them. Meanwhile, the fate of the Na’vi depends upon who wins among the battle between the white male competitors; they are in no position to defend themselves against the white-led multiracial military. As in Dances with Wolves, the protagonist in Avatar takes on the role of white messiah in saving the Na’vi from their demise from, ironically enough, the greedy white corporatists. Thus, the real battle lies among whites themselves, and the racial others (including alien species) are little more than pawns in this fight. This theme continues into the Hollywood films that portray animals with human characteristics. For this portion of the analysis, I include the films Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012), Rio (2011), and Turbo (2013). Madagascar 3 was considered by many to be the best of the series, and was commercially successful in international markets as well as domestically. It portrays four zoo animals trying to get back

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home to their zoo in New York from Europe, but they must join a circus in order to do so. Many of the movie’s jokes are premised on ethnic humor, particularly the French cop who tries to capture the loose animals. Moreover, the characters played by actors of color come dangerously close to stereotypical roles, such as the wise-cracking zebra (voiced by Chris Rock) and the big booty hippo (voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith). Most offensive is the lemur that, while speaking with what seems to be an Asian Indian accent, has eccentricities which produce the biggest laughs in the film, with lines such as “oooh you have a hairy back. I like that in a woman.” The character of the lemur provides a way of mocking Asian men by labeling them as having poor taste in women and being strange more generally.4 All three films are similar in that, despite a nucleus of a few characters, the one at the center of attention is a white male character. In Madagascar 3, the lion talks the most and gives orders to the other animals. He is voiced by Ben Stiller, who is Jewish, but unlike the giraffe voiced by David Schwimmer (who is also Jewish), there are virtually no references to his real-life status as a Jewish man (Gillota 2013). In fact, in the first sequel the lion met his father in Africa, who is voiced by Bernie Mac (who is black). Thus, not only does race matter, but so does ethnicity: the lion “passes” as both white and Anglo. The zebra at one point questions the lion’s status as leader of the group, but when confronted by the tiger of the traveling circus and asked “which one of you is leader?” the zebra meekly points to the lion. In addition to keeping with the theme that white men are natural leaders, this also echoes the old concept of “white man’s burden” in which whites must rule over nonwhites in order to save them, a concept used to justify slavery and colonialism. Whereas the nucleus of animals in Madagascar 3 is both multiracial and multiethnic, the stories of Rio and Turbo differ in that they both portray animals in a “white bubble” that, while safe, is a “dull, miserable reality,” as said by the main character’s brother in Turbo. In Rio, a domesticated macaw named Blu that lives in Minnesota (with a white woman) goes on a trip to Brazil to find another one of his kind. When he joins up with the other macaw, they meet up with other macaws in the jungle and, as the promotion reads, “…take a walk on the wild side.” In Turbo, Theo is a snail who dreams of racing in the Indy 500 someday, and has an accident that allows him to do just that. But before he can get there, he needs the assistance of a snail crew to get there, as well as to win the race.

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The racial overtones in these films are hard to ignore. In Rio, the wild macaws are portrayed the same way Brazil is portrayed in the movie: in clichés. They are voiced by minority actors and are portrayed as goofy, musical, and at times intimidating, even violent, which harkens back to the old stereotype of the urban coon caricature (Bogle 2016). At one point, Blu exclaims, “[the] human has given me love and affection for the last 15 years while my own kind try to strangle me after 15 seconds.” Meanwhile, in Turbo the crew of snails is loud, flamboyant, and downright silly. Though perhaps unintended, one consequence of portraying “animals of color” as goofy or silly is the messaging to children that people of color are not to be taken seriously. Additionally, in Turbo ethnic stereotyping continues with the humans, including an Asian female nail technician who is voiced by Ken Jeong, because, apparently, there were no women available for the part. While both Rio and Turbo have multicultural casts, a hierarchy exists in which the lead characters are portrayed as white and the nonwhites are relegated to supporting cast members. This continues even into the world of make-believe in Hollywood films when Lego minifigures come to life and our feelings represent actual people inside our minds. In The Lego Movie (2015), Emmet is a Lego construction worker who is “a special one with a face of yellow” (i.e., white5) and is considered by a prophecy to be the one who can save the world from annihilation. This film is basically a rip-off of The Matrix (1999) in which a racially ambiguous, though can pass for white, male initially does not believe he is “the one,” but with the assistance of others (many of them nonwhites), he ultimately “saves the realm.” This prophecy is created by Vitruvius, voiced by Morgan Freeman, who represents a kind of “magical Negro” in how he has special powers that assist a white man in self-fulfillment (Hughey, 2009). Nearly all minifigures in the film appear in the stock yellow color, except for Vitruvius and Lando Calrissian of Star Wars fame, who makes a brief cameo appearance. Apparently, Hollywood filmmakers think that using yellow for skin tone will not be viewed as the equivalent of “white” skin in the real world. This is a glaring problem, one that I am surprised has not received more attention from critics. The use of yellow skin is even more troubling in Inside Out (2015), which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. This film portrays the feelings of a young girl in the form of human beings, with their skin tone representing their respective feelings (Sadness is blue, Anger is red, Disgust is green, and so on).

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Joy is the first character to appear on screen, and apparently the first to come into existence. Her skin tone is bright yellow, while her hair is blue. She also happens to be voiced by Amy Poehler, who is white, and has all the characteristics of a white woman. Moreover, Joy is located at the center of the movie poster as well as in charge of business conducted in the little girl’s mind. In fact, she attempts to suppress the other feelings, especially Sadness. Though perhaps less obvious to viewers, all characters have eye colors that match their skin tones except for Joy, whose eye color is blue, the same as Sadness. Is the audience supposed to believe that these representations of “the little voices” inside our heads are shared among all of us? Does everyone have a white woman in our head trying to suppress our feelings? Is this the ideal in the eyes of the filmmakers? Even more peculiar still, at one point Joy breaks down and cries, experiencing sadness herself. She is the only one who, perhaps besides Sadness, seems capable of understanding other feelings, or empathy (in fact, at one point when Anger, Disgust, and Fear fail to take charge of the controls away from Joy, Anger utters “it’s like we don’t learn anything”). Ultimately, Sadness and Joy join forces to bring balance to the young girl’s state of mind. Meanwhile, the others are effectively sidelined as secondary feelings and turned into nonwhite characters. Hence, the blue-eyed of the bunch, Sadness and Joy, represent the unification of the white self, while the feelings of color make their contributions, but come to understand that their rightful place is at the periphery taking orders.

Discussion Presumably, Hollywood has been put on notice. Constance Wu and other Asian American actors have made their voices known concerning the practice of Hollywood whitewashing (Foster 2016; Hess 2016). Unfortunately, studies such as mine suggest that the problem goes well beyond the whitewashing phenomenon. What is to be done? Perhaps the problem is that the actors speaking out are not, or at least cannot pass as, white, otherwise, they can land work, possibly even become an A-list movie star, like Keanu Reeves, Dwayne Johnson, or Vin Diesel. Is there a possible link between the appeal of biracial actors and the appeal of President Obama? Would he have been elected had his surname been Johnson or Jackson?

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In this chapter, I provided a thematic analysis of ten Hollywood films released during the Obama administration and found that while change is desired (at least by some), it is very difficult to accomplish. Hollywood has a long history of (re)producing stereotypical images of nonwhite people, and I have provided evidence that this still occurred in Hollywood in the age of Obama. This trend continues, despite the vocal opposition to whitewashing characters or negative portrayals of ethnoracial minorities. Similar to Republicans in the US Congress, Hollywood filmmakers continue to resist change, even if such change would increase their profits, illustrating the waste of racism (Feagin and McKinney 2005). Then again, perhaps there is a rationale for this fear, as the appeal of birther-in-chief Donald Trump demonstrates. One of the subframes of Feagin’s white racial frame is for the emotion of fear. I believe the fear is actually two-sided: both a general fear of nonwhites (especially blacks), as well as a fear of fellow whites who may strip away the privileges afforded to whites, for being labeled a race traitor or, specifically for this study, generating a negative response to a product. These filmmakers appear as afraid to upset the white racial frame of their white customers as Republicans are afraid in upsetting their white constituents (Feagin 2012). As I outlined earlier, these films were “mainstream” successes with large payoffs and widely liked by most viewers, even winning awards. Although such films are indeed likeable for many reasons, they also show that old habits die hard in Hollywood, despite public outcry over their ethnoracial representations.6 Critical to the success of the multiculti action film is the ambiguous racial identity of the actors that can still pass as “white,” at least to white moviegoers. However, actors do not appear on screen in the animated films, giving filmmakers the ability to reproduce racial and ethnic stereotypes in ways they could not with live-action films. Hence, ethnoracial boundaries are clearer in the animated films than in the multiculti action movies. As a result, I fully expect the reign of animated features to continue. Such films fail to challenge, and instead even strengthen, the white racial frame. “[A]nimated films do not simply impose values or create meaning through allegories; they also actively encourage forgetting through distortion and erasure … or by consciously reinforcing the invisible norms of society” (King et al. 2010, p. 6). One must bear in mind, however, that these are not the only types of films produced by Hollywood. Many filmmakers continue to churn out stereotypical images of ethnoracial minorities if they are portrayed at

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all. In fact, the number of animated films portraying virtually no nonwhite characters is substantial, including Frozen (2013), How to Train Your Dragon (2010), and The Croods (2013). Meanwhile, in its apparent inability to create its own original material, Hollywood continues to whitewash characters in stories created by nonwhite writers. And then, of course, there are the Clint Eastwood films. Even if we see more nonwhite characters, they are almost always at the periphery and are there to serve the white lead(s). While we may see more positive representations of people of color in films as a result of demands for change in films such as Fast & Furious and Avatar, many of the old rules apply for Hollywood films. More research is needed to examine how people of various races and nationalities react to nonwhite actors in lead roles.

Notes 1.  These “rules” used by Hollywood filmmakers over the years include (1) white characters are portrayed more prominently than nonwhite characters, and (2) when nonwhite characters are featured they are defined based upon their relationship to white society: if they are deemed a threat, they are treated as villains who must be deterred; if they are allied with whites, they are allowed to exist; regardless, the nonwhite characters are always portrayed as inferior to whites. 2. Beltrán (2005, p. 51) describes Vin Diesel’s character as “ethnically ambiguous.” Both Diesel and Dwayne Johnson may pass as white due to a variety of factors, including phenotypical reasons (e.g., their shaved heads that do not reveal a texture of hair that may be perceived as nonwhite) and cultural (e.g., their support for values and beliefs deemed acceptable to whites). 3. By “animated features” I am including Disney/Pixar as well as non-Disney films in this analysis (Turbo, for example, was distributed by Fox). 4. For a great analysis of media representations of Asians, and South Asians in particular, see Shilpa S. Davé, Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 5. As we also see in Inside Out and other animated films depicting images of real people, characters portrayed as “white” often are given a shade of yellow, since white would actually be a poor depiction of the typical tone of white people. It should be noted that there are a variety of markers used to distinguish between different racial groups. Since race is a social construction and not a biological one, characteristics unrelated to phenotype could be utilized (such as linguistic styles, tone of voice, or religion, to name a

190  J. D. FOSTER few). We see these differences used particularly in the films that portray talking animals. Still, phenotypical differences matter, and in The Lego Movie we see the color of the characters Vitruvius and Lando Calrissian darker than that of Emmet’s. 6. It should be reiterated that there was little to no outcry over the representations in the animated films.

Works Cited Anderson, Margaret. Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender, 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Beltrán, Mary C. “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (2005), 50–67. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 5th ed. New York: Bloombury, 2016. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 4th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Davé, Shilpa S. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Fandango. “Rotten Tomatoes.” Fandango. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/. Feagin, Joe R. White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics. New York: Routledge, 2012. Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Feagin, Joe R., and Karyn D. McKinney. The Many Costs of Racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Feinberg, Scott. “Steven Spielberg Supports Diversity in Academy, ‘Not 100 Percent Behind’ Current Plan, Calls for Limits on Oscar Campaigning (Exclusive).” The Hollywood Reporter, February 11, 2016. Accessed May 24, 2016. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/steven-spielberg-supportsdiversity-academy-864310. Foster, John D. “Drifting for Whiteness: Hollywood Representations of Asian Americans in the Twenty-First Century.” In Race and Contention in TwentyFirst Century U.S. Media, edited by Jason Smith and Bhoomi K. Thakore, 117–130. New York: Routledge, 2016. Foundas, Scott. “Exodus: Gods and Kings’ Director Ridley Scott on Creating His Vision of Moses.” Variety, November 25, 2014. Accessed June 2, 2016. http://variety.com/2014/film/news/ridley-scott-exodus-gods-andkings-christian-bale-1201363668/. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1984.

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Gillota, David. Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Guess, Teresa J. “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence.” Critical Sociology 32, no. 4 (2006): 649–673. Hess, Amanda. “Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored.” New York Times, May 25, 2016. Accessed June 2, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/movies/asian-american-actors-arefighting-for-visibility-they-will-not-be-ignored.html?_r=1. Hughey, Matthew W. “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films.” Social Problems 56, no. 3 (August 2009), 543–577. Hughey, Matthew W. The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014. IMDb. “Box Office Mojo.” IMDb. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/. Ketchum Paul R., David G. Embrick, and B. Mitch Peck. “Progressive in Theory, Regressive in Practice: A Critical Race Review of Avatar.” Humanity and Society 35 (February/May 2011): 198–201. King, D. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Kuppuswamy, Venkat, and Peter Younkin. “Blaming the Customer: The Effect of Cast Racial Diversity on the Performance of Hollywood Films.” Social Science Research Network, February 26, 2016. Accessed June 2, 2016 http://ssrn. com/abstract=2738728. Liberato, Ana S.Q., and John D. Foster. Representations and Remembrance: Tracing Civil Rights Meanings in the Narratives of Civil Rights Activists and Hollywood Filmmakers.” Journal of African American Studies 15, no. 3 (2011): 367–384. Ritzer, George, and Jeff Stepnisky. 2013. Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Slattery, Denis. “Academy Responds to #OscarsSoWhite by Adding Three Minority Governors.” New York Daily News, March 16, 2016. Accessed May 24, 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/oscars/academyadds-3-minority-governors-diversity-response-article-1.2566027. Tuchman, Gaye, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benét, eds. Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Vera, Hernán, and Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Zweigenhaft, Richard L., and G. William Domhoff. Diversity in the Power Elite: Have Women and Minorities Reached the Top? Yale University Press, 1998.

PART III

Intersections Between Race, Ethnicity, and Gender and Colorblind Racism in Hollywood

CHAPTER 9

Zombies, Muslims, and Politics: Racism Without Race in Contemporary America Tarik Ahmed Elseewi

In this chapter, I explore the ambivalence (and the injustice) of ‘post-racial’ discourse in US popular culture by juxtaposing political ­ utterances about Muslims with popular filmic utterances about zombies. Muslims and zombies, while not necessarily depicted as identical, can serve as metaphors for similar articulations of deep social anxiety, social breakdown, and apocalyptic destruction of life. Xenophobic politicians and media figures emphasize this connection between lifeless zombies and zombified Muslims for political gain using post-racial language and the discourse of virality, infection, and destruction. Zombie fiction films themselves, though, better represent our actual social ambivalence in the globalized encounter with difference than politics do. To be explicit, I am premising my argument on the assumption that politics tries to evacuate the ambivalence of Otherness in American society by blaming specific groups (in this case Muslims) for social ills while society itself— here represented by zombie films—is more ambivalent about difference and Otherness. T. A. Elseewi (*)  Film and Media Studies, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_9

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As originally envisioned, this chapter was about identifying trends in a post-race discursive environment with particular attention to Muslims. With the election of Donald Trump, though, the status quo of shared political meaning and social interpretation has been upended. Campaigning on the racist, xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric of the rejection of difference, Trump represents a post-race racist resurgence. Blatantly bigoted discourse is no longer forced to conceal itself to enter the public sphere. Making the case for a conceptual link between the undead and Muslim otherness is, in this context, more fraught and complicated than it was during the Obama era. While the cultural superstructure of American society has not (and cannot) be transformed in one election, the public sphere that gives us clues as to the form and content of this superstructure has changed. Scholars, artists, and politicians—all members of a tenuous but long-lived status quo—are asking themselves, ‘could we have gotten it all so totally wrong?’ This chapter argues that the underlying anxiety about racial, gendered, religious and cultural differences that have long animated the culture wars in the USA remains firmly in place. Acceptance or rejection of otherness remains the animating division between left (or open) and right (or closed) politics in the USA. What has so drastically changed, though, is this: The tenuous illusion of national unity has ruptured. The idea of a roughly common interpretation of national aspirations and national identity—long held together by a sharply circumscribed liberal public sphere of print and electronic media dominated by a select number of powerful voices—has shattered. In its place, the early twenty-first century has seen the rise of a cacophony of electronic media that each posit and create a series of competing, mutually antagonistic communicative bubbles—all taking place in a transnational environment—that can no longer be called ‘The public sphere.’ In this context of a ruptured center of common social interpretation, it is even more important that pointed social critique pays close attention to the nuances involved in the representations of otherness. In this era—where notions of truth have been vigorously disrupted on the right by alternative news and entertainment sources and new political interpretations and on the left by post-modern philosophy—feelings, emotions, and vague notions are as likely to serve as rationale for political principals as platforms, facts, or philosophies. It is in this area of vague emotions and fears that fictive connections between the undead—Zombies—and the inhuman—Muslims—find

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cultural traction. While I will define how I am using ‘politics’ and describe zombie films a bit later, what is important to note at the start is the seeming incongruity of my examples—Muslims and Zombies— with the initial topic: race in contemporary America. Why transpose a discussion of race—a putatively biological category—onto the grouping of social and legal structures called Islam? It is precisely because Islam describes a set of social or ideological relations—affinities that are based in thought and action rather than biology—that allows for Islamophobic discourse to at once activate the notion of insoluble difference while avoiding the appearance of racism. Even today, no one seems to want to feel or admit that they are racist. Prejudice and discrimination against Muslims are the perfect contemporary solution for maintaining rigid boundaries between proper (read white/Christian) bodies and improper (read everything else) bodies while remaining firmly within contemporary mainstream post-racial discourse. In an age (at least before Donald Trump) where it has become socially taboo to denigrate AfricanAmericans, and Latinos based on race, the seemingly post-racial focus on Muslims remains useful to express a rejection of all that is not white supremacist. In short, public abuse and denigration of Muslims—as a rejection of difference in US culture—are not only about Muslims, but also very much about excluding African-Americans, Latinos, and other ethnic minorities from political life. Implicit in this argument is a cultural studies methodological claim. The most intellectually profitable way to investigate questions of race and representation in a society that sees itself as post-racial is not by analyzing official national rhetoric or legal decisions, but by watching how a society represents itself in real time—in this case represented by contemporary zombie movies. After all, the founding political rhetoric of the USA claimed that ‘all men are created equal,’ while the real-time political culture of eighteenth-century America enslaved and murdered non-white people.

Zombies = Muslims (Sometimes) Muslims and zombies are not equivalent nor do representation of one necessarily lead to reflections or action on the other. Instead, invoking the language of psychoanalysis, our shared cultural knowledge (sometimes called the social imaginary or national identity), which consists of the mediated worlds of television, film, the Internet, newspapers,

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magazines, and social institutions such as education and church, helps to create identity categories which posit healthy American minds and bodies on one side and polluted foreign bodies and minds on the other. Each moment we are engaged with mediated culture—in film, politics, economics, and other areas—we are asked to unconsciously identify with ‘correct’ cultural attitudes and reject ‘incorrect’ attitudes. In this light, cinema and politics matter because they help to produce (and negate) people. In order to understand this point, we have to recognize that while biological processes produce physical homo sapiens, it is social processes that inscribe what we think of as humanity. As Judith Butler (2010) points out, every subject is formed through the process of differentiating the self from the not-self. A subject can only become a ‘me’ through an active process of excluding ‘not-me’s’. … A subject emerges through a process of abjection, jettisoning those dimensions of oneself that fail to conform to the discrete figures yielded by the norm of the human subject. The refuse of such a process includes various forms of spectrality and monstrosity, usually figured in relation to non-human animal life. (p. 141)

A significant part of the process, then, of finding and articulating national identity is through accepting social norms and rejecting difference. Prevailing social norms come to represent what is good and true; alternative practices, and thus different people, come to represent monstrosity and inhumanity. How does this help us to envision a cultural relationship between zombies and Muslims? Visually, I ask you to imagine two distinct scenarios. The first, you’ll see in almost every zombie movie: hordes of shambling undead trying to get access to a live human. Imagine how they move, waving their arms about. Imagine how they’re dressed, in tattered clothes. Imagine what they say, unintelligible moans and roars. Now I’ll ask you to imagine a news report on CNN or FOX about an anti-Western protest somewhere in the Muslim world. How are the protesters moving? Waving their arms about chaotically. How are they dressed? In the old, tattered clothing of the poor. What are they saying? It’s impossible to understand; it sounds like unintelligible moans and roars. While it isn’t intellectually profitable to argue that there is a deliberate connection between the framing of Muslims or Middle Easterners in the news media and the framing of zombies in fiction, the very visual

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similarity helps to draw unconscious connections. This is an important point which I will continue to emphasize: Rarely (in the social imaginary or the public sphere) are Muslims and Zombies consciously associated. Instead, if we think about Judith Butler’s claim on the process of identity-formation, in order to psychologically claim a normative, American, Western identity we are asked to expel as monstrous all that does not conform to the norm. In this case, the poor, the thirdworld, and the irrational are necessarily left outside the normative scope of what we can call human. They are not zombies necessarily. But the unconscious does not specialize in rational associations. And these indirect associations quickly become available for xenophobes and racists to manipulate and use for political gain. This unconscious association does not stop at the visual similarity between hordes of third-world Muslims and hordes of undead zombies. There is also the matter of humanity—or the lack thereof. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2005) describes President George Bush’s ‘military order’ of 11/13/01—which was about ‘enemy combatants’ in Guantanamo Bay—as meticulously and legally scrubbing the humanity out of Muslims. It ‘radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being … neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees,” they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well’ (p. 4). In a legal sense, these ‘detainees’ are neither living nor dead; they are like zombies who shuffle at the social boundaries. This is an official statement in the world about the inhumanity of our enemies and another subconscious articulation of the lifelessness of Muslims. While mainstream discourse, again, does not make conscious connections between Muslims and Zombies, the unconscious anxiety about both Muslims and the apocalyptic collapse of civilization is fertile ground for those who do seek to create a tangible link between Muslims and zombies, between foreignness and the destruction of all we hold dear. A whole media industry of well-funded right-wing xenophobes has risen in recent years to draw attention to the supposed danger of Muslims in the USA (Lean and Esposito 2012). Often associated with both FOX news and fundamentalist Christian associations and funded by a myriad of political action groups,1 these groups work to turn the unconscious fear of Otherness into a conscious fear of a particular Other, Muslims.

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Frank Gaffney is a good example not only of the rising Islamophobia Industry (as author Nathan Lean calls it) but of the relationships between Islamophobic groups and the right wing of American politics. As an advisor to the Ronald Reagan presidency and a national security advisor to former presidential candidate Ted Cruz in 2016, Gaffney is not a political outsider. In describing Islam as a virus, Gaffney plays upon the dual fears that animate much of our contemporary social life: civilizational collapse and fear of the foreignness of Islam. What is the connective tissue between all these attacks (in American cities) … I’m not saying that they’re tactically coordinated, I am saying, though, that there is this virus if you will, a virus that is far more toxic than swine flu and we are failing to recognize it as such, even though it is actually animating people to believe that Jihad is what God wants them to engage in to the murder of lots of people to force their submission to Islam. (StealthCrusaders 2011)

Gaffney draws an implicit distinction between the natural toxicity of Islam and the rational, scientific imperative of US power to tame nature. Like zombies, Muslims don’t need to think to be dangerous; they don’t need to coordinate, plan or be rational. Instead, it is in the very nature of Islam as a dangerous virus that turns what otherwise might be human beings into caterwauling instruments of destruction and death: Zombies. While Gaffney’s utterances on Islam are frightful, we should strenuously avoid thinking Islamophobic discourse as following the rigid binary of left and right or liberal and conservative, nor think of this discourse as expressing itself only in the field we call politics. Noted British scientist, liberal thinker, and atheist Richard Dawkins provides an example of the cross-political attraction of denigrating Muslims to make a point by also deploying the viral metaphor against Islam. The child’s brain is vulnerable to paracitization by viral code which is things like ‘it is essential that you pray five times a day, it is essential that you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon.’ How is the child brain to know which bits of advice are good, like don’t jump off of a cliff and which bits are silly like sacrifice a goat? If the child brain could tell which was good advice and which was bad advice, it wouldn’t need the advice in the first place… therefor it is automatically vulnerable to the equivalent of computer viruses, which is what I think religions are. (OxfordUnion 2014)

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Dawkin’s message is that people like him—rational, Western scientists (he has also made much of the point that Muslims haven’t won very many Nobel prizes)—are the gatekeepers of truth and that Muslims, like children, are vulnerable to the virus of stupidity. In Dawkin’s liberal articulation of proper subjectivity, there is the rational—don’t jump off a cliff—and the irrational—engaging in Islamic religious ritual by sacrificing a goat. What is important to note in these examples from the right and the left is that in no instance does anyone claim that Muslims are biologically, or racially, incapable of rational thought. Dawkins appears to be arguing that all religions do this, but his examples only come from Islam. Instead, the failures of Muslims come down to ideology, to improper education and socialization. Muslims, whether considered from the political left or right, are redeemable as humans, but only in one instance: If they stop being Muslims. This disavows not only the appearance of racism, but (thinking generously) might even represent the absence of racist intention in both of these thinkers. In this way, public denigration of Muslims represents a post-racial way of performing social division. We do not reject these people because of biology, which is unchanging, but because of their ideas, which they can change. Once established that thought and ideology can be recrafted to better fit ideal American social life, it’s not a stretch to imagine that African-Americans and Latinos also suffer not from improper biology but improper thinking. However, the genocidal flaws in this argument are clear: Not until you abandon and erase the you in yourself and inscribe the me in yourself will you be accepted into ‘our’ society. The argument appears to be beyond race but the results are the same: the exclusion of ethnic or religious minorities from public life.

What Do Zombies Do? I’m interested here in juxtaposing politics and film in order to highlight the ambivalence of contemporary post-racial discourse with the idea that artistic production is always more ambivalent than ‘politics’. What do these two broad social fields do similarly and differently? They both produce and reflect information and stories about social life. They both make claims about how to organize social relations and hierarchies. They both try to gain our attention through drama and entertainment. They both recombine elements of immediate, contemporaneous social life to

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reflect on our shared past and future. But of course, politics and film are also very different from each other, namely in the immediacy of political consequences. It would be difficult, for example, to point to a film that could have the same effect as Donald Trump’s 2016 call for a ban on Muslims coming to the USA: In this case a marked increase in violence and hate crimes against Muslims (Chotiner and Stahl 2016). In ‘politics,’ the field of contestation is power itself whereas in film the field of contestation is much more diverse (power, yes, but also artistry, economic gain, and the expression of social ambivalence). But, specifically, what do Zombies offer us that, say, detective movies or romantic movies don’t? Responding to the explosion of undead movies since the 2000s, many scholars have noted how zombies and other monstrous bodies have been used to discuss the transformation of safe spaces into anxious, socially frightening spaces (Powell 2012); the monstrosity of non-Western spaces (Saunders 2012); anxiety over immigrants and asylum seekers (Stratton 2011); culturally relevant sites for alternative constructions of gender (Murray 2013); historical amnesia (Kavadlo 2013); and American narcissism (Overpeck 2012). Zombie narratives function like thought experiments, commenting on the anxieties of our contemporary lives by transposing them into an apocalyptic future (or past). In this way, the zombie genre can be like dystopian science fiction. But it can also work like the Western genre in reverse: Instead of the pre-social, pre-civilized wide-open western vistas, we have post-social, post-apocalyptic, lawless landscapes that can (like the Western) serve as a canvas for masculine strength and policing fantasies such as in AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–present). Making use of the generic flexibility of zombies, recent films have featured zombie romance such as Warm Bodies (2013), zombie comedy such as Shaun of the Dead (2004), and zombie historical fiction Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016). Early zombie movies like White Zombie (1932) or Revenge of the Zombies (1943) were about race, colonialism, and slavery and highlighted the monstrosity of third-world cultures. But the modern, flesh-eating version of zombie fiction was initiated by George Romero in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. In addition to giving us the visual images of undead hoards, Romero offered us an implicitly critical perspective of the war in Vietnam and race relations in America (Bishop 2009). After barely surviving the zombie onslaught, the African American protagonist is senselessly gunned down by a group of

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rednecks. Romero followed with Dawn of the Dead (1979), an explicit critique of capitalism and materialism that takes place in a shopping mall (Harper 2002). David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1976), while not explicitly identifying itself as a zombie narrative, used shuffling, infected hordes of once-humans to express anxieties about contemporary modernity, suburbia and hedonistic sexuality. Of course, that George Romero inaugurated the contemporary form of the genre in a spirit of social critique is no guarantee at all that this spirit would persist. And many zombie narratives do not appear at all motivated by social critique. Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead (2012), for example, is a Japanese zombie film that is representative of a seam in zombie narratives that is more interested in humorously exploring psychosexual bodily issues than sociopolitical issues. What does help to keep zombie narratives open to critiquing society is their low budgets and peripheral relationship to mainstream Hollywood. As Carol Clover (1993) observes, independent horror has the flexibility to approach topics from a multiplicity of perspectives that Hollywood blockbusters don’t. Their low budgets mean fewer investors to be beholden to, fewer demographic boxes that must be checked, and less mainstream thought that must be catered to. For example, the stoner zombie flick Bong of the Dead (2011) was filmed (with one camera) in 15 days at a budget of $5000. The writer/ director was also able to add CGI effects with his own computer. The film tells the story of two pot-smoking friends who discover that zombie brains make great marijuana fertilizer. The producer’s press release describes it as ‘Cheech and Chong or Harold and Kumar meet Shaun of the Dead’ (Horrorfanzine.com 2011). What this claim of lineage suggests is that this film, typical of the genre, is explicitly aware of occupying a space in an existing constellation of zombie narratives. It is this very structure of the zombie narrative that gives it freedom. Like a musical key that requires certain notes but leaves the order, duration, intervals, and occurrence of those notes open, a zombie narrative has certain keys that must be hit (viral infection, apocalypse, blood), but once those are activated the ability to experiment is wide open. This is the case with genre in general but especially so in the zombie sub-genre of horror where the rules are quite specific, the iterations seemingly endless, and the media in which they unfold are various and diverse. This leaves the zombie narrative open to multiple political and social positions. World War Z (2013), for example, can function as the

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right-wing fantasy/nightmare of expulsion. The lost bodies, the inhuman hordes that are in the process of destroying the entire world, are stopped in only one instance: Israel. The wall across the occupied Palestinian territories that had been so lamented in real-world leftist circles turns out to be the one thing that saves humanity (at least temporarily). In what one Israeli newspaper called ‘the greatest piece of propaganda for Israel since “Exodus”’ the real-world exclusion of Palestinians from their historical home is evacuated of its political implications as Brad Pitt studies Israeli successes in zombie/Arab exclusion (Hoffman 2014). The threat of Arabs to the innocent Israeli state is equated with the threat of Hitler to the Jews. Israel’s invitation (in the film) to living Arabs to come inside the wall might warm the heart of the most ardent ideologue but its buffoonish depiction of the refugee Arabs trying to get inside probably won’t fool anyone else. The more enduring image to arise from viewing the film (at least from an oppositional perspective) is the one featuring uncountable swarms of undead Arabs throwing themselves on top of each other to form a bridge and get over the wall so that they may consume the brave Israeli soldiers and end civilization as we know it. Although intention is always impossible to verify, perhaps the film’s $190 million budget is inseparable from its right-wing fantasizing (The Hollywood Reporter 2014). Subtly demonizing Arabs and Muslims is most certainly not a necessity in big-budget Hollywood films, but it doesn’t hurt. Heroizing Arabs and Muslims in a big-budget Hollywood film, on the other hand, is simply unimaginable, at least at this historical point. Smaller budgets can lead to more ambivalent politics. Osombie (2012) is a good example. On its surface, and perhaps even deeper, the film is a nationalist American fantasy. One of the producers verifies this: ‘It’s a very pro-military film, very patriotic—can I say that? It’s a very patriotic film!’ (Edwards 2012). In Osombie, a group of soldiers is in Afghanistan trying to get to the bottom of a zombie outbreak. They are joined by an American reporter who is in the area looking for her brother, a civilian who, convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, has come to personally kill him. Bin Laden, it turns out, has come back from the dead to initiate a zombie apocalypse to bring down the West. With such an absurd premise, it’s no surprise that the film is a selfaware campy horror comedy. Certainly a pro-military and/or right-wing fantasist could find pleasure as wave after wave of Afghani undead— dressed like our worst enemy Osama Bin Laden—are slaughtered.

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In several scenes, the living are confused with the undead as both Taliban and zombies attack the soldiers and are both handily eliminated. This is a global policing fantasy writ large: Mobs of ‘terrorists’ killed with nary a thought for their humanity—because they obviously lack it. An alternate reading is, however, as much at the surface of the film as this right-wing fantasy. In presenting the unabashedly absurd images of wave after wave of terrorist zombies being gunned down, or the absurdity of an American civilian journeying to Afghanistan to personally undertake what the government has failed to do, or even in the repeated homoerotic scenes of shirtless men engaged (incongruously) in ironworking and absurd violence, the film can be read as providing a space for criticism or, at the very least, ambivalence. As Carol Clover (1993) points out, in horror films the viewer occupies the subjectposition of both the hero and the monster and combining this reading with the absurdity that glints right on the surface of the film, the rightwing political fantasy of the expulsion of the Arab/Muslim from the side of humanity can, at the very least, be seen ironically. Let me be clear here, I am not arguing that Osombie is explicitly critical of US foreign policy or race relations or even that many viewers would read it that way. Nor am I arguing that a film that had a straightto-DVD release can in any substantive way transform society. Instead, the larger argument is that the visual and narrative representational nature of film necessarily allows for multiple points of engagement and identification, and thus ambivalence, in a way that politics cannot and/ or will not. Other low-budget zombie films quite consciously toy with dominant political codes and take more explicitly critical perspectives of contemporary social life. In Zombies of Mass Destruction (2011), the horror-comedy centers on an Iranian-American girl who is constantly tormented about her ethnic background, a young gay man who can only ‘come out’ to his mother after she turns into a zombie, and a messianic preacher who convinces himself that only unbelievers can be infected. The ironic awareness of the film begins in its title, a reference to the Bush administration’s unsuccessful justification of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Zombies of Mass Destruction, like Osombie, externalizes the link between ‘Islamic terrorism’ and zombie infection. Whereas Osombie is ambivalent and can be read in multiple ways, this film is explicit in its rejection of policing fantasies of exclusion. In one scene, white American Joe Miller ties the Iranian-American Frida Abbas to a chair after seeing a news broadcast

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suggesting the zombie attacks might be the result of terrorism. Instead of paying attention to his wife who is transitioning into a dangerous zombie, Joe nails Frida’s foot to the ground and begins to torture her for ‘information.’ Frida’s objections that she has been their neighbor for her entire life fall on deaf ears. Joe forces Frida to take an American civics test and sing the US national anthem as his wife, unattended to, completes the transition to undeadness. Joe’s teenage son eventually frees Frida on the condition that she ‘goes out’ with him. The ironic narrative presents an unambiguous message: An obsession with terrorism blinds us to the problems directly in front of us.

Zombies, Muslims, and ‘Politics’ French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2010) argues that what we normally call ‘politics’ actually serves to obscure how power functions and is better termed ‘policing.’ Let me contextualize his thoughts in the US arena of power. Before his 2012 run for president, Newt Gingrich had very little to say about Islam and what he did say was neutral or positive (Elliot 2011). But in the context of his attempt to become US president, he became a virulent critic of Islam and Muslims, repeatedly telling voters that the most significant danger they faced as Americans was the imposition of Sharia law (Shane 2011). This about-face in the normal parlance of American power would be called ‘political’ in that he could be seen as (cynically) pandering to xenophobic thought in order to garner votes. But if we are to see politics in the normative American sense as describing the process of fighting over and distributing power in a democratic process, what Gingrich and other xenophobic and bigoted rhetoricians engage in cannot be called political. In short, Gingrich’s bid for power was in this case predicated on driving Muslims out of the political sphere while distracting ‘normal’ voters from more significant issues such as the increasing wealth of the super-rich at the expense of the rest of American society, the exporting of jobs abroad, and the destruction of the social welfare system by global capitalism. The question that Rancière would pose is how could something be ‘political’ when it is used to (1) restrict certain groups from participating in the democratic process and (2) deflect other groups from serious thought about their own dire economic and social circumstances? We have to find a word other than ‘politics’ to describe the process that expels people from the process of participating in their own rule. Rancière prefers the word ‘policing.’

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If we think back to Butler’s claim about normalizing identity, we can see Newt Gingrich, in this sense, policing American identity by normalizing a particular narrow form of whiteness and Christianity and expelling the spectral figure of the diseased Muslim from the body politic. Politics, for Rancière, is quite rare and represents an outburst from participants not previously ‘counted’ in the functioning of governing. In other words, politics is what happens when those who aren’t thought to have a voice, who aren’t normally considered in the distribution of power, suddenly shout out. Examples include the political outburst of previously unintelligible (as far as the existing powers could hear) voices in Egypt, Libya, or the Occupy movement in the US. Rancière’s politics, then, is predicated on the senses: sight, sound, and touch. Momentarily in 2011, the repression of the youth, women, and the poor was disrupted and these groups became visible and audible on the streets. This was deeply political in that for something to enter into the process of politics, for it to be a term of discussion or a bone of contention, it has to be seen and heard. Much of what we call the ‘political’ process, on the other hand, works to make sure that dissonant voices (the poor, women, minorities) are NOT seen and heard. In short, making the previously unimaginable seen and heard is politics. Looked at in this way, while zombie films aren’t ‘political’ in the normal sense of the word—they don’t directly address the legislative system, they don’t explicitly talk about foreign policy, they don’t make laws— they are political in Rancière’s sense. They work on the field of power by aesthetic means: They give a sensual material shape (auditory and visual) to a whole series of social anxieties about power, exclusion and otherness that animate contemporary society. They make visible what lurks beneath the surface. Zombie films such as The Bay (2012) tell stories about the lurking fears of environmental apocalypse at the unceasing hands of selfish capitalism; Zombie Night (2013) represents dark fears about the evaporation of family life; Infected (2013) wonders if the Facebook/Twitter generation, as physically and emotionally soft as they are, could live in a world without the niceties of modern life. These films, regardless of their ideological intention, narratively and visually render legible the fears and anxieties about civilization, terrorism, bodily dysfunction, and social breakdown. Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim travel or his identification of Mexicans with rapists, on the other hand, works not primarily to position these non-Whites as subhuman (though his rhetoric

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does this, too) but primarily to obscure the field of contestation over power. His policing rhetoric seeks to exclude people of color and religious minorities from the democratic process. Whereas zombie narratives generally blame the existence of zombies on some social, political, or environmental ill, the policing rhetoric of Trump and other xenophobes blame the zombies/Muslims themselves for their plight and blame ‘liberal’ society for not seeing the problem. To return to the question of linking so-called political discourse and zombie discourse, consider the juxtaposition of these two utterances that take broken Muslims as their objects: (1) images of hordes of ‘Islamic’ zombies in Afghanistan, led by undead mastermind Osama Bin Laden, being decimated by machine gun wielding, bare-chested Americans in the campy zombie film Osombie; and (2) Newt Gingrich’s statement on CNN: I think we haven’t had any honest epidemiology … We’re trying to hunt down 5,000 people in al Qaeda, there is a potential pool of 65 to 100 million recruits … They’re spreading across the whole planet, from the Philippines to, frankly, the United States. And I think we greatly underestimate how many places you’re going to have trouble in the next decade … Neither (John Kerry or Chuck Hegel) nor the president have a positive vision of how you’re going to deal with a worldwide virus that is increasingly destabilizing the planet. (Brown 2013)

Without claiming that either of these utterances speak for the entirety of their fields—zombie narratives on the one hand and ‘political’ (or what I refer to in Rancière’s terms as ‘policing”) narratives on the other— what kinds of patterns can we see on their surfaces? Firstly, they make explicit what is often an implicit, actively repressed or unexplored animating fear in both zombie films and politics: The monstrous foreign body as a source of disorder in the contemporary world dominated by the discourse of terrorism on the one hand and a post-racial discourse on the other. Both the film and the politician present Islam as an irrational sickness that is to be feared because of its viral nature. They both present the American subject as a whole body and the target of the threat. Islam in both utterances is simultaneously a weakness—those that have it are incapable of independent thought—and an unstoppable threat. With these similarities it is not difficult, then, to see Osombie as matching Gingrich: a right-wing ‘political’ fantasy for dealing with the putative

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otherness of Muslims. Muslims, barely conscious but infected with ideology, are attacking ‘us’ and must be repelled and we should have no moral quandaries about killing them as they are something less than human. However, if on their surfaces Newt Gingrich’s statement and Osombie’s statement seem to be mimicking each other, their very forms elide easy equations. Of course, film and power are not identical. Where the strategy of wielding or obtaining power—such as in the hands of former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump—is to obscure its aim, to make itself as invisible and ‘natural’ as possible, the strategy of film, especially horror film, is to make explicit what we didn’t even realize we held implicitly. I like to think of this difference as one between fantasy—the ‘political’ fantasy of purity—and imagination— the visual representation of the possible outcomes of our social anxieties. What prompted these questions, and ultimately this essay, after all, was the fact (and absurdity) of the visual images that I was seeing in Osombie. As Stuart Hall (1973) famously pointed out, the ideological intentions behind the production and distribution of cultural goods like film and literature in no way guarantee how an individual ideologically ‘reads’ the work. Whether through misunderstanding, subversion, or cultural negotiation, how an audience makes meaning of culture can in no way be assumed. In that light, regardless of the intentions of the filmmakers, Osombie provides a visual image to the political fantasy of the expulsion of the Muslim from the family of humanity, which remains open to interpretation. And I, at least, found that visualization to be ridiculous if entertaining. Or more precisely, entertaining because it was ridiculous. While Donald Trump’s bigoted demonization of Muslims (and women, and handicapped people, and African-Americans, and Mexicans, and poor people) is also absurd, it functions in a different realm. In the invisible fantasy of power, the absurdity is cast into the putatively rational field of ‘politics,’ but it never has to take the form of a visual representation. Imagine the social outcry that would ensue if instead of verbally mocking a disabled reporter (Resnick 2015), we saw images of Donald Trump personally physically expelling a disabled person from one of his rallies; or an image of Trump standing at an airport physically pushing a Muslim child back onto an airplane and out of the US. Trump’s political absurdities, in other words, can lay dormant and fantastical without having to take bodily form.

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Conclusion Both film narratives and political—or policing—narratives are important in the process of identity formation, primarily in their articulation of social norms. In normative political postulations (such as Gaffney’s, Dawkins’, Gingrich’s, or Trump’s) of a human subject, the ‘me’ can only be arrived at by expelling the monstrous, infected Muslim from the social life of humans. For the ‘me’ in these utterances to be American and, by extension, human, a ‘me’ must vacate the bent figure of the Muslim that might lurk at its edges. Zombie narratives also postulate the human ‘me’ in relation to the expulsion of the inhuman ‘not-me.’ But the caveat is that in zombie films there is always the implicit realization that the difference between us and them is wildly contingent. There is always the embodied ‘not-me’ on the screen next to the ‘me.’ While zombies bring the fear of third-world chaos to American streets, the inhuman body that has to be destroyed used to be your mother or child, and, in five minutes, it could be you. If the policing fantasy is the suppression of its cultural other, the reality is never so easy. Politicians like Trump or Gingrich denying or obscuring the humanity of the victims of US global hegemony might do policing work. They might even provide us with a sort of pleasure in demonizing the seeming source of contemporary social ills. But they never really address the underlying problem. The undeniable contingency of who does and doesn’t get to count as human cannot be stopped from provoking emotional anxiety. The binary that puts ‘us’ in a position of first-world privilege, away from the scene of the violence, and ‘them’ at the fulcrum of the violence is predicated on an accident of birth. It is not because of their material violence that events like 9/11 or the Paris or Brussels attacks inspire fear but instead precisely because they disturb the self-evidence of the first/third-world binary. They give lie to the Western policing fantasy of separation from the rest of the world. The inarticulate Other that is necessarily expelled from the political body has to go somewhere, though. All of those non-humans that are blown to bits by the policing fantasies and drone bombs of the US state will not remain forever mute but instead must come back to haunt our social nightmares. What is repressed eventually must return. Horror is among the fields of cultural expression where this repression bubbles up. As Carol Clover (1993) puts it, ‘What makes horror “crucial enough to pass along” is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and

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fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings’ (p. 11). Horror narratives deal with the Other in ways that policing narratives can’t. ‘…[J]ust as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror film. We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, in horror, comes from “knowing” both sides of the story’ (p. 12). Nowhere is the binary between self and other more contingent than in zombie narratives where the slightest bite or drop of blood can transform one from a thinking subject into a frenzied object. We are both the living and the undead in zombie narratives, and the fragility of that dividing line often functions as a plot mechanism. In making a case for ambivalent readings of zombie films in particular and cultural production in general, I am (perhaps naively) holding out some modicum of hope: Even though our political system appears to be irretrievably damaged, we cannot assume that the entirety of social lives also functions in a winner-take-all, zero-sum game of the rejection of cultural difference. While some politicians might imagine a fantasy world of the elimination of the cultural other, real-time society has a much more complicated, ambivalent relationship with difference.

Note 1. See http://www.islamophobia.org/islamophobic-organizations.html for a list of these funding organizations.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception (First edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Anonymous. “Bong of the Dead with Simone Bailly Low Budget Indie Zombie/ Comedy Is Directed By Thomas Newman.” Horrorfanzine.com, June 7, 2011. http://horrorfanzine.com/bong-of-the-dead-with-simone-bailly/. Bishop, Kyle. “Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 37, no. 1 (2009). Brown, F. Peter. “Gingrich: Obama Not Dealing with Terrorist Virus.” Western Journalism, 2013. Accessed May 22, 2014. http://www.westernjournalism. com/gingrich-obama-not-dealing-with-terrorist-virus/.

212  T. A. ELSEEWI Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Chotiner, Isaac, and Jeremy Stahl. “Donald Trump and the Spike in Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes in the U.S.” Slate, May 9, 2016. http://www.slate.com/blogs/ the_slatest/2016/05/09/donald_trump_and_the_rise_of_anti_muslim_hate_ crimes.html. Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Cronenberg, David. Shivers. Horror, Sci-Fi, 1976. Edwards, Haley Sweetland. “Q&A: Osombie Producers Kynan Griffin and Jason Faller on Afghanistan and Why Straight Male Moviegoers Like Seeing Sculpted Men On-Screen.” Vanity Fair, 2012. http://www.vanityfair.com/ online/oscars/2012/04/osombie-producers-kynan-griffin-jason-fallerterrorist-afghanistan. Elliot, Justin. “Newt: For Shariah Law Before He Was Against It.” 2011. http://www.salon.com/2011/06/08/newt_gingrich_muslims/. Forster, Marc. World War Z. Action, Adventure, Horror, 2013. Gulager, John. Zombie Night. Horror, Thriller, 2013. Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973. Halperin, Victor. White Zombie. Horror, 1932. Hamedani, Kevin. ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, 2011. Harper, Stephen. “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1, no. 2 (2002). Hoffman, Jordan. “In Turkey, ‘World War Z’ Is No World War Zion.” The Times of Israel. Accessed September 30, 2014. http://www.timesofisrael.com/ in-turkey-world-war-z-is-no-world-war-zion/. “How Brad Pitt’s ‘World War Z’ Came Back From the Dead—Hollywood Reporter.” The Hollywood Reporter. Accessed September 30, 2014. http:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-brad-pitts-world-war-573811. Iguchi, Noboru. Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead. Comedy, Horror, 2012. Kavadlo, Jesse. “9/11 Did Not Take Place: Apocalypse and Amnesia in Film and the Road.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 61 (2013). Lean, Nathan, and John L. Esposito. The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. London: New York: Pluto Press, 2012. Levine, Jonathan. Warm Bodies. Comedy, Horror, Romance, 2013. Levinson, Barry. The Bay. Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, 2012. Maciejewicz, Filip. Infected. Horror, Sci-Fi, 2013. Murray, Jessica. “A Zombie Apocalypse: Opening Representational Spaces for Alternative Constructions of Gender and Sexuality.” Journal of Literary Studies 29, no. 4 (2013): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2013. 856659.

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Newman, Thomas. Bong of the Dead. Action, Comedy, Horror, 2011. Overpeck, Deron. “‘People Are Going to Want to Know What Really Went Down’: Cloverfield and the Return to Innocence in Post-9/11 America.” Horror Studies 3, no. 1 (April 2012): 105–124. https://doi.org/10.1386/ host.3.1.105_1. OxfordUnion. “Richard Dawkins | Religion a Computer Virus | Oxford Union.” YouTube Video, 6:15, February 26, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3Og08XbGjg4. Powell, L.A. “Zombie Landscapes of Lacuna and Swarm: The Poetics of Fear.” 2012. http://www.inter-Disciplinary.net/. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Tra edition). Translated by Steven Corcoran. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Resnick, Gideon. “Donald Trump’s War on People With Disabilities.” The Daily Beast, December 2, 2015. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/02/donald-trump-s-war-on-people-with-disabilities.html. Romero, George A. Night of the Living Dead. Horror, 1968. Romero, George A. Dawn of the Dead. Action, Horror, 1979. Saunders, Robert. “Zombies in the Colonies: Imperialism and Contestation of Ethno-Political Space in Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide.” Monstrous Geographies, 2012. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/. Sekely, Steve. Revenge of the Zombies. Adventure, Comedy, Horror, 1943. Shane, Scott. “In Shariah, Gingrich Sees Mortal Threat to U.S.” The New York Times, December 21, 2011, sec. U.S./Politics. http://www.nytimes. com/2011/12/22/us/politics/in-shariah-gingrich-sees-mortal-threat-to-us. html. StealthCrusaders. “Frank Gaffney—Shariah [Islam] Is a Virus!” YouTube Video, 1:15, June 2, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uspTMK1p774&feature= youtube_gdata_player. Steers, Burr. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Action, Horror, Romance, 2016. Stratton, Jon. “The Trouble with Zombies: Bare Life, Muselmänner and Displaced People.” Somatechnics 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 188–208. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2011.0013. The Walking Dead. Drama, Horror, Thriller, 2010. Wright, Edgar. Shaun of the Dead. Comedy, Horror, 2004.

CHAPTER 10

Latinas/os in Hollywood: Contemporary Representations in Black and White Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

The goal of this chapter is to identify and explore a newly emerging pattern in Hollywood in relation to Latinidad, which I will define for now as the social, cultural, and political connectivity assumed to bring together the different Latina/o groups within the United States. The pattern that I will identify here tends to represent Latinidad as “Black” or “White” and seems to be replacing the traditional representations of Latinidad (and Latinas/os) as exclusively “brown.” I will connect these representations by Hollywood to the proposal by the United States Census Bureau to “convert” the category Latina/o into a racial category for the 2020 census, as these present certain dilemmas involving understandings and articulations of Latinidad. They also raise questions about the role of Latinas/os in US culture and society, as well as the treatment that Latinas/os endure as a result of these representations, especially given the current political and ideological climate that articulates Latinos as both foreign and criminal (Chávez 2013).

C. R. Lugo-Lugo (*)  School of Languages, Cultures, and Race, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_10

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The current political climate regarding Latinas/os in the United States seems to echo the general contradictory climate in our society involving race relations and the dominant idea (at least among certain sectors of the White population, which tends to dominate this particular discourse) that race considerations are a thing of the past (this is where the idea of post-raciality or the idea that we are living beyond race comes from), while simultaneously claiming that, as a racial group, Whites are at a disadvantage (Shteynberg et al. 2011; Ingraham 2017). To illustrate the pull of post-raciality among Whites, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center in 2015, 38% of White Americans thought that “our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with Whites,” compared to 8% of Blacks (Pew Research Center 2015). To illustrate the claim that Whites see themselves at a disadvantage, according to a 2016 Huffington Post/YouGov survey, 45% of White Americans who voted for Donald Trump believe that Whites face “a lot of discrimination,” a higher percentage than those who thought that Muslims (40%), Blacks (22%), Jews (19%), and Latinas/os (19%) do (Ingraham 2017). And a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2017 found that 57% of White evangelical Protestants believed that “there’s a lot of discrimination against Christians in the U.S. today… [while] only 44% said the same thing about Muslims” (Green 2017). So, in retrospect, when two years earlier 32% of Republicans interviewed for a CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation survey about race relations in the United States said that “racism is a big problem” in our country, someone needed to ask them, a problem for whom? (Agiesta 2015). Notions about Whiteness (or forms of Whiteness) being persecuted in the United States seem to ignore the fact that people of color are being structurally targeted, mistreated, and abused, while also claiming that anything that happens to folks of color (if it does), whether it is police brutality, higher incarceration rates, and even employment and housing discrimination, is their own fault (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Flitter and Kahn 2016). In fact, in 2015, a CBS poll found that 60% of White Americans think Blacks have a “better chance of getting ahead today” than Whites (Dutton et al. 2015). These contradictions have crystallized in the last 8–10 years leading to and culminating in the election of Donald J. Trump as president and the mainstreaming of racist/hate groups under the banner “alternative right” or “alt-right” (Coates 2017). Within this political climate, then, Latinas/os, a highly racialized collection of ethnicities into a pan-umbrella, continue to exist in a highly

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precarious position, the result of a rhetoric that invokes criminality and points to this group taking advantage of the government and even the constitution (Chávez 2013; Lugo-Lugo; Bloodsworth-Lugo 2014). To provide a more concrete picture, according to a 2015 PEW Hispanic Research Center poll, 37% of Americans viewed “the impact of immigrants from Latin America” as mostly negative (Pew Research Center 2015). As context, this was only 2% points lower than negative views about immigrants from the Middle East. In contrast, only 9% of Americans viewed immigrants from Europe as mostly negative (Pew Research Center 2015). These results remained constant in a poll conducted by Vox a year later (Yglesias 2016). Another poll conducted by the National Hispanic Media Coalition in 2012 found that, for Americans, Latino or Hispanic “and the issue of illegal immigration…are highly associated” (Barreto and Segura 2012, p. 2). The illegality associated with immigrating into the country without the required documentation is added to stereotypes that are highly associated with this group. For instance, according to the same study by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, “stereotypes people believe to be true about immigrants and Latinos reflect the images, characters, and stories they commonly encounter in news, television, film, and radio programming” (Barreto and Segura 2012, p. 2). This tells us how important media and popular culture can be in creating and/or developing social perceptions about one group. To wit, according to the study results, “people exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos and/or immigrants hold the most unfavorable and hostile views about both groups” (Barreto and Segura 2012, p. 2). And as we saw above, for many Americans these are one and the same group. Two examples of the unfavorable views held against Latinas/os are as follows: Of those Americans who knew Latinas/os mostly through the entertainment industry, 51% thought that the phrase “welfare recipient” described Latinas/os very or somewhat well and 50% thought that the phrase “less educated” described Latinas/os very or somewhat well. The most startling finding by the study, the one that spoke volumes about the pull that the entertainment industry within its audience and its ability to construct a hostile view about a group is that “[e]xposure to just one negative cue predicts higher rates of negative Latino stereotyping in terms of criminal activity… and impressions of them being ‘illegal immigrants’” (Barreto and Segura 2012, p. 19). This is the context that I am using to identify and explore the newly emerging pattern in Hollywood discussed in the

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opening paragraph that presents Latinidad (and more specifically Latinas and Latinos) as “Black” or “White,” instead of the traditional representations of Latinidad (and Latinas and Latinos) as exclusively “brown”.

Hollywood: The Census, and Questions on Articulations of Latinidad In mid-January of 2017, as I was beginning to think of a topic for an upcoming talk, I posted, next to each other, two pictures of two different “celebrity” children on my Facebook timeline. One of the children was a blonde, blue-eyed, young White American actress, the other the light-skinned, blue-eyed child of Puerto Rican celebrities. The same day, on her timeline a Facebook friend of mine posted a news item from the Pew Research Center about a possible restructuring of the Census racial categories, where the designation “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” would become a new racial category, instead of the separate and self-standing ethnic category it has been since 1980.1 My post with the children’s pictures asked my friend group to guess a connection between the two. The friend was inquiring about the “new” racial category, specifically questioning the inclusion of Spaniards, a European group, in it. The interesting thing about the two posts, mine about the two children, and that of my friend about the newly proposed racial category by the Census, is that they were also both connected as they were both asking about and questioning racial articulations and racial representations of Latinidad. Both of our posts meant to make our friends think about issues involving labeling, identity, and representation. In general, our posts were indirectly asking the questions: Who belongs in the category Latina/o? How is race or racial background incorporated into the category? How are those determinations made? And, perhaps more importantly, who makes those determinations, or more to the point, who plays a role in the representation of Latinas/os? That last question was at the heart of my Facebook post that day for the post was about the representation of Latinas/os in US popular culture. Specifically, one of the children was actress Dakota Fanning of German, English, French, and Irish background, and the other was Christian Muñiz, the son of singer, performer, and actor Marc Anthony and former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres, both (Anthony and Torres, that is) of Puerto Rican background. The answer to my question about the connection between the two children is that Fanning played the role

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of “Lupita Ramos,” the daughter of Marc Anthony in the film Man on Fire, while Muñiz is his biological child. The point of my post was not to say that Latinas/os can be White too, as there are simpler ways to make that statement (if I were interested in making such a statement). I was also not seeking to discuss (at least not at that particular moment) the casting of a non-Latina to play a Latina role, and, I was not seeking to discuss the whitewashing of Latinidad.2 Although I will discuss some of these ideas here, I was (in my post) and I am (in this chapter) interested in continuing a conversation started by Arlene Dávila when she argued that “the production of Latinos as easily digestible and marketable within the larger structures of corporate America is … revealing of the global bases of contemporary processes of identity formation and of how notions of place, nation, and race that are at play in the United States and in Latin America come to bear on these representations” (pp. 3–4). I would like to bring these ideas in conversation with what Mary Beltrán calls “urban” and “offwhite” representations of Latinidad in Hollywood. Thus, as part of the conversation, I will discuss casting as well as the “whitening” and “blackening” of Latina/o representations. I am interested in depictions and representations specifically because these have a way of reflecting ideas held dear by the larger society and, as such, tend to turn into the realities that Latinas/os have to maneuver around, push through, contest, reinvent, and/or adopt— sometimes simultaneously. This brings me to an elaboration of the concept of Latinidad, which I defined briefly in the opening paragraph. Using Molina-Guzmán (2010), I’ll begin by saying that Latinidad is a social construct that is brought into existence by the collaboration and collusion of both external and internal forces (within and outside Latina/o communities, groups, and individuals). The external forces are constituted by social elements such as popular culture like Hollywood and governmental instruments like the census form, and the internal forces are constituted by anyone and everyone who identifies as a Latina/o. But ultimately, Latinidad assumes an ethnoracial identity (Molina-Guzmán 2010, p. 4). Thus, Latinidad is paradoxically made up of identities while also producing an identity (or a set of identities). And as Alcoff (2005) tells us “[a]ccepting identities is tantamount to accepting dominant scripts and performing the identities power has invented. Identities are not and can never be accurate representations of the real self, and thus interpellation always in a strict sense fails in its

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representational claim even while it succeeds in inciting and disciplining one’s practice” (p. 77). According to Alcoff, “identities are always imperfect” in their “representational claim[s],” even while succeeding “in inciting and disciplining one’s practice” (p. 77). What follows are some manifestations of the changing nature of Latina/o racialization in the twenty-first-century United States as envisioned and architected by US popular media and the American mainstream generally, and Hollywood more particularly. As I continue here, there are two related points that I would like to identify: (1) a new configuration is emerging in popular media’s contemporary representation of Latinas/os; and (2) this pattern is drawing from an old racial order in the United States that sees race exclusively in Black or White. Of course, having a conversation about representations of Latinas/os by mainstream society and the mainstream popular media is not a small feat, as such a conversation must include a discussion of Latinas/os ethnic and racial positioning within the US racial structure and societal understandings of race and race relations. To this end, it is useful to invoke the work of David Theo Goldberg on ethnorace, especially as reworked and deployed by Linda Martín Alcoff in her book Visible Identities (2005). As Alcoff tells us, the concept of ethnorace is useful in “bringing into play both the elements of human agency and subjectivity involved in ethnicity, that is, an identity that is the product of self-creation at the same time that it acknowledges the uncontrolled racializing aspects associated with the visible body” (p. 246). First, Alcoff is firm in negotiating the difficult relationship between race and ethnicity as it pertains to the category Latina/o by noting that “what better unites Latinas/os both across and even within our specific national cultures is not race or phenotype but precisely those features associated with culture: language, religious traditions, cultural values, characteristics of comportment” (p. 34). In her articulation, which could serve as another definition of Latinidad, Alcoff positions the label in proximity to but never fully within ethnicity, for in her words: “[u]sing only ethnicity belies the reality of most Latinos’ everyday experiences, as well as obscures our own awareness about how ethnic identifications often do the work of race…” (p. 247). She also stresses that the category Latina/o does similar work to the category “African American,” as they both operate as racialized categories. So, she is quick to caution that “moving away from race to ethnicity is not necessarily moving away from race” (p. 38) as both of these concepts shape Latina/o realities in the

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United States. However, although both race and ethnicity are salient to the category Latino/a, neither one alone can explain how the category is articulated, experienced, and lived every day in the United States. The historical use of the category “Hispanic/Latino” by the United States Census Bureau along with its proposed changes to the 2020 form present us with a timely illustration of the difficulties of treating Latina/o (i.e., the category) as either an ethnicity (which as Alcoff tells us sometimes does the work of race) or a race (a classification that Alcoff tells us, is full of political, sociological, and economic salience). To understand the proposed changes to the classification of Latinas/os in the 2020 Census, it is important to keep in mind its historical use by the Office of Management and Budget. As mentioned above, the 1980 census form asked respondents, for the first time, to identify as Hispanic (or not), in a question that clearly established a separate ethnic designation for the category in the form. The 1990 form marked the first time in which respondents were able to answer questions themselves instead of having a representative from the Census Bureau come to the home to ask the questions and fill the forms for them. In the 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses, the categories “Spanish/Hispanic origin,” “Spanish/ Hispanic/Latino,” and “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” respectively, were also presented in separate questions from the race question. In 2000, respondents were asked for the first time to answer both the Spanish/Hispanic/Latino question and the race question, in part because in the 1990 form, a sizable percentage of the Latina/o population skipped the race question once they answered the Spanish/ Hispanic/Latino origin question. The changes proposing to include “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” within the race question become a substantive shift in the measuring of Latinidad, which would now squarely become a racial classification. These changes are also an indication of the difficulties of shoring up Latinidad and/or Latina/o identity as either a race or an ethnicity. If the changes are implemented and “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” does become a racial category, my prediction is that Latinas/os will likely just choose that as their designated race, but that those who choose more than one category (as this will still be an option) will likely be bifurcated exclusively in Black or White. Where do I get this idea? From two sources: (1) mainstream popular media and the recent portrayals and representation of Latinas/os in it, which I see not only as a reflection of society, but also as a reliable predictor of future social happenings;

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and, (2) the pattern of responses to the race question by those claiming Latino ancestry in the last two censuses. Thus, I am using culture and history to make this prediction. The importance of understanding particular changes in the racial representation of Latinidad hinges on the fact that notions of “the other” are easier to deploy and manipulate in a strictly bifurcated and dichotomized society. This is why we must pay close attention to changes in the representations of Latinas/os by/in popular culture.

Hollywood Portrayals: Latinas/os in Black and White Let us take a look at recent portrayals and representations by Hollywood, as this is of the most pervasive and enduring popular forms of entertainment, influencing audiences, their thinking, and their perceptions (King et al. 2010). If we review the history of Latina/o representation in the big screen, we can see that Latina/o representations have homogenized Latinidad as exclusively brown, a process that Molina-Guzmán (2013) calls “symbolic colonization” (p. 211). This process began early in ­cinema and later in television and has endured to the present day.3 The process of homogenizing Latinos and Latinas as “brown” explains why actress Sofia Vergara felt that she had to darken her naturally blondish hair when she initially crossed over to Hollywood film and television. In her words: “When I first got to Hollywood, I wasn’t getting roles because I didn’t look, according to many casting directors and producers, ‘Latina enough’” (Fox News Magazine 2013). This is the ultimate irony, for here you have one of the most recognizable Latina actresses in Hollywood today struggling to get to this position because she was not able to fit the strict ideas (i.e., as exclusively “brown”) that casting directors had of Latinas at the time. In the last decade or so, however, we have witnessed a movement expanding the traditional representations that sought to portray Latinas/ os as exclusively, monolithically, and one-dimensionally “brown.” The shift seems to be establishing a bifurcated path where representations of Latinas/os are taking two specific shapes: Black or White. It used to be that for a White actor to portray a Latina/o character, s/he had to be seen as dark enough to “pass” as brown: Al Pacino (in Carlito’s Way 1993), Catherine Zeta-Jones (in The Mask of Zorro 1998 and The Legend of Zorro 2005), and Gina Gershon (in Across the Line: The Exodus of

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Charlie Wright 2010) are a few relatively recent examples. A more nefarious alternative was for the actor (if not “dark” enough) to appear on screen wearing brown face. An example of this is actor Charlton Heston who played Mike Vargas in the film Touch of Evil (1958). Two other examples are George Chakiris who in 1961 played Bernardo in the film West Side Story (1961), and Eli Wallach who played Tuco in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Although these films are from an earlier era, it is worth noting that they remain in the collective consciousness of the country, and in the case of Chakiris, his brown-faced performance won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. But the bifurcated new shapes of Latina/o representation are far from the practices of funneling Whiteness into brownness, and in fact, are distinctly moving away from Latinidad as “brown.” A few years ago, in her book Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, Mary Beltrán began this conversation by making a comparison between the urban (i.e., Black) feel given to Rosario Dawson’s characters in film (think, for instance, her character in 25th Hour 2002; and Top Five 2014), and the ambiguous, “off-white appearance and image” given to Jessica Alba’s characters (Into the Blue 2005; and Good Luck Chuck 2007 are two examples) (p. 170). Dawson, who is the product of different ethnicities (including Puerto Rican and Cuban) and racial backgrounds (including White and Native American), said in an interview: “There are scripts I’m not even allowed to read. That’s hard. But, on the other hand, I can be Moroccan, Iranian, Egyptian, Puerto Rican, black and more. I blend” (Hirschberg 2009). Alba, who is also the product of different ethnic (e.g., Mexican and Spanish, etc.) and racial backgrounds (e.g., White and Native American, etc.) said in a recent interview that casting directors have told her: “You’re not Latin enough to play a Latina, and you’re not Caucasian enough to play the leading lady, so you’re going to be the ‘exotic’ one” (Johnson 2017). The comparison between Dawson and Alba made by Beltrán stems precisely from the fact that while both actresses identify as Latina, they are also both racially ambiguous and already deviating from the “Latinas must be brown” Hollywood edict. But, while Dawson’s ambiguity seems to be cast as “urban” and thus closer to Blackness, Alba’s ambiguity puts her closer to Whiteness even if she is “not Caucasian enough to play the leading lady.” Alba is fully aware that phenotypically she deviates from Hollywood expectations although she sees her phenotype as reflective of current changes in the American racial/ethnic landscape. Commenting

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on entertainment producers she asks: “when are they going to get a clue that I am American, that this is what America looks like-people like me who are mixed, have different blood, mixed with different ethnicities?” (Alba 2008). The “beige look” vs “urban look” discussed by Beltrán in her work has been developing in Hollywood for a while now. Let’s consider two further cases: Jennifer Lopez and Zoe Saldana. Mainly, although playing the “brown” Latina in many films (Selena 1997; Maid in Manhattan 2002; Monster In Law 2005; and El Cantante 2006 are four examples), for the last 20 years or so Jennifer Lopez has also (and pretty consistently) played either ambiguously White or even decidedly White characters in films. The films Enough (2002) and An Unfinished Life (2005) are examples of the former (where she plays ambiguously White characters), and Angel Eyes (2001) and The Back-Up Plan (2010) are examples of the latter (where she plays decidedly White characters). And as Myra Mendible (2007) reminds us, throughout her career Lopez has been able to comfortably straddle the line that divides White representations from Black representations for “although Lopez is frequently positioned within Whiteness, she is also positioned in relation to or within blackness” (p. 158). Lopez’s approximation to Blackness has taken place in arenas other than film or television but has been a constant presence in her public persona. Mendible expounds: “…she does this herself by foregrounding the hip hop influences in her life and in her music, a result of growing up in the Bronx” (p. 158). She concludes: Lopez’s formations are always in flux, contingent on the star herself, who can choose how and where to align and represent herself…Lopez’s star text [i.e., her “readability’’] allows points of access to “alternative or oppositional” ways of being in the world, despite dominant representations. (p. 165)

However, Jennifer Lopez may be read as an anomaly, for most performers are able to do one or the other: they can approximate Whiteness or Blackness, but not both. In the end, Lopez’s one-woman show in Black, brown, and White only highlights the precarity of the situation for everyone else, both performers and the general population of Latinas/os who may not be able to be read as broadly. The case of Zoe Saldana is very different (from both Jennifer Lopez’s and from Rosario Dawson’s), for she has not been allowed to play many Latina roles (one notable exception is her character Cataleya in

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Colombiana 2011). Most of the human characters that Zoe Saldana has played have been ambiguously Black or decidedly Black characters. The films Vantage Point (2008) and Out of the Furnace (2013) are examples of the former (i.e., Saldana portraying ambiguously Black characters), while the films Guess Who (2005), Blackout (2007), Star Trek (2009), and Nina (2016) are examples of the latter (i.e., Saldana portraying decidedly Black characters). The portrayals of Black characters by Saldana have come with consequences, for as Molina-Guzmán (2013) tells us, there has been quite a bit of “public opposition to casting Saldana in a U.S. Black role,” the most recent case has been her casting as Nina Simone (p. 222).4 MolinaGuzmán connects this opposition to “desires by U.S. audiences for racial authenticity dependent on colorism and biological notions of race” (p. 222). Since Lopez and Alba have experienced no backlash in their portrayals of (almost) White characters, a few questions come to mind: What exactly does that say about biological notions of race in relation to White characters? Are notions of Whiteness “opening up” in Hollywood? And how are Latinas/os positioned in whatever “biological notions of race” are being advanced by Hollywood? Dávila (2001) brings up an important point by suggesting that when it comes to Latinas/os and Latina/o representation in the United States, “processes of identity formation” must account for “how notions of place, nation, and race that are at play in the United States and in Latin America come to bear on these representations” (pp. 3–4). And, although notions of race as biology have plagued ideologies within both Latina/o and Latin American communities and what Alcoff (2005) calls “dominant scripts,” articulations of Latinidad haven’t been strictly or exclusively bound by notions of biology. So, what does it mean for a group that has not trafficked or dealt exclusively on race as biology to be placed within a cultural context that has emphasized “race as biology” ideologies almost exclusively? This is especially relevant in a cultural moment where certain groups within the United States seem to be re-entrenched in old notions of race and eager to re-explore and even embrace those antiquated notions? With her (urban-)Black vs. (off-)White point, Beltrán is establishing the foundation for me to take up representations of Latinidad in Black and White here. I would like to develop the contours of Latinidad in Black and White especially in relation to questions about Whiteness and Blackness as biology, where representations of Latinidad in Hollywood

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are taken outside the confines of Latina/o culture and ancestry. Let us begin with Latinidad in White. I already discussed the case of Dakota Fanning playing the character Lupita Ramos in the film Man on Fire (2004), where the character’s Latinidad, in addition to her name (i.e., Lupita Ramos) and setting (i.e., Mexico), is grounded on her father, Samuel Ramos, played by Marc Anthony. Although this could easily be seen as a fluke or an isolated case, we can actually find plenty of similar examples, pointing to a developing pattern where White actors are being tapped to play Latina/o (or partially Latina/o) characters without having to be “browned” or bronzed in. One example I can offer is White American actor Ben Affleck (of English, Irish, and German ancestry) playing Mexican-American CIA former employee Tony Mendez in the film Argo (2012). Another recent example is White British actor Charlie Hunnam, who was asked to play alleged Mexican drug lord Edgar Valdez Villareal for the film American Drug Lord, still in development (Anderson 2016). In contrast to this tendency is the use of Black or non-White actors to play Latino roles. One example is Maori actor Cliff Curtis, who has played Latino roles in both television and movies, including his character Emilio Restrepo in the film Colombiana (2011). Another example is Italian-Black actor Giancarlo Esposito in the film Feel the Noise (2007). But the most prominent of these is Black American actor Mahershala Ali, who won an Oscar for playing the Cuban American character “Juan” in the Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016). These representations should not be confused with what Molina-Guzmán (2013) calls “Black Latinidad,” which from her perspective tends to “… counter dominant constructions of Latinidad as ‘brown’ and exists in tension with dominant perceptions of U.S. Black identity as static and unchanging” (p. 211). In this case, she is specifically talking about the challenge that Black Latino/a actors pose for both conceptions of Latinidad and conceptions of Blackness in the United States (as I discussed previously with Zoe Saldana), a different story from the challenge that non-Latino/a Black actors pose when playing Black Latino/a characters. Non-Latino Black actors, while perhaps expanding notions of Blackness in relation to Latinos/as, are also keeping Black Latinos and representations and their own representations of (Black) Latinidad away from the roles. These actors, along with the White actors playing Latino/a roles are, by way of the characters they play, helping Hollywood articulate Latino/a-free articulations of Latinidad.

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And here’s my point about these two tendencies: (1) they are happening simultaneously, and on first inspection they seem to be expanding representations of Latinidad as they seem to acknowledge the reality that there are “White” Latinas/os and “Black” Latinas/os, or that the “Latinos as exclusively brown” is an outdated, inaccurate view. However, (2) on closer inspection, it is clear that these tendencies are actually relying on and maintaining the ideological infrastructure that built race relations in this country in exclusively Black or White terms while erasing the bodies of Latinas/os in the process. A frightening thing to be happening at a moment when Whiteness is a beacon shining bright from the White House with the Trump presidency and Blackness is still the epitome of that which must be exterminated (Feagin 2006). The one necessitates the other and is as clearly articulated as they have ever been. As Ta-Nehisi Coates expounds: “The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed” (2017). These mostly condoned overt expressions of racism articulate Whiteness as the norm, which is always juxtaposed against Blackness, always articulated as the “unwanted other.” Thus, in addition to the fact that Latinidad is now being articulated by those outside it, it is also important to keep in mind that by being articulated in Black and White, it is also being articulated in tension with itself. I would add that another problem with a country built on a strictly Black and White binary that now looks at Latinas/os in that precise way is not only that it becomes a very constricting way of looking at race, but also a way of understanding entire groups of people using antiquated notions that carry with them specific (and oftentimes ill-informed) ideas about phenotype as biology and biology as fate or destiny (Graves 2004). These narrow ways of looking at race also limit and sometimes even eliminate notions of ethnicity and cultural heritage, and ironically, when applied to Hollywood representations, they tend to carry the onus of diversity. For instance, who could argue with having a Cuban American character serving as a father figure in a film about a Black kid coming of age and dealing with his sexuality (as is the case of Mahershala Ali’s character in Moonlight)?

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The Race Question in the Census or Why Turning Latinas/os into a Race Is Big Deal I would like to refer back to the 2000 and the 2010 censuses. Specifically, I would like to call attention to racial identification among Latinos at both points in time. In the 2000 census, 47.9% of Latinas/ os identified as White, and 2% identified as Black (United States Census Bureau 2000). Ten years later, 53% identified as White and 2.5% identified as Black (United States Census Bureau 2010). The increase in the two categories is modest (especially the increase in the Black category), but if we look at the absolute percentages we can see that in 2000 half of Latinas/os identified as either White or Black, and in 2010 over half identified as Black or White. We can’t go farther back in the census for the Census 2000 was the first that requested Latinas/os identified both ethnically and racially. But what exactly did Latinas/os mean when they identified as Black or White? Are they identifying with US notions of Blackness and Whiteness or with those from the “old” countries? And, is Hollywood, by giving us White or Black characters, merely responding to Latinas/ os’ self-identification? Let us tackle the first question involving the “old countries.” Given the different histories and cultural developments, constructions of Blackness and Whiteness in Latin America are considerably different from those in the United States. They also differ from each other. But if we look at the numbers, we don’t need to worry too much about those differences or about what exactly Latinas/os mean when they say they are Black or White. I will begin with the fact that in 2000, 60% of the Latina population was born in the United States (Krogstad and Lopez 2014). In 2010, the percentage was close to 65% (ibid.), which means that an overwhelming majority of those selfidentified Latinas/os filling out the census form in 2000 and 2010 were US-born Latinas/os. We can be certain then, that whatever conceptions of Whiteness and Blackness Latinas/os may have held and may have invoked when filling out the census, those conceptions were homegrown and reflective of US society and its articulations of Blackness and Whiteness. Similarly, of those Latinas/os born elsewhere, about 38% had lived in the United States for 20 years or longer and 65% had lived in the United States for at least 10 years (Patten 2012). Given the longevity of their immersion in US culture and cultural practices, it is safe to assume that a sizable number of the non-US-born Latinas/os are also

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responding to the census race question by deploying what they have learned in relation to US-based conceptions of race. Thus, although constructions of Whiteness and Blackness in Latin America may have a role on non-US-born Latinas/os responses to the race question, in the end, we can say with a certain degree of confidence that, given the sheer numbers, when Latinas/os have been forced to identify racially by the Census Bureau, they have done so using the referents they are immediately familiar with: those from the United States. It is possible, then, to make a connection between the Black/White bifurcation in racial identification among Latinas/os (as demonstrated by the Census results on race) and the pattern of racializing in Black and White (by popular media) that I have identified in this paper. I am not suggesting that one is the direct result of the other, but rather, that they are happening simultaneously, and as such they could be informing one another. The significance of this increasing dichotomization cannot be overstated, as the Office of Management and Budget contemplates the inclusion of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” within the race question for the 2020 Census, especially when federal and state government as well as private offices tend to use the same questions and classifications in their own forms.

Conclusion: Latinas/os in Black, Latinas/os in White With the previous discussions in mind, a few questions come to mind: What does it mean for Latina/o actors to be playing characters that approximate Whiteness or Blackness? And, what does it mean for non-Latina/o White and non-Latina/o Black/non-White actors to be playing Latina/o characters? How do we explain these two patterns of representation at a historical juncture when Latinas/os are being obliged to pick a racial classification in governmental forms? And, how do we explain these two patterns at a historical moment when Latinas/os continue to be vilified as criminals by the general society?5 Before I attempt some answers, I must, of course, note that representations of Latinas/os as brown still make up the bulk of representations in popular culture. Similarly, a great percentage of the Latina/o population (i.e., 42%) identified in the 2000 census as belonging to “some other race” to the ones provided by the Bureau, whereas 6.3% identified as

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belonging to “two or more races” (United States Census Bureau 2001). Thus, while 50% of Latinas/os identified as unambiguously White or Black, the other half identified, racially, in a number of ambiguous ways, showing that Latinos/as may have felt uneasy about embracing or applying to themselves US constructions of race at that time. In 2010, these numbers shifted a bit, as approximately 37% of Latinas/os identified as belonging to “some other race,” while 6% identified as belonging to “two or more races,” bringing the total to 43% of Latinas/os identifying in racially ambiguous terms. If you recall, 55.5% of Latinas/os identified as White or Black that year. So, in those ten years we start to see among Latinas/os a shift in how they understand themselves racially within the United States. Although it is still too early to identify any definitive pattern in their responses (since we are talking about only two census cycles), we can nevertheless project into the future and argue that, given the direction in which the numbers are running, the new emerging tendency for Latinas/os to be depicted in Black and White by non-Latina/o actors in Hollywood is telling of where we may be headed as a society, in relation to Latinidad and race, but also in relation to general constructions of race in the United States. I am not ready to predict that Latinidad as brown will disappear altogether, but I am certain that the Latinas/os as White and Latinas/os as Black representations will continue to grow in numbers as US society continues to follow strictly dichotomized notions of race. Molina-Guzmán (2013) concludes that for Latinas/os, “representational success whether political or cultural has often come at the expense of maintaining Latina/o exclusion from Blackness and an ambivalent relationship to Whiteness that rarely questions white privileges and norms” (p. 223). I would say that the emerging representations are (perhaps problematically) moving closer to both Blackness and Whiteness (without the presence of Latinas/os), while leaving “flesh and blood” Latinas/os behind, for Latinidad has never been constituted through phenotype. As we move further into the twenty-first century, we also seem to be moving back to an entrenched view of race as an either/or construction where racialized notions of Latinidad are spliced and reconstituted through Blackness and Whiteness without the presence of Latinas/ os at all, while the number of Latinas/os in the country continues to grow rapidly.6 This is also troubling if we take into consideration that in 2016, a CBS poll among Americans found that 46% of non-Latina/o Americans thought that Latinas/os had either a mostly bad influence

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or not much influence on US society, and 48% that their influence on “moral and social values” was mostly bad or didn’t have much influence (CBS News 2016). If we connect the bifurcation in Black or White to our history as a country, a few points arise. In the case of Blackness, we are talking about a history that involves slavery, segregation, exclusion from major institutions, and structural as well as individual violence. This history has translated into representations that put forth problematic tropes and general ideas about non-Whiteness that hurt everyone who is not White, but especially those who are seen as Black. Whiteness, on the other hand, is still very much seen as the norm, almost like an aspirational form of being, for as Joe Feagin (2006) tells us, “[w]hiteness is centrally about prizing white beauty, values, opinions, stereotypes, and culture” (p. 237). He continues: Most whites grow up as children in a society that is still presented to them by parents, peers, or the medias a more or less racialized world. They learn positive images and understandings of whiteness and white superiority, as well as ways to evaluate outgroups that are not white in blatantly or subtly negative terms. (p. 288)

As such, Whiteness involves a possible rather unnerving alternative path to inclusion, assimilation, and ultimately, incorporation, which hurts both those who are incorporated into its fold (because they have to leave anything that makes them unique behind-Whiteness is its own imaginary, one constructed apart from Latinidad) and those who are left outside of the fold (i.e., those who do not fall within the White imaginary). Our current cultural moment is characterized by a retrenching of ideas that equate race with (measurable) biology.7 This has remained so even though scientific organizations have made it clear that race has nothing to do with biology.8 The current state violence against Black bodies and Latina/o immigrants, along with a general call to take this country back to a time when Whites felt secure in their supremacy, adds a nefarious element to both Hollywood representations of Latinas/os in White and Hollywood representations of Latinas/os in Black. In a country also dogged about deploying “us” vs. “them” ideologies, strictly dichotomized racial understandings can only serve the interests of those invested in continuing to propagate such ideologies, which is to say, those who benefit from them.

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Notes 1. According to the Census, a “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” person is “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race” (United States Census Bureau 2018). 2. Although I will discuss the casting of non-Latinas/os to play Latina/o roles, I would like to call attention to the brilliant works of Charles Ramirez Berg and Frank Javier García Berumen, who have addressed the history of those representations. For a discussion of Latina/o whitewashing, I would like to refer readers to the works of Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Angharad Valdivia, and Clara Rodríguez. 3.  Frank Berumen points to the silent film era and the 1894 film Pedro Esquire! and Dionecio Gonzalez: Mexican Duel in specific as freezing “in time forever” the distorted image about Mexicans and Latinas/os that “has remained static for more than a century” (2003, p. 19). 4. Most of the opposition involving the casting of Saldana as Simone was about two things: (1) the fact that ethnically, Saldana was not African American (but Dominican and Puerto Rican); and (2) the fact that her skin was darkened for the role, suggesting a sort of contemporary “black face” performance (Grinberg 2016; Blay 2016; Gahanan 2016). 5. The study “Power of Pop: Analyzing Portrayals of Immigrants in Popular Television” conducted by The Opportunity Agenda, examined 40 leading television programs and showed that Latina/o immigrant characters are the most represented as criminals (Villafañe 2017). This idea was also embraced by then Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who in a speech said the following about Mexican immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Ross 2016). 6. According to the United States Census Bureau, 35.3 million people in the United States identified as Latina/o. In 2010, the number was 50.4 million. The Census Bureau is projecting the Latina/o population to reach about 106 million in 2050 (Krogstad 2014). 7. See, for example, Nicholas Wade’s discussion of race as biology in his 2014 essay “What Science Says About Race and Genetics” published in Time. 8.  For instance, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a statement clearly articulating this point in 1998. According to the AAA: “it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups” (American Anthropological Association 1998). In fact, they connect

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contemporary “creations” of race by our society with social and economic inequality. In the Board’s words: “we now understand that human and cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification…The ‘racial’ worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth” (American Anthropological Association 1998).

Works Cited Agiesta, Jennifer. “Race and Reality in America: Five Key Findings.” CNN, November 25, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/24/us/race-reality-key-findings/index.html. Alba, Jessica. “Jessica Alba: I Want My Baby to Be Brown.” Latina, 2008 http://www.latina.com/entertainment/buzz/jessica-alba-i-want-my-babybe-brown. Alcoff, Linda M. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. American Anthropological Association. “AAA Statement on Race.” American Anthropological Association, May 17, 1998. https://www.americananthro. org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583. Anderson, Tre’vell. “Twitter Says a White British Actor Playing a Mexican American Is Exactly What’s Wrong with Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2016. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/ la-et-mn-charlie-hunnam-edgar-valdez-villarreal-diversity-20160124-story.html. Barreto, Matt A., and Gary M. Segura. “The Impact of Media Stereotypes on Opinions and Attitudes Towards Latinos.” September 2012. National Hispanic Media Coalition. http://www.nhmc.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/01/LD_NHMC_Poll_Results_Sept.2012.pdf. Beltrán, Mary. Latina/o Stars on U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Films and TV Stardom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Berg, Charles R. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Berumen, Frank. Brown Celluloid: Latino/a Film Icons and Images in the Hollywood Film Industry, Volume I (1894–1959). New York: Vantage Press, 2003. Blay, Zeba. “What Zoe Saldana Still Doesn’t Get About the ‘Nina’ Controversy.” HuffPost, June 20, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-zoesaldana-still-doesnt-get-about-the-nina-controversy_us_5767fc6ee4b0853f8bf1634c. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

234  C. R. LUGO-LUGO CBS News. “CBS News Poll: Hispanics in America.” CBS, October 16, 2016. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-hispanics-in-america/. Chávez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The First White President: The Foundation of Donald Trump’s Presidency Is the Negation of Barack Obama’s Legacy.” The Atlantic, October 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/. Dávila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Dutton, Sarah, Jennifer De Pinto, Anthony Salvanto, and Fred Backus. “Poll: What Do Americans Feel About Race Relations?” CBS, July 23, 2015. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-state-of-race-relations-inamerica/. Feagin, Joe. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 2006. Flitter, Emily, and Chris Khan. “Exclusive: Trump Supporters More Likely to View Blacks Negatively-Reuters/Ipsos Poll.” Reuters, June 28, 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-race/exclusive-trump-supporters-more-likely-to-view-blacks-negatively-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCNOZE2SW. Fox News Magazine. “Sofia Vergara’s Secret to Success: Changing Her Hair Color.” Fox News Magazine, December 11, 2013. http://magazine.foxnews.com/ celebrity/sofia-vergara%E2%80%99s-secret-success-changing-her-hair-color. Gajanan, Mahita. “Zoe Saldana Faces Criticism Over Dark Makeup in Nina Simone Film Trailer.” The Guardian, March 2, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/02/zoe-saldana-nina-simone-black-makeup-filmtrailer. Graves, Joseph. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. Boston: Dutton Publisher, 2004. Green, Emma. “White Evangelicals Believe They Face More Discrimination Than Muslims.” CNN, March 10, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2017/03/perceptions-discrimination-muslims-christians/ 519135/. Grinberg, Emanuella. “Backlash Against Casting Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone.” CNN Entertainment, March 2, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/02/ entertainment/nina-simone-biopic-trailer-feat/index.html. Hirschberg, Lynn. “The Kid Stays in the Pictures.” The New York Times, February 19, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/style/tmagazine/22rosariow.html. Ingraham, Christopher. “White Trump Voters Think They Face More Discrimination Than Blacks.” The Washington Post, August 2, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/02/

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white-trump-voters-think:-they-face-more-discrimination-than-blacks-thetrump-administration-is-listening/?utm_term=.Oa8cd485112c. Johnson, Kirby. “I Was Told I Wasn’t ‘Caucasian Enough’ to Play Leading Roles.” PopSugar, February 9, 2017. https://www.popsugar.com/latina/ Jessica-Alba-Her-Ethnicity-Video-43132591. King, C. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Krogstad, Jens M. “With Fewer New Arrivals, Census Lowers Hispanic Population Projections.” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/16/with-fewer-newarrivals-census-lowers-hispanic-population-projections-2/. Krogstad, Jens M., and Mark H. Lopez. “Hispanic Nativity Shift: U.S. Births Drive Population Growth as Immigration Stalls.” Pew Hispanic Research, April 29, 2014. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2014/04/29/ hispanic-nativity-shift/. Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R., and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. “Anchor/Terror Babies and Latina Bodies: Immigration Rhetoric in the 21st Century and the Feminization of Terrorism.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought 8, no. 1 (2014). https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/jift/vol8/iss1/1/. Mendible, Myra. From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. “Commodifying Black Latinidad in US Film and Television.” Popular Communication 11, no. 3 (2013): 211–226. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Patten, Eileen. “Statistical Portrait of Foreign-Born Population in the United States.” Pew Research Center: Hispanic Trends, February 21, 2012. http:// www.pewhispanic.org/2012/02/21/statistical-portrait-of-the-foreign-bornpopulation-in-the-united-states-2010/#foreign-born-by-region-of-birth-anddate-of-arrival-2010. Pew Research Center. “Chapter  4: U.S. Public Has Mixed Views of Immigrants and Immigration.” Pew Research Center, September 28, 2015. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-4-u-s-public-hasmixed-views-of-immigrants-and-immigration/. Ross, Janell. “From Mexican Rapists to Bad Hombres, the Trump Campaign in Two Moments.” The Washington Post, October 20, 2016. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/20/from-mexicanrapists-to-bad-hombres-the-trump-campaign-in-two-moments/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9eedbf917058. Shteynberg, Garriy, Lisa M. Leslie, Andrew P. Knight, and David M. Mayer. “But Affirmative Action Hurts Us! Race-Related Beliefs Shape Perceptions

236  C. R. LUGO-LUGO of White Disadvantage and Policy Unfairness.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 115, no. 1 (2011): 1–12. United States Census Bureau. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin.” U.S. Census Bureau, 2000. https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-1. pdf. United States Census Bureau. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000.” 2001. US Department of Commerce. http://www.census.gov/prodlcen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf. United States Census Bureau. “The Hispanic Population 2010.” U.S. Census Bureau, 2010. https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04. pdf. United States Census Bureau. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010.” 2011. US Department of Commerce. https://www.census.gov/prod/ 2001pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf. United States Census Bureau. “Hispanic Origin.” 2018. Last revised March 7, 2018. https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/about.html. Villafañe, Veronica. “Latino, Black, and Middle-Eastern Immigrants Portrayed as Criminals on TV.” Forbes, May 18, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ veronicavillafane/2017/05/18/latino-black-and-middle-eastern-immigrants-portrayed-as-criminals-on-hollywood-tv/. Wade, Nicholas. “What Science Says About Race and Genetics.” Time, May 9, 2014. http://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/. Yglesias, Matthew. “New Poll: Voter Worries About Immigration Mostly Aren’t About the Economy.” Vox, July 6, 2016. https://www.vox. com/2016/7/6/12098622/immigration-worries-economy-security.

CHAPTER 11

Tonto and The Lone Ranger: Nostalgic Kitsch or Post-racial Backlash? Sarah E. Turner

With a population of 6.8 million or just under 2% of the overall American population, Native Americans represent such a small minoritized group that, in all probability, much of the rest of the country has little to no daily interaction with this group and might, until recently, have been hard-pressed to even name a living Native American. However, two recent events have foregrounded Native Americans and Native American concerns in the American media landscape and, in doing so, have worked to challenge outdated and problematic stereotypes the media has long-perpetuated. The most notable event was the 2016 months-long action against the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline—a project that threatened traditional lands, burial grounds, and clean water for the Standing Rock Sioux. It was the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in recent history (over 4000 activists from indigenous groups and allies from all over the USA and Canada), and the protest served to remind the American public that Native Americans are not simply historical or museum figures but are instead active members of twenty-first-century America.1 The more recent event took place in January of this year on Sarah E. Turner (*)  Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_11

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the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.2 Native American activist Nathan Phillips and Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann were photographed in what initially was interpreted as being a tense faceto-face confrontation between a Native American elder and a MAGA hat-wearing student. Public and media reaction was quick to condemn the white student’s actions as racist and disrespectful toward Phillips whose stoic expression marked a strong contrast to the smirk on the face of Sandmann. The story, however, wasn’t so simple: Phillips said he was concerned that a group of Hebrew Israelites were threatening the high school students and that he stepped into try to intercede. What is intriguing about this story is the way in which Phillips was originally “read” by the press as being a helpless victim of white racism—made manifest by the Make America Great Again hat.3 This chapter will explore the political and cultural moments—wherein Karl Marx, Obama, Trump, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva become bedmates—that led to the 2013 remake of The Lone Ranger and specifically examine why, in the latter years of Obama’s presidency, there was a perceived need to reboot both this classic storyline and brand. I will argue that this remake is one example of filmic manifestations born out of the unease created by Obama’s presidency (and his blackness). Obama’s tenure in the White House created the need for re-assurance of all things “as they are supposed to be”—in this case—through movies that employ clearly delineated racial lines and roles that reify the hegemony of whiteness while simultaneously minoritizing the place and status of the nonwhite characters.4 In a political and cultural moment when the current president of the USA refers to various African countries as “shitholes,” complains migrants are infesting the USA and therefore a wall needs to be built to keep them out, and claims that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, the reboot of Native American depictions seems both deliberate and problematic. Tonto (for example) enables an ongoing racialized and racist depiction of a minority group in the USA—but a group that, until very recently, was perceived of as too often invisible or seemingly inconsequential and therefore “safe.” And so, unlike the rise of historical African American-themed films in the Obama era (12 Years a Slave…)5 that could be read as a backlash to Obama’s presidency, perpetuating racist and/or fossilized images of Native Americans works to reassure America’s hegemonic culture that all is as it should be. Colorblindness reifies an image of a multicultural society while simultaneously ignoring the systemic and institutionalized racism impacting

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minority communities. I would argue that the systematic impact on minority communities as read through the theories of Karl Marx connect reification to the social tendency to “attribute concrete form to abstract things”—which thus results in a sense of alienation. In this way, social relations (hegemonic power structures) are conceived of as inherent attributes, which so clearly connect to colorblindness and the alienation of those minoritized groups.6 Marx argues that the ideologies of both capitalism and racism are predicated on the division between the workers and the wealthy—the proletariat and the bourgeoise—which is why and how I would argue capitalism and colorblind racism are intrinsically linked.7 The danger of making color/race into a commodity—something to be bought and sold—and that therefore has a perceived intrinsic value— is that the economic worth of the “thing” supersedes its authenticity or reality. So Johnny Depp’s Tonto—inauthentic and historically inaccurate and, at its heart, racist—has more value and appeal; thus, capitalism erases culture(s) in a colorblind world. Therefore, the choice to cast Johnny Depp as Tonto exemplifies the seductive appeal of the ideology of colorblindness; if we, as a culture, don’t see race or difference, then the casting of a white actor to play a minoritized figure becomes acceptable. To wit, the rationale of a colorblind world is that since there is no difference, anyone (of any race) can play any role; however, as New York Times movie reviewer Kevin Noble Maillard asks, “What’s So Hard About Casting Indian Actors in Indian Roles?”8 Maillard reminds his readers (who, like many Americans, have little to no daily contact with Native Americans) that “film generates a collective understanding of how Indians look, sound, and act, imparting and reaffirming norms.” This generation of a collective understanding of “Indian” once again calls into question the choice to cast Depp as Tonto given that Tonto may be the most pervasive American Indian character of the 20th century…and he’s purely fictional, unlike Pocahontas, Sacajawea, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull or Geronimo. It’s not surprising he keeps getting recycled. He’s perfectly malleable for whatever the dominant fantasies are for native culture. (D’Addario)

This idea of Tonto’s malleability speaks to the usefulness of the character and characterization of this highly visible and “recognizable” Native figure. Berkeley Law Professor Ian F. Haney-Lopez argues that

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the “present incarnation of colorblindness seems geared to preserving a status quo of continued white dominance…by providing cover for stereotypical rationalizations masked in cultural and behavioral terms” (p. 828). The very ideals of a colorblind world enable the tendency of the hegemonic culture continuously to define those it also minoritizes, which illustrates Haney-Lopez’s sense of the preservation of white dominance. Thus, Disney and Depp can convince themselves that the choice to cast a white man to play Tonto is in no way problematic. Moreover, and despite evidence to the contrary, Depp can claim that “I started thinking about Tonto and what could be done in my own small way to try to—‘eliminate’ isn’t possible—but reinvent the relationship, to attempt to take some of the ugliness thrown on the Native Americans, not only in The Lone Ranger, but the way Indians were treated throughout the history of cinema, and turn it on its head” (Breznican). Despite’s Depp’s desire to “take some of the ugliness…and turn it on its head,” his Tonto, problematically and eerily similar to Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow from Disney’s highly lucrative The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, solidifies the image of the American Indian—complete with a dead crow on his head—in the mind of the contemporary viewer.9 Perhaps the similarities between Tonto and Jack Sparrow are deliberately designed to appeal to an audience who has little to no interaction with Native Americans; the familiarity of Jack Sparrow’s idiosyncrasies manifested in Depp’s Tonto resonate with the viewers and suggests that the exotic otherness and appeal of pirates may also extend to Native Americans. What is troubling, however, is that Depp felt his portrayal of Tonto would in fact “turn the stereotype [of Native Americans] on its head…You know, I presented Tonto with, I hope, a dignity, and a pride and with respect. And as far as Tonto being eccentric and at times considered aloof, he’s a very wise warrior” (del Barco). Despite Depp’s intentions to reinvent Tonto, the Tonto audiences see is neither wise nor a warrior; instead, he is odd and an outcast. That Depp is not in fact an Indian actor and that his portrayal of Tonto is replete with historical inaccuracies is overshadowed by Depp’s name recognition and box office allure, which is, of course, the real reason he was cast as Tonto.10 Disney’s The Lone Ranger is not the first film to recognize the appeal of commodifying Indian representations for profit; consider the box office numbers of the following films. Kevin Costner’s 1990 Dances with Wolves grossed $184, 208, 848 domestically, was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.11 And

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Disney’s animated Pocahontas (1995) earned $346,100,000.12 By comparison, the 1998 film Smoke Signals, based on a short story by Native American writer Sherman Alexie (Spokane), won the Filmmaker’s Trophy at Sundance yet only grossed $6,745,362 domestically.13 The 2014 Canadian film Rhymes for Young Ghouls did poorly at the box office, only grossing $1,529,000,14 while Taylor Sheridan’s 2017 Wind River grossed $33,800,859 domestically.15 Smoke Signals was the first “feature film written, directed, and produced by Native Americans” (Clement) and had a majority Native American cast while Dances with Wolves was a white-centered story with Native Americans in secondary roles. Wind River’s two main stars are white, but the supporting cast is Native American; Rhymes for Young Ghouls has a majority-minority cast and is set in Canada, which might explain the lack of success at the box office. Denise K. Cummings explains the box office discrepancies of films such as Smoke Signals as being based on what audiences don’t see. The romanticized “Hollywood” portrayal of Indians is nowhere to be found; no squaw, “Indian princess,” primitive, savage, hunter or warrior, indeed no buckskin and no teepees. Neither is there a mystical medicine man, political activist, or “Natural Ecologist,” those depictions of recent stereotyping. Therefore, in the very first minutes of the film, Smoke Signals confronts and dislocates its first expected ethnic response. (p. 60)

The connection between what Cummings calls the dislocation of the “expected ethnic response” and the poor showing of Native Americancentered films at the box office illustrates the power and economic appeal of the Hollywood Indians such as Depp’s Tonto: audiences want to see the familiar and non-threatening Hollywood image, an image that forever fossilizes and marginalizes Native Americans and reifies the position and power of the hegemonic culture as exemplified by The Lone Ranger himself. Indeed, the Western genre was conceived of as being tied to “the idea of nationhood, particularly for the U.S. [They were], with Manifest Destiny, fundamental nation building myths for the U.S.” (Wente)16 This historic connection between Westerns and nationhood is made manifest in the power dynamic of The Lone Ranger and Tonto’s relationship wherein, even in the twenty-first century, Tonto is still the sidekick to the white hero. Executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s claim that “this is not [your] grandpa’s Lone Ranger” (Santo, p. 196) ironically serves to locate this 2013

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version as exactly that: an homage and a nostalgia for that lost era where, despite the 1930s Great Depression and the economic crisis, white interests ruled America. It is no coincidence that the Mount Rushmore monument (on sacred lands stolen from Native Americans) was started in 1927 and the Meriam Report was issued in 1928. The Meriam Report detailed the abject poverty of Native Americans on and off reservations, the failure of the government-sanctioned attempts to assimilate Native Americans into “white” or mainstream culture, the brutality and ineptitude of the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, and the ­ results of the eugenics movement, which targeted the Native American population. President Roosevelt’s New Deal attempted to address some of these issues—but it is telling that The Lone Ranger myth/franchise was launched in this historical context. “Indeed, even Bruckheimer’s claim that the latest version of the Lone Ranger is a far cry from the one revered by the silent film generation seems like a classic retro-­ branding tactic: evoking the past to call attention to dissimilarities, which in turn also highlight the property’s longevity and brand essence” (Santo, pp. 195–196). However, these “surface dissimilarities” mask or hide the nostalgia/comfort for not only the story and iconic characters but also for an historical era of clearly delineated racial lines and power structures. This chapter argues that the “nostalgia” for The Lone Ranger extends beyond the franchise itself to become a reaction to the Obama presidency and the perceived changing power structures that accompanied it; moreover, it also underscored the threats to the hegemonic culture— changes and fears that ultimately ushered in a Trump presidency and his call to “Make America Great” Again. A 2016 Washington Post poll asked Americans “which is the bigger problem in this country: blacks and Hispanics losing out because of preferences for whites, or whites losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics. Among GOP voters who supported Trump for the Republican nomination, 54% picked whites as the bigger losers” (Ingraham and Long). While it is indisputable that the white working class has/is experiencing economic decline and marginalization, it is also true that this group is encouraged to look to minorities as the cause rather than the privileged 1% who are in fact the real cause of such disenfranchisement. Noted sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that colorblind racism, or “New Racism” as he calls it, became the “dominant racial ideology” beginning in the late 1960s that “serves today as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post-Civil Rights era…

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[that] aids in the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare… [and allows for] the curious enigma of racism without racists” (pp. 2–5). What this means is that unlike the overt racism of Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, contemporary America continues to perpetuate a system of racial inequality that is more difficult to recognize and to confront. While Bonilla-Silva focuses on the impact of jerrymandering, unfair banking practices and residential segregation, educational inequities, and so on, the impact of colorblind racism is also apparent in Hollywood, specifically in Disney’s 2013 The Lone Ranger. There is a perceived sense of safety in the stereotypical depiction of Native Americans in movies; too small a population to voice objections or truly effect change, the iconic Native American figure is both useful and comfortable for filmmakers and audiences alike.17 Bonilla-Silva posits that a “society’s racial structure [is] the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege” (p. 9); Johnny Depp’s Tonto, despite his and Disney’s intentions to do something different, ultimately “fails—and for the simple reasons that the original material is too entrenched in an essentially racist ideology” (Harris). America’s racial structure functions only through its minoritizing of various racial groups, which suggests that the remake of The Lone Ranger was destined to fail from the start as it was unable to either step outside that racial structure or posit an alternate set of practices and depictions that might work to confront the inequities Bonilla-Silva discusses. Imagining that The Lone Ranger reboot would be as successful as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Disney invested $375 million in a film that ultimately failed at the box office, while also failing to reinvent the figure of Tonto, keeping him in the secondary role as sidekick to the white hero. Despite being made an honorary member of the Comanche nation due to the cultural sensitivity Depp supposedly brought to his role as Tonto, the casting of Johnny Depp as Tonto, and the historical inaccuracies that run rampant throughout the 2013 The Lone Ranger, underscores the exploitability of all things “Native” in popular culture regardless of their relation to history or reality.18 Too often Hollywood depends on its construction of an “iconic” Indian figure who is an amalgamation of nations, cultural practices, clothing, and practices the average film viewer does not see as anything but “authentic” having rarely been shown anything else. The film opens with a 1933 setting at a carnival in San Francisco—to wit a “Wild West Show”—and the narrative

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structure is introduced as a re-telling of The Lone Ranger myth by a preternaturally old Tonto to a young boy who is attired in a Lone Ranger costume—complete with badge and mask.19 Immediately, the shot of the costumed little boy reifies the commercial value of The Lone Ranger franchise—underscored by the 1933 setting, which is the year The Lone Ranger radio series first aired on Detroit’s WXYZ radio. And the fact that the boy is white re-establishes the racial order of The Lone Ranger as white man and Tonto as other. If Disney had really intended to remake The Lone Ranger in such a way as to disrupt previous iterations of the story, they might have made the choice to cast a Native American boy instead of the white one wearing The Lone Ranger costume. The result could have been a film that actually challenged the racial stereotypes and power structure associated with the myths of The Lone Ranger and Tonto. In 1952, The Lone Ranger radio and television show, comic books, and cartoons generated five million dollars in profits for the show’s creator George W. Trendle, who declared that the show tried to “convey a message that subtly teaches patriotism, tolerance, fairness and respect for the rights of all men” (Time 14 January 1952). J. Edgar Hoover claimed that “The Lone Ranger is one of the greatest forces for juvenile good in the country,” while Trendle himself said “it is just plain good, healthy American entertainment[,] which will not offend anyone, because there is just nothing in it to criticize” (Time 1952). However, the rights of all men—juvenile or grown—championed by The Lone Ranger exclude Native Americans or Native American concerns as illustrated by the wholesale slaughter of the Comanche warriors in Bruckheimer’s film not to mention the ubiquitous usage of Tonto-speak in every iteration of the franchise. Tonto-speak is Hollywood’s constructed interpretation and approximation of Indian voice that mixes “broken” English with simple sentences and problematic grammatical constructions; this linguistic marker (and the unspoken suggestion that the speaker is not educated or educatable) serves to further oppress and marginalize Native Americans as other. The Lone Ranger franchise includes 2956 radio episodes, 221 episodes of the television series that ran from 1949 to 1957, the 1956 movie The Lone Ranger directed by Stuart Heisler, the 1958 movie The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold directed by Lesley Selander, the 1981 Legend of the Lone Ranger directed by William A. Fraler, and the The WB’s 2003 made for TV The Lone Ranger movie intended as a pilot

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for a series that was never made. The [2013] Lone Ranger “debuts in theaters in time for the July 4 holiday,” and the launch is accompanied by a merchandise campaign that includes Tonto action figures, Lego Comanche Camp toys, and Tonto images on Subway glasses (Bogado). The promotion of the Disney, Lego, and Subway images of Depp’s Tonto is all the more problematic given that Native American on-screen representation has been minimal, accounting for less than 1% of all the characters in the top eighty films from 2007 to 2015 (Siegal). UCLA professor Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa) is troubled by the image of Depp’s Tonto stating that “no authentic Native American goes around wearing war paint outside of ceremonial pow-wows, and certainly not day and night in the [late 19th century] Wild West frontier. There’s no way you can look at this and not say it’s odd, unusual, arresting, startling. It’s a major setback for the Native American image in the world because that’s how millions of people will think American Indians are now” (del Barco). However, despite all the promotions, Bruckheimer’s film was described as “the big box office tragedy of the weekend” (Mendelson) when it opened with The New York Times claiming “tumbleweeds blew through theaters playing [the movie] over [opening] weekend” (Barnes). Indeed, Rotten Tomatoes gave it only a 31% approval r­ating, although they cited the length and the violence and not the politics in their review. Disney’s 2013 The Lone Ranger was directed by Gore Verbinski, who also directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean ­movies, The Ring, and Rango; its initial budget was $215 million, but the final costs (including a large marketing budget) were closer to $375 million—while the movie itself grossed only $89 million that first year. The movie was nominated for the Oscar’s “Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling” and won the Hollywood Guild Award for the same category in 2014. Less inspiring, the movie did win the Razzie (Golden Raspberry) Award for “Worst remake, Rip-Off or Sequel” and was nominated for the Razzie’s Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Depp), Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay Awards in 2014. The film’s Razzie “success” suggests that Disney and Verbinski over-estimated audience ­ interest in yet another remake of the film although, I would argue, not because the film utilized problematic Native American stereotypes. Instead, as the opening weekend box office numbers suggest, filmgoers were more interested in animated sequels and stand-up comedy.20

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The first shot the audience sees of Tonto is as one of the exhibitions in the Wild West Show—alongside a stuffed buffalo and bear; Tonto represents the Noble Savage according to the sign on his installation.21 He is something to be looked at—a relic or an exhibit—not a person and clearly not meant to be seen as relevant to the 1933 context of the young viewer (or, for that matter, to the twenty-first-century context of movie-going audiences). So ubiquitous is this image of the Native American as historical relic that both the audience and the young boy jump when Tonto moves and speaks. Despite having top billing, when the viewing audience initially sees Johnny Depp’s Tonto in the action of the narrative that he himself is recounting to the little boy, the first shot of Tonto, who is playing with a broken Sears Roebuck pocket watch, is only seconds long. The film opens with a shot of the as-of-yet unfinished Golden Gate Bridge and the subtitle “San Francisco 1933,” and then the camera pans to a shot of a carnival, a Ferris wheel, and a tent emblazoned with a “The Greatest Show on Earth” sign that invites people inside to experience the “Wild West Show.” The first word Tonto utters is “kemosabe”—which confuses both the young boy to whom it is addressed and the twenty-first-century viewing audience because it sounds like Tonto-speak once again. The latter is confused as they had been promised a film that will espouse “values that will resonate with any potential filmgoer” and “hint at shifting relationships” (Santo, pp. 205, 196). Ultimately, however, the filmgoer doesn’t receive a sympathetic, non-stereotypical, or non-caricatured depiction of Tonto or Native Americans in general. Instead and presumably unsurprisingly for the audience, Depp’s Tonto falls into line with all the previous depictions of Tonto—all Hollywood and no historical accuracy. Two minutes later the audience is given the first shot of The Lone Ranger and Tonto—together and on horseback—and Tonto’s utterances are again in Tonto-speak, once again belying the notion that this film will present a fully developed Indian presence.22 When the audience sees Tonto again, this time in a rail car, he is in chains next to a white man, and there are two rangers watching over the two prisoners. The white man is the notorious Butch Cavendish, and he is en route to his public hanging. When Cavendish frees the gun that has been hidden on the train for him, Tonto tries to warn the two rangers. However, Tonto is ignored, and Cavendish kills the two rangers. The lack of motivation for Tonto’s character, i.e., why would Tonto warn the rangers who are responsible for him being in handcuffs on the train next

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to Cavendish, calls to mind the trope of the magical Negro—this time in brown face with a dead crow on his head—who exists to save the white man often at the expense of his own life. The magical Negro figure originates with and is employed by white actors and screenwriters and as such can be read as a white fantasy figure. Tonto himself is (and has always been) a white fantasy figure created by white writers and at times portrayed by white actors—and Depp’s Tonto perpetuates this fantasy.23 His twenty-first century Tonto still exists to serve the hegemonic system— not to subvert it.24 Eventually, eighty or so minutes into the film, Tonto’s motivation becomes clear, but in these early scenes, the audience is left wondering why he turns a gun on Cavendish in the train and says to him, “time has finally come, Wendigo.” While Tonto’s desire for vengeance against Cavendish and his brother Cole is evident by the latter part of the film, what is never fully explicated is Tonto’s investment or motivation in saving John Reid, who becomes the title character after the death of the six Texas Rangers. Tonto and Reid are literally chained together on the train after Cavendish kills the two rangers and his men take over the train, and the two men must work together both to free themselves and to save the rest of the passengers.25 Ed Guerrero’s study of 1980s interracial buddy films characterizes the emergence of such films as representative of Hollywood’s “Reaganite entertainment”—[wherein] “ideologically conservative Hollywood films reflect the tenure and tenor of the Reagan Years” (1993, p. 239). It is possible, I would argue, to read Disney’s decision to return to The Lone Ranger/Tonto story and dynamic as a nostalgic homage to that Reagan moment of ideological conservatism and an era marked by a return to “traditional American values.” It is all too easy to imagine this reboot of the Tonto story with a post-2016 release date as this return to “values” is reminiscent of the current move to “make America great again.” When Texas Ranger Dan Reid asks Tonto “what’s your crime, boy?” after Tonto and John Reid “save the day,” Tonto simply replies “Indian.” It is unclear whether Disney wanted the audience to laugh at this “joke”—recognizing that Tonto’s Indian status is portrayed as his crime—and thus establishing this rendition of the Tonto story as more enlightened than its predecessors. While it is difficult to imagine this as anything but ironic, it could potentially be read as a concession on the part of the film that acknowledges that Tonto does recognize and understand his status as “other” but must still adhere to the hegemonic status

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of white culture. Whether the PG-rated audience reads this moment as ironic or not, Tonto is left to languish in jail after the train scene, and the Texas Rangers, including John Reid, ride out after Cavendish; after the Texas Rangers are ambushed and slaughtered, Tonto, now inexplicably free from jail, appears armed with a shovel and digs graves for the rangers. Again, his motivation is not clear, and, when he discovers that John Reid is not in fact dead, Tonto drags Reid away from the gravesite and places him atop a twenty-foot tower balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff. Tonto then fashions the iconic mask for Reid out of his dead brother’s vest and melts down the badges of the six dead rangers to create the silver bullets so intrinsically connected to The Lone Ranger myth. While Tonto’s Comanche affiliation is not made clear in the original series (he was in fact Potawatomi), the melted badges-to-bullets moment is a direct carryover. It is only at this point, some fifty minutes into the movie, that the audience learns Tonto’s motivation; he tells John Reid “I am Tonto of the Comanches, last of the Wendigo hunters.” What the audience does not learn is that the Wendigo is a figure in Algonquin mythology—not Comanche—and is found in and around the Great Lakes, not Texas. It is conceivable that Disney relied on the audience’s not being able to differentiate among the 573 nations and their mythic figures and oral histories, as well as their ignorance of the Wendigo myth, in their appropriation of the Algonquin figure given the invisibility of Native Americans in contemporary America. Tonto tells Reid that Wendigos have the power to “throw nature out of balance,” which might help explain the flesh-eating jackrabbits that appear at this point in the film. Cavendish, who Tonto has been chasing for twenty-six years, was transformed into a Wendigo because of inhumanity and avarice: “silver made him what he is.” Although Dan Reid had negotiated treaties and peace with the Comanches, after his death a series of attacks on outlying homes attributed to the Comanches results in the nullification of all treaties and signals an open season on Comanches. The Calvary is brought into address the “Indian Problem” and, after a recounting of Tonto’s backstory and the reason for his eccentric behavior, the venerable Comanche leader tells John Reid that “our time is past; they call it progress…we [are] all already ghosts.” The little boy listening to Tonto interjects into the narrative to ask “war?” But what the movie audience sees is wholesale slaughter; the Comanches ride against the Calvary and are systematically mowed down by Gatling guns—gratuitously and horrifically—and

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shocking for a Disney audience and a PG-13 rated film. More troubling though is that while his people are being wiped out, Tonto is focused on saving The Lone Ranger and appears—dressed as one of the nameless and expendable Chinese laborers—riding a handcar through the hail of bullets to safety. The ongoing presence of Sears Roebuck pocket watches and the promise and potential of seemingly limitless silver mines and fortunes suggest to the viewing audience that simple greed and capitalism are to blame for the extermination of Native Americans in the nineteenth century—that the greed of the brothers Latham Cole and Butch Cavendish, both of whom are dead by the movie’s end, kills the Indians and their culture—thus exonerating the rest of America from any role or responsibility.26 Indeed, one of the two brothers, Cavendish, is depicted literally as bloodthirsty, apocryphally eating the leg or toes of one of his victims and then actually eating the heart of Dan Reid, the leader of the six rangers he and his men have just ambushed and killed. Tonto’s initial interactions with the young boy in the Wild West tent—trading a dead mouse for the boy’s bag of peanuts—reifies the message that capitalism and the inability of Native Americans to either thwart it or adapt to it are responsible for their demise.27 Viewers are thus able to distance themselves from such outrageous atrocities and by extension any culpability in the historical genocide as well as any contemporary marginalization or disenfranchisement of Native Americans today. Indeed, Bonilla-Silva would see this as an example of cultural racism wherein the minoritized status of non-white groups is explained and justified through universalizing and egregious claims such as “Native Americans prefer a simple life on the reservation and don’t want things like cell phones, flat screens, or cars” to explain Native American poverty or low graduation rates. However, in his review of the movie for Forbes magazine, Scott Mendelson argues that the film’s focus on capitalism and greed is actually an “incredibly subversive and challenging fable that uses the prototypical wild west hero and [The Lone Ranger’s] Native American sidekick to tell a story that is knee deep in the moral rot of that era, standing as a parable for any one of America’s cultural sins that we don’t have the strength/courage to acknowledge” (p. 2). I would argue that it is difficult to read the film as subversive when confronted with images of Indians being mowed down by the Calvary, Depp as Tonto dressed as a Chinese laborer, Depp wearing a dead crow on his head throughout the film, and Depp’s ultimate inability to free Tonto from the magical

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negro/sidekick role. While it is true that by the end of the film the two “bad” white men are dead and good seems to have triumphed once again, the railway is still being built through Native American lands supposedly guaranteed by treaties, the bulk of the Comanche nation has been slaughtered, the West continues to expand thanks to the idea(l)s of Manifest Destiny, and Tonto still speaks in Hollywood’s Tonto-speak. The Lone Ranger and Tonto ultimately triumph, sending the trainload of ill-gotten silver to the river’s bottom and the greedy, murderous brothers to their deaths, but not until after the audience hears the Calvary captain instruct Tonto to “dance, monkey” while he shoots at Tonto who is balanced on the roof of the moving train. The last line of the movie has The Lone Ranger asking Tonto if he knows “what ‘Tonto’ means in Spanish” as the word Tonto has no meaning in any Native American language. The answer, of course, is “stupid.” Is the audience supposed to read this moment as self-reflexive on the part of The Lone Ranger and Disney—acknowledging (too little too late) the racially charged depiction of Native Americans the film itself reifies? The final image of the movie shows Tonto, now dressed in a dark suit and carrying a suitcase, walking off into the scenery—no longer the Noble Savage of the Wild West Show—but instead a frail, bow-legged, and bent-over figure who is slowly disappearing into “Indian country” as the music swells and the credits roll over the now-distant shambling and shuffling figure of Tonto. Movie critic A. O. Scott describes such scenes as illustrating Hollywood’s contemporary “consensus to focus on the moral condition of white people [wherein] the existence of racism is acknowledged, and its poisonous effects are noted. But it is also localized, in time and geography, in such a way as to avoid implicating the present-day white audience” (NYTimes 2013). The 1933 setting of The Lone Ranger story re-creates that distance and that comfort that exonerates contemporary audiences and holds out the promise of America as post-racial similar to the failed potential of the Obama era. When Donald Trump called Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” on the 27th of November 2017, at a moment when he was supposedly “honoring” Navajo code talkers at a White House ceremony, he simultaneously insulted all Native Americans by failing to differentiate among (or even recognize) the 573 American Indian nations, and he revealed his ignorance regarding Native Americans by referencing a Native American woman recognizable to many Americans only because of the 1995 Disney movie: “At an event to honor Navajo heroes, he

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used the name of a Powhatan woman to disparage a senator who claimed Cherokee ancestry” (Roberts The Washington Post). Trump has also mocked Warren for not being a “true” Native American; by invoking the image of “Pocahontas,” Trump relegates Warren to being a cartoon caricature, which is indicative of his—and most people’s—limited knowledge of Native American history.28 While this was not the first time Trump referred to Warren as “Pocahontas”—in fact, this is the only name he now gives her—his actions may be read as a synecdoche of the tendency of twenty-first-century America to rely on historical and fossilized images of Hollywood Indians rather than recognizing these nations as viable and contemporary cultures. Americans’ familiarity with Tonto and Pocahontas relegate Native Americans to history, to the past, while making contemporary Native Americans invisible and more likely to die twenty years earlier than other Americans (NPR 12 December 2017). Hollywood’s focus on Native Americans marks a complicated moment: trying to make an invisible minority more visible seems positive and inclusive, yet the questionable casting of non-Native Americans in Native American roles calls into question the agenda behind such representations. Interestingly, and in a welcome and much-needed response to such inaccurate and fossilized or absent images of Native Americans, 2017 saw the release of Wind River—set on the Wind River reservation and starring an impressive list of Native actors, Woman Walks Ahead (2017) based on the true story of nineteenth-century Catherine Wheldon and her desire to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull, and currently in production are both a film adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and a new Mutants movie—X-Men: The New Mutants (2019)—starring Blu Hunt, herself part-Native American—who will play the Cheyenne Mutant Danielle Moonstar. “For an industry that long has relegated Native Americans to the nefarious periphery (John Ford’s The Searchers), whitewashed them (Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in Pan) or lampooned them (Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6), Part-Time Indian is a welcome change” (Siegel). Ideally, these new films will work to replace those iconic, stereotypical images with Native American-created and produced depictions of themselves. Michael Greyeyes, who plays Sitting Bull in Woman Walks Ahead, acknowledges that “actors of color bear a particular, an added responsibility, because dominant culture often see us as exemplars, or as sort of icons for a larger culture…I’ve always been adamant about trying to expand or agitate or subvert in some way our collective notion of

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Indian-ness” (NPR July 1 2018). Greyeyes’ recognition of the burden of responsibility carried by actors of color once again calls into question the decision to cast Depp as Tonto. His version of Tonto failed to “expand or agitate or subvert” either Hollywood or the audience’s notion of who or what constitutes an American Indian.29 As NPR’s Benjamin Doxdator reminds us, “Indigenous stories are ongoing, not simply legends from the past” (Code Switch). In an ideal, non-colorblind Hollywood, future portrayals of Native Americans will be accurate, contemporary, and diverse—reflecting the breadth of the 573 nations and experiences—and not the fantasies and creations of white actors, writers, and directors.

Notes







1. It is somewhat telling, however, that public attention and media coverage peaked when celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Jaden and Willow Smith, and Pharrell added their voices and presence to the protests. 2. The Covington High School students were in DC to participate in the annual anti-abortion march; Nathan Phillips had just participated in the indigenous people’ march—while the public was likely aware of the former march, it is unlikely that the latter received the same attention. 3.  The most recent census reveals that there are approximately 6.8 million Native American/Alaskan Natives living in the USA today. Of that number, approximately 22% live on one of the 326 federally recognized reservations while the other 78% live in urban and/or non-reservation areas. There are 573 federally recognized tribes or nations, and the 6.8 million includes people who identify as having both single-race and multi-racial backgrounds. Those who identify as single-race Native American and Alaskan Native have the highest rate of poverty: 26.6% versus the national average of 14.7%; moreover, this group also has the highest level of people without health insurance—20.7%—versus the national average of 9.4%. 82.7% of Native Americans/Alaskan Natives have at least a high school diploma compared to the national average of 87.1, while 19.1% have a bachelor’s degree versus the national average of 30.6% (Native Americans by the Numbers). 4. Another example would be the 2016 remake of The Legend of Tarzan. 5. See, for example, The Help (2011), Django Unchained (2012), The Butler (2013), Selma (2014), Straight Outta Compton (2015), Loving (2016), Hidden Figures (2016). However, the 2017 Get Out and the 2018 Black Panther films, as well as the Tyler Perry franchise, provide a necessary alternate perspective and portrayal of blackness proving more than popular with contemporary audiences.

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6. The focus on silver in the movie furthers the connection/importance of Marx’s use of reification, namely the dangers of the capitalist society on the proletariat—in this case Native Americans. There is also the suggestion of a connection between Wendigos and werewolves with the use of silver bullets. 7. As Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, “Capitalism can turn anything into a commodity, including memories and amnesia” (p. 13). 8. The New York Times, 1 August, 2017. Movies. 9. Depp took his inspiration for his Tonto from the work of Kirby Sattler, a white artist whose “I am Crow” painting is based on what the artist refers to as his interpretations of Native Americans (my emphasis). 10. The Lone Ranger is not the only Western movie Depp has done; he was cast in Jim Jarmusch’s 1996 film Dead Man where his character William Blake is befriended by a Native American figure named Nobody. 11. Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=danceswithwolves.htm. 12.  Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=pocahontas.htm. 13. Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=smokesignals.htm. 14. B ox Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id= rhymesyoungghouls.htm. 15.  Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=windriver.htm. 16. Ojibway Jesse Wente of the Toronto International Film Festival talked about the film in an interview on Moviefone entitled “Tonto in The Lone Ranger: Racist? Progressive? You Decide.” 17. The current population of Native Americans today is 6.8 million or about 2% of the USA. 18. LaDonna Harris, a Comanche and the founder of Americans for Indian Opportunity, chose to adopt Depp into her family; the adoption was recognized by the Comanche nation chairman, which makes Depp an honorable member of the nation. 19. The unspoken historical specificity of the 1933 setting is the American eugenics project that began in 1907 and, for American Indians, continued until 1979. 20.  Despicable Me 2 and Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain had big opening weekends especially in comparison with cost of production versus weekend ticket sales. 21.  The term “Noble Savage”—long credited to the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—was in fact first used by poet and playwright John Dryden in the seventeenth century and was used in the nineteenth century by a racist anthropologist named John Crawford in his campaign to justify slavery and genocide (Hill).

254  SARAH E. TURNER 22. Depp claims that his portrayal of Tonto was “in [his] own small way, my attempt to right the wrongs of what had been done with regards to the representation of Native Americans in cinema” (NPR: “Does Disney’s Tonto Reinforce Stereotypes or Overcome Them?”). 23. On the original radio show, Tonto was voiced by two white men: John Todd and Roland Parker. 24.  Depp has played characters who challenge stereotypes or work to empower outsiders: the title character in Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). 25. The image of the two men chained together yet working in tandem to save the passengers calls to mind the classic 1958 “interracial buddy film” The Defiant Ones in which Sidney Poitier gives up his freedom in order to “save” Tony Curtis and thus initiates the trope of the “Magical Negro.” 26. In addition to the broken watch that Tonto carries, Latham Cole wears a similar pocket watch and checks it frequently; furthermore, when the owners of the railroad want to reward The Lone Ranger for saving the day, they attempt to give him a pocket watch. Tonto’s broken watch freezes him in an historical moment while the working watches of the various white men signal their connection and role in the present moment as well as the future—a future denied to the historicized and fossilized Native Americans. Tonto’s time has come and gone; this era (and the future) belongs to white men. 27. This exchange is reminiscent of the myth that Manhattan was sold for a handful of beads. 28.  Donald Trump’s use of Pocahontas in reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren has been further complicated lately by her admission that she took a DNA test in 2018 in order to establish her Native American ancestry. Unfortunately for Warren, the decision back-fired; while the test did show that she does in fact have Native American ancestry, her use of a DNA test “angered members of the Native American community and left-leaning Democrats who believe cultural kinship and tribal sovereignty determines Native citizenship, not blood” (Herndon, NYTimes). 29. The fact that Arapaho and Cheyenne writer Tommy Orange chooses to begin his 2018 debut novel There There with a primer in Native American history speaks to the often-invisible and partial status of American Indians in this country. Orange’s second of twelve inter-connected narrative voices, Dene Oxendene, directly connects to my argument. Oxendene wants to make documentaries because, as he says, he “wants to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as it’s seen on the screen” (p. 40). Orange’s novel makes it clear that it is to be read as a response to the all-too-common portrayal of the fossilized or historical Indian image that Hollywood likes to repeat and re-package time after time.

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Works Cited Adler, Jerry. “Is the New Tonto Any Better Than the Old Tonto?” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2013. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/is-the-newtonto-any-better-than-the-old-tonto-4833743/#wIpO4FByk98Ojv03.03. Barnes, Brooks. “Masked Lawman Stumbles at the Gate.” The New York Times, July 8, 2013. Bogado, Aura. “The Good, Bad and Ugly of Marketing ‘The Lone Ranger.’” Colorlines: News for Action, July 3, 2013. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism & Racial Inequality in Contemporary America. Third Edition. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Breznican, Anthony. Entertainment. May 8, 2011. https://ew.com/ article/2011/05/08/johnny-depp-tonto-lone-ranger/. Clement, Nick. “Smoke Signals Film’s Effect 20 Years Later.” Variety. September 26, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/film/news/smole-signals-25-years-later1202959185/. Cummings, Denise K. “‘Accessible Poetry’? Cultural Intersection and Exchange in Contemporary American Indian and American Independent Film.” Studies in American Indian Literature. Series 2, Vol. 13, no. 1, 57–80. Representations of American Indians in Contemporary Narrative Fiction Film (Spring 2001). D’Addario, Daniel. “Johnny Depp’s Tonto Misstep: Race and ‘The Lone Ranger’.” Salon, July 3, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/07/03/johnny_ depps_tonto_misstep_race_and_the_lone_ranger/#.WWJY-0iDHts.email. del Barco, Mandalit. “Does Disney’s Tonto Reinforce Stereotypes or Overcome Them?” NPR Morning Edition, July 2, 2013. Doxtdator, Benjamin. “Opinion: My First-Nations Identity Feels More Like an Absence.” NPR Code Switch, May 30, 2017. Garcia-Navarro, Lulu. “‘Woman Walks Ahead’ Lead Sees a Sea Change for Indigenous People on Film.” NPR Weekend Edition, July 1, 2018. https:// www.npr.org/2018/07/01/624792101/woman-walks-ahead-lead-sees-a-seachange-for-indigenous-people-on-film. Guerrero, Ed. “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties.” In Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara, 237–246. New York: Routledge, 1993. Haney-Lopez, Ian F. “Is the Post in Post-racial the Blind in Colorblind.” Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository: Faculty Scholarship 32, no. 3 (2011): 807–831. Harris, Aisha. “Johnny Depp’s Tonto: Not as Racist as You Might Think: But Still Kind of Racist. Slate’s Culture Blog. July 3, 2013. http://www.slate. com/blogs/browbeat/2013/07/03/johnny_depp_as_tonto_lone_ranger_ movie_pushes_against_racism_but_reinforces.html.

256  SARAH E. TURNER Herdon, Astead W. “Elizabeth Warren Apologizes to Cherokee Nation for DNA Test.” The New York Times, February 1, 2019. www.nytimes.com. Hill, Amelia. “Racists Created the Noble Savage.” The Guardian, April 15, 2001. Ingraham, Christopher, and Heather Long. “The War on Whites is a Myth—And an Ugly One.” The Washington Post, August 14, 2017. Maillard, Kevin Noble. “What’s So Hard About Casting Indian Actors in Indian Roles?” The New York Times, August 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/08/01/movies/wind-river-native-american-actors-casting.html. Marx, Karl. Capital (1867). New York: Penguin, 1992. Mendelson, Scott. “Weekend Box Office: ‘The Lone Ranger’ Tanks While ‘Despicable Me 2’ Scores Huge.” Forbes, July 7, 2013. https://www.forbes. com/sites/scottmendelson/2013/07/07/weekend-box-office-the-loneranger-tanks-while-despicable-me-2-scores-huge/#3ae6ac215015. Moviefone. “Tonto in The Lone Ranger: Racist? Progressive? You Decide.” October 20, 2015. https://www.moviefone.com/news/tag/canada/. “Native Americans By the Numbers.” Infoplease. Sandbox Networks, Inc. July 16, 2018. https://www.infoplease.com/american-indians-numbers-1/. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, 13. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Orange, Tommy. There There. New York: Knopf, 2018. “Radio: The Masked Rider.” Time Magazine, January 14, 1952. Roberts, Molly. “Trump’s Racist Pocahontas Reference Really Has Nothing to Do with Elizabeth Warren.” The Washington Post, November 28, 2017. Opinion Section. Rothman, Lily. “Johnny Depp as Tonto: Is The Lone Ranger Racist?” Time Magazine, July 3, 2013. http://entertainment.time.com/2013/07/03/ johnny-depp-as-tonto-is-the-lone-ranger-racist/. Santo, Avi. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger & Transmedia Brand Licensing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Schilling, Vincent. “Blu Hunt Cast as Native American Lead in Marvel Comics’ New Mutants Movie.” Indian Country Today, June 5, 2017. Scott, A.O. “Never-Ending Story.” New York Times. Arts Section, p. 1, September 29, 2013. Siegel, Tatiana. “Hugh Jackman, Fox’s ‘Part-Time Indian’ Will Be First ‘Culturally Authentic’ Studio Film.” Hollywood Reporter, December 7, 2016. “The Real Problem with a Lone Ranger Movie? It’s the Racism, Stupid.” Indian Country Today, July 8, 2013. https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/ culture/arts-entertainment/the-real-problem-with-a-lone-ranger-movieits-the-racism-stupid/.

CHAPTER 12

Cyborg Woman: Ex Machina and Racial Otherness Tony Magistrale

In her seminal essay on the horror genre, “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams (1996) posits that female protagonists in horror films share a unique relationship with the various forms of monstrosity that populate these films and are placed on display. Indeed, this relationship poses one of the few occasions in cinema where the woman is not merely a fetishized object of the male gaze, but is instead an active presence who is allowed to look (at the monster), and in so doing she establishes “a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing” (p. 20). Williams goes on to consider this unlikely affinity between these two figures who exist, ironically, in opposition to one another in the horror film narrative, suggesting further that the woman and monster actually possess mutual traits that bring them together in the eyes of the traumatized white male hero, thereby increasing his traumatization; for example: their biological freakishness, threatening appetites, frightening potency, and, most important, their otherness as entities separate from and in opposition T. Magistrale (*)  University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_12

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to white patriarchy: “There is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster … is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power” (p. 25). As Robin Wood (1986) has opined, the horror monster stands in opposition to his culture’s dominant ideology. This, in turn, ties the monster to social and cultural anxieties associated with outsiders, women as well as others, who are likewise socially marginalized and exhibit markers of difference. In this chapter that will address Hollywood cyborgs generally, and specifically those that appear in the 2015 film Ex Machina, I would propose broadening the monster-female bond that Williams (1996) recognizes to include a racial component that she doesn’t. By this, I mean that the connection between monster and woman contains as well an implicit racial dimension, either within the otherness inherent in the bond itself or sometimes in an even more explicit acknowledgment. For example, the affinity between the blonde, white woman, and the mythic serial killer in the film Candyman (1992) appears more disruptive and destabilizing because the monster is African American and the issue of miscegenation becomes a defining element of their union.1 In that film, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) finds herself not only obsessed with looking at and looking for the monster Candyman (Tony Todd), but supernaturally connected to him by virtue of being held responsible for crimes he commits. In the passage of her self-mytholization from victim to victimizer and eventual transformation into a female Candyman, Helen finds herself similarly ostracized and persecuted as she wanders a social wasteland in search of redemption. This process occurs in a highly racialized context that forces Helen to experience what it is to be hunted and falsely accused—in other words, to be a black male in racist America. Throughout the horror genre, the other—i.e., characters possessing elements marked as different from the norm (via gender, race, even species) and thereby labelled monstrous and subversive—is discovered to be a core aspect of the self; monster and human, while cast in opposition to each other, nonetheless find shared points of hybridity. In turning Helen into a Candywoman, she haunts her old apartment and pursues violent revenge against her white husband, much as Candyman comes after her. Thus, Helen’s bond with the monster is personalized beyond her professional aspiration for a graduate degree with the Candyman myth as the subject of her research. Monster and woman are more closely aligned than most film scholars are willing to admit.2 Williams’ observation that

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the monster-female affiliation represents an assault on white patriarchy is thereby exacerbated when a racial component is explicitly added, but even in horror cinema where race is often a less obvious presence than it is in Candyman, the issue of exclusion from the mainstream and the otherness of the woman-monster bond presents an analogue to racial ostracism and threat. Horror film often bleeds into other genres to produce compelling subgenres; it has arguably created the most hybrids of any cinema, including film-noir-horror, dystopian-horror, science fiction-horror, detective-horror, comic-parody-horror, and techno-horror, to name some of its most popular amalgamations. Techno-horror film featuring the subject of humanoid cyborgs dates back to Metropolis (1927), but recent fascination with artificial intelligence (A.I.)—e.g., Hollywood’s many adaptations of Philip K. Dick, the various Terminator ­movies, Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), Real Humans (2012–2014), Westworld (2016–), and Ghost in the Shell (2017)—keeps returning to Blade Runner (1982) as prototypical locus: its level of genetic enhancement, ethical ambiguities, even the existence of memory as a defining characteristic linking cyborg to human. Blade Runner explored and expanded beyond several of the ethical ground rules for human/android interaction initially postulated by Isaac Asimov in his “The Three Laws of Robotics” from his 1951 short story “Runaround,” raising moral and philosophical questions to which subsequent narratives dutifully return. Blade Runner asked questions that subsequent A.I. films still have not answered: What does it mean to be human? Do all life forms have a right to self-determination, free will, and dignity? Should cyborgs be considered gendered or raced? As robotics and artificial intelligence grow more acculturated, what changes occur to the relationship between human androids and humans themselves? Are androids the exclusive “property” of those who construct them, and do their human creators possess the right to treat them like any other machine—to exploit and ultimately to destroy them? When does humanly engineered intelligence exhibit enough humanoid traits that it transcends mere machine and can be considered sentient, even sovereign, as it ventures toward becoming “more human than human,” to cite the tagline from Blade Runner? While android sophistication has progressed since the 1982 release of Blade Runner, forcing considerations beyond the original laws raised by Asimov, the human response typically has not. In fact, the inhumanity of humans is put on cinematic display in their frequent acts of violence,

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insensitivity, and bigotry when interacting with artificial life forms. The threat of a race of androids—with their superior intelligence, programmable skills, and physical superiority—inevitably creates anxieties in their human creators who become paranoid about the potential for cyborgs to displace the human race. Many of the most recent android films focus on treating women cyborgs as sexual objects programmed for male enjoyment. However, these films quickly descend into critiques of male desire, as the female machines rebel against their enslavement and the audience empathizes with the droids. Many cyborg films have evolved into moral tales criticizing the sexuality that has been unleashed by new technology. From the Terminator series to Westworld, there are no filmic representations dealing with this subject that peacefully resolve issues such as those raised above between the gendered and racial otherness of the android and the human world in which it must coexist. Ex Machina (2015) is no exception. There is even a moment in the film where the tyrant of technology and the creator of a literal harem of android women, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), remarks to the young software designer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who has won a trip to visit Nathan’s secluded fortress and laboratory, that “One day the A.I.s are gonna look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa: an upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.” This comment proves to be prophetic as the film tracks a literal slave rebellion that ends up releasing Nathan’s most advanced android, Ava (Alicia Vikander), out into the world after she helps to murder Nathan and leaves Caleb entombed inside Nathan’s fortress. Moreover, his comment likewise exposes another terror anchored by the weight of feminist and/ or racist narratives: the gendered or racial signifier of monstrosity eventually overwhelming a white male population, either by sheer numbers or in superior genetics. Following in the footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein, Nathan considers himself a man-god who imposes this conceit on Caleb from at the very start of their week together, misinterpreting and hyperbolizing Caleb’s early compliment about the technological skill that went into the construction of Ava and elevating it into an acknowledgment of his own godhead. Like the setting for the final third of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,3 Nathan separates himself from the rest of human society by inhabiting a cold, Arctic-like location (the film was shot in Norway), a place of formidable remoteness where snow and ice cover a vast stretch of his property even during what appears to be the summer season. His

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wooded grounds are boundless and serve to emphasize his wealth and power throughout the film. The director, Alex Garland, has described the importance of Nathan’s estate: “We knew that if we found a really spectacular landscape, the landscape would provide a lot of power to the guy. If he owns this landscape, it would be implicit” (Through the Looking Glass: “8 Behind-the-Scenes-Vignettes” 2015). If Nathan conducts himself as a god-like figure, his house resembles a geek’s version of the Garden of Eden, replete with an endless array of expensive alcoholic libations; fresh sushi prepared by Kyoto (Sonoya Mizuno), his Asian android chef; a hermetically sealed inner sanctum devoid of windows; an elaborate central computer system with constant closed-circuit television monitoring that allows him absolute control over what takes place in his home’s interior; and a sexually accessible harem of naked female cyborgs. The unnatural nature of Nathan’s ambitions is highlighted in the spare glass and hospital-white sterility of his “research facility” that stands in stark contrast to the spectacularly lush green forests, meadows, and waterfalls that immediately surround the fortress. The house is a combination laboratory and an extension of Nathan’s paranoid and pleasure-seeking personae, but most of all it is a high-tech prison— replete with glass-enclosed cells—where each android female is consigned to perpetual solitary confinement. Thus, Nathan emerges as a hubristic representative of the ­patriarchy: a combination of God the Father, working in solitude to create sequential renditions of his Ava/Eve in a quest to build the perfectly designed woman who will also be the archetype of a new race and species, and Adam, the only man who gets to experience sexually successive generations of these females. It slowly becomes clear in Ex Machina that Nathan’s quest to advance robotics has several hidden agendas that expand beyond his scientific wizardry at evolving computer circuitry, “Bluebook” software search engines, structured gel, and plastics into a convincing artificial human. His flippant remark to Caleb that Ava is equipped with a vaginal “opening” containing “a concentration of sensors—you engage them the right way, creates a pleasure response,” is the first of several instances meant to alert the viewer to Nathan’s truest quest: to create objects of pleasure for himself, sexual pleasure in particular. When Caleb discovers the secret videos of Nathan engaged in sexual acts and opens closets that reveal the nude torsos of various female androids Nathan has manufactured, it becomes clear that Nathan cares far less about the scientific or financial impact of his work than he

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does about the opportunity to indulge his pornographic imagination. (Perhaps more accurately, it is impossible for Nathan to separate his scientific hubris from his pornographic imagination, as they inspire each other. While there is a strong suggestion that Ava has been deliberately constructed to appeal to Caleb’s “pornographic preferences,” it is also apparent that the other females from Nathan’s laboratory reflect his own fetish for multiracial women. Thus, the film refuses to uncouple Nathan’s evolution as a robotic designer from his own sexual predisposition toward Black and especially Asian women.) If Nathan’s pornographic attraction toward these female androids sounds auto-erotic, even masturbatory, it is because his collection of cyborgs is the closest he can get to having sex with a female extension of himself, and thus indulge fully his aberrant narcissism. While most of the women in his “shop” are lifeless—bodies ­hanging limp in individual coffin-closets—the secret computer video Caleb uncovers reveals a disturbing sequence where a naked Asian android named Jade (Gana Bayarsaikhan) is recorded pounding against the solid glass walls of her cell, scarring the glass with her fists, splintering her mechanical hands into bare stumps of wires and plastic, and shrieking repeatedly, “Why won’t you let me out?” Caleb is appropriately horrified by the contents of Nathan’s surveillance storage; in his dual roles as the creator and jailor of these females, Nathan has put himself in a position to expand and refine the imposed bondage of sexual slavery that women have been forced to endure throughout history. And his justification is a similar argument that continues to enslave women of all races: These androids are his legal property, mere machines, and therefore exist without rights. Likewise, it is no oversight that his machines are gendered exclusively female. We gain deep insight into Nathan’s sexist and racist attitude when Kyoto accidentally spills Caleb’s glass of wine at the dinner table. Not only is she solely responsible for preparing the meal that the two white men consume, she is not permitted to join them at the table. And after she spills the beverage, Kyoto is upbraided brutally by her master. She serves as his maid, his dancing partner, his lover, his slave— whatever role he decides, she must assume—but it is always from the position of satisfying his immediate needs. The fact that Nathan insists on such degrees of seclusion and secrecy in his locked and windowless laboratory where he has spent way too much time alone, even forcing Caleb to sign an elaborate nondisclosure contract, suggests that he is aware he is performing acts that might well be perceived as morally

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reprehensible, risking his reputation as the corporate CEO of a highly successful business and even his legal status, as there exists hard evidence he is holding these women against their will.4 This explains why he is so turned on by his project but also paranoid about keeping it secret. Nathan knows he has reached a point in his research where Ava is ready for the Turing Test to prove she has convincingly made the transition from machine to human. However, he has no friends of his own to trust with administering this test; he has to rely upon a stranger who is also a young, impressionable, male employee, and whose complicity is thereby more easily manipulated. But there never is any indication that Nathan is preparing to introduce his android to the larger world; in fact, quite the opposite, as he anticipates yet another cyborg evolution, “the next model after Ava … part of a continuum,” that will be implanted with elements of Ava’s body and soon-to-be-disassembled brain. All of his individual androids remain in enforced separation—Ava admits that Caleb is the first new person she has ever met and that she has never been out of her cell until she makes her escape at the end of the film. Kyoto has been programmed without the ability to speak or to understand English, ostensibly to protect “trade secrets.” The android women are imprisoned, objectified, placed under continual surveillance, and silenced. Nathan and Caleb collude in private conversations about Ava in her absence. This effectively renders her silent as a character, by speaking about and for her, as if she were only a highly functioning machine—a car or an airplane—and her opinion was of no consequence. There exists a disconnect between Nathan and Caleb and the cyborgs who are without personhood in their white male hierarchy. As Helen Lewis (2015) has observed, “the film [is] a deconstruction of male power fantasies … It doesn’t occur to either of [the men] that Ava might have thoughts and feelings—an interior life of her own—to which they have no access.” Silencing the individual and the collective voices of women is integral to the framework of patriarchy; it is a major feature of certain types of pornography that play into the male-centered fantasy of female containment and sexual abuse (bondage, sadomasochism); and it is also a crucial component in the oppression of racial otherness, helping to maintain the disempowerment of nonwhite (and nonhuman) women. Nothing about Nathan’s designs are random. He has been careful to make certain that there are no more than two animated women androids functioning in the fortress at the same time—the rest hang deactivated in storage—and neither of these women possesses her own key card to

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open doors nor the ability to gain access to the house’s many computers. In short, Nathan’s wealth, reputation, and skills at constructing artificial intelligence make it possible for him to indulge an elaborate private sexualized drama at the expense of the artificial women he keeps in bondage. His female androids are all beautiful and sexualized; like Pris in Blade Runner,5 Nathan’s women are “basic pleasure models” who “know how to fuck,” as he acknowledges proudly to Caleb. Nathan has not only given birth to his women cyborgs; he has likewise modelled their personalities and body shapes upon a sexist and stereotypical femininity. Yet, in this capacity he has not been entirely successful. Although his androids all conform to conventional standards of feminine beauty, the closer to human agency that each generation attains, the more advanced her level of self-consciousness; ironically, as Nathan’s women evolve as artificial intelligence, feeding his scientific hubris, the less likely they are to remain passive sex objects, thereby threatening his dominant alpha-male ­sexuality. As Ava tells him prior to her escape, “How does it feel to have created something that hates you?” His A.I.s are shown evolving over time, but Nathan himself never does. Nathan’s relationship with Caleb echoes the former’s relationship with women; in fact, Caleb, while neither a cyborg nor female, is nevertheless treated as one as his speech, movement, and behavior are closely monitored by Nathan. Like the cyborg women, Caleb possesses limited access to the house, his conversations with his boss are reinterpreted, interrupted, and continually redirected. While Ava is the object of the male gaze throughout the film, Caleb is also put on display as Nathan subjects them both to a series of sessions and tests that are all recorded visually (and sometimes audibly) and subject to review by Nathan. In contrast to the hyper-masculine Nathan (weight lifter, boxer, muscled), Caleb appears androgynous and feminized (blond, beardless, slight of build). Like the cyborgs themselves, Caleb serves the will of Nathan. He is told what to do and how to feel; for example, Nathan demands that Caleb respond to Ava not in technological terms, “nothing analytical,” but as she stimulates his “feelings.” From the moment of his arrival, Caleb is feminized in all of his interactions with Nathan; this helps to explain why he empathizes so quickly and completely with Ava’s situation and contributes to her rebellion by devising a potential escape plan for them both. Caleb’s role, then, mirrors the cyborgs who live under Nathan’s watchful eye to the point where, like them, he is even physically assaulted by Nathan. Caleb comes so thoroughly to identify with

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the women surrounding him that he feels compelled at one point to examine himself in his bedroom mirror, checking his eye sockets, mouth, and cutting his own skin to reassure himself that he is still human and not mechanical. At the end of the movie when Caleb is trapped in his own cell, he pounds on the door and tries to break through it with the same panicked desperation found in Jade’s earlier file tape. And similar to the status of the androids themselves, he is depicted as an outsider—an extension of their Otherness—who is manipulated by both Nathan and Ava, the latter convincing Caleb of her helplessness and need to be saved so that the two of them might then actualize the dream of a romantic “date” together. Caleb turns out to be the most traditionally feminized and racialized figure in the film as he assumes a “naturally” submissive and subservient position to the machinations of both Nathan and Ava.6 Images and technological representation so thoroughly pervade contemporary lives that much of what passes as reality every day is actually a simulacrum for the real. The cyborg is arguably the most convincing and complex of all simulacra, a promise of the future that appears to be getting closer every day. Yet, while the android points the way to the future with its ever more compelling humanoid portrayals, Hollywood’s projections of A.I. speak as much or more to the past—at least in terms of portraying issues of gender and race—than to the future, as much about what was and still is, as to what will be. Despite the scientific sophistication behind its development, the otherness of the A.I. race typically affords humans with the license to treat these machines as less than human, thereby providing a veiled metaphor for historical marginalization as it occurs in acts of racial exclusion. As David Golumbia (1995–1996) reminds us, “Being a member of any ‘other’ race … means that one’s character and characteristics are largely determined by one’s membership in that race” (p. 87). The human, if we translate Golumbia’s argument into a cyborg lexicon, occupies a privileged position similar to whiteness as the unmarked norm, while the android is exposed as the racial other, defined by its inherent confusion of boundaries and difference. This confusion of boundaries suggests that the cyborg crosses over into the realm of the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva (1982) since it is the android’s very humanness that is called into question. Furthermore, the android is as artificial and blatantly constructed as any definition of race or gender, which makes the futuristic cyborg an ironic exemplar of the past, as marginalized as any group that has not been allotted full-personhood status in a dominant culture. Malini Johar Schueller (2005) makes explicit

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the nexus between cyborg and nonwhite female: “Just as the cyborg is a fusion of human and machine, a monstrous and illegitimate fusion, so, the argument goes, is the constituency of women of color, forged as it is without identity” (p. 81). Since so many A.I.-centered plotlines revolve around cyborgs that are gendered female, sci-fi films that feature them often include genderrelevant issues similar to those I have explored so far in this chapter. Because of the frequent acts of violence (sexualized and otherwise) perpetrated against female cyborgs, viewers and feminist critics have ­ rightly focused on the multiple gender issues that are identifiable within these films. But typically, because the long history of A.I. in literature and film presents a colorblind narrative, the feminist critique chooses to treat race as peripheral to discussions of gender politics; race, at least when dealing with the cyborg genre, is not central to or an important part of reevaluating sexual politics.7 In other words, class, race, and even nation are all subsumed within the construction of the gendered android body. Abby Wilkerson (1997) goes as far as to wonder cynically “whether many white feminists have enthusiastically taken up the cyborg myth precisely because of what it does not say about race” (p. 170). Over the years, Hollywood has incorporated race into the android genre without explicitly mentioning it. The analogy of gender presented in so many A.I. texts parallels the struggle of any other marginalized group in their effort to find legitimation and identity. In truth, the female cyborg frequently journeys down a personal and psychological path that resembles that of the female protagonist in works by Black women writers, becoming, as Mary Helen Washington (1980) identifies, “part of an evolutionary spiral, moving from victimization to consciousness” (p. 43). Therefore, a racial presence is an implicit construct in this genre—even in films from which race seems totally irrelevant—if only because the android is always representative of an entity marked as other than human. Indeed, the divided body of the cyborg, posits Margaret Rose (2015), offers an analogue to racial demarcation: “The maintenance of the strict division between human and machine is tied to the scientific racism inherent in the construction of cultural identity” (p. 1193). The android thus conflates issues relevant to both gender and race despite the fact that the audience is typically encouraged to view race as an absent signifier because the visualized robotic object tends to be human in appearance, resembling us in size, anatomy, language usage, sexuality, and disposition. But just as significant, the Hollywood cyborg

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film has also tended to privilege whiteness—and particularly beautiful, middle-class white females—in its hierarchy of ontologies. In Ex Machina, however, the conflation of race and gender is more visually demonstrable and therefore not so easily overlooked; while the film may begin with an emphasis on gender politics, it soon enlarges to include and incorporate important racial components. Ava’s efforts to pass as a human bear close similarity to that of a racial minority’s desire for acceptance and coexistence amidst a racial majority. Furthermore, Nathan’s libido appears to be demarcated exclusively along ­heterosexual, but racially diverse lines. While females are the exclusive sex ­constructed in his laboratory, his in-house storage facility reveals androids representing a range of racial variations: Asian, African, a Caucasian ­ blonde and brunette. The viewer is encouraged to speculate that whenever Nathan feels like having interracial intercourse, he simply builds a nonwhite machine, thereby obtaining the double eroticism of choosing a racially marked human female whose identity is further complicated in the awareness of having sex with a nonhuman entity that he himself has constructed. His warehouse of female parts permits him to troll for an exotic virtually real pornographic experience made all the more erotic because of its exotic range of interracial extrapolation, traversing various races within the human species as well as potential variances available in the nonhuman. This is Dr. Frankenstein two hundred years later, with a Ph.D. in biomechanics and an advanced sexual fetish for multiracial robotic women.8 Nathan’s pursuits in Ex Machina are therefore misogy­ nistic and racist, often both at the same time. While his pornographic imagination is stimulated by multiracial females, his physical and psychological abuse, particularly against Asian droids, indicates his antipathy toward women in general, but especially toward women he views as racially inferior.9 Nathan may well appreciate immodestly the miraculous innovations that resulted in the production of his female cyborgs, but his ­scientific racism never wavers beyond viewing them as live-action sex dolls, as domestic servants, as exotic women of color, as disposable machines. In this way, Nathan resembles less the innovative technological god than the imperialist who has once again colonized an entire race (of women), duplicating the historical structure of white male hegemony controlling the fates of yellow, black, and Caucasian bodies. Because Nathan’s ­colonization includes penetration that crosses over into interracial rape, domination, and aggressive sadism, Ex Machina takes us to a place where

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Andrea Dworkin’s (1987) sensational claim that heterosexual intercourse is inherently an act of occupation and colonization by a hostile force (p. 63) gains plausibility. Although Nathan maintains his assemblage of android women as private stock, the fact that he has brought together a “global” racial collection of female representations for purposes of sexual exploitation ultimately implicates him in the vast network of underground sex “traffic in women” that occurs around the world, from the United States to Europe to the far East. As was the case when a white male slave owner chose to exercise his sexual will over African-American women living on his plantation, the races of Nathan’s A.I. women are given no choice but to submit to their master’s will, sexual and otherwise, as Caleb discovers in the taped episode where Nathan is recorded assembling and assaulting a nude black android, dragging her by her ankles from room to room (identified as Jasmine [Symara Templeman] on the tape and in the credits). A slave had no legitimate will of her own; in the eyes of the law, she belonged bodily to her owner. The cyborg thus faces the identical problem as the black slave: just as the rights of personhood are invalidated when a human is turned into a thing, when a thing is turned into a human, its status changes accordingly. The sexual complications portrayed in Ex Machina thus become racialized complications as well since the film revisits one of the terrible fears that still haunts America: the fear of miscegenation raised exponentially as the sex in this film is not only interracial, it is also interspecies. While Nathan’s women represent different human races and cultures and may not necessarily understand the same language, in the process of acquiring more and more human characteristics, they share an objection to their common exploitation—sexual, racial, domestic, temporal, intellectual, and emotional—and a similar declaration to be free of their master. Nathan’s murder is occasioned by the cross-racial collusion that takes place between Ava and Kyoto. The two women break through their imposed cultural and linguistic barriers when Ava is somehow able to communicate with Kyoto. Although it remains undeveloped in the film, Ava forms a connection with Kyoto most likely based on mutual sympathy. When Nathan finds them together, Ava is whispering conspiratorially in Kyoto’s ear while gently holding her hand. Indeed, in a scene prior to the bonding moment that occurs between these two women, Kyoto presents herself visually to Ava for the first time when she wanders into her cell without invitation or clear explanation. The film’s implication, however, is that the Asian cyborg is deliberately searching for contact

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with someone other than Nathan, and that she may be seeking specifically the company of another woman and/or cyborg. Kyoto is the first to stab Nathan in the back with the same knife that she uses to slice his sushi, an appropriate act of betrayal and punishment against a man who possessed neither an allegiance to nor respect for women, followed by Ava’s own knife thrust into his chest. As the anonymous blogger from the site Feministing.com noted wryly, “One can fairly say that Ava and Kyoto killed God the Father in order to be free. One only regrets that Kyoto did not live to run off hand-in-hand with Ava” (“Goddess” 2017). It is worth noting that while the film suggests a collusion between Kyoto and Ava, it also privileges Ava in allowing her to survive while Kyoto is destroyed. Ava is racially coded as an archetypical Aryan (Alicia Vikander is a Swedish actress), while Kyoto is clearly representative of Asian descent and her role in the film affirms stereotypes of Asian women’s exotic sexuality, passivity, and servitude. Even as these two cyborgs unite in their aggression against a common male oppressor, unwittingly or not, the movie grants more authority to Ava as a European Caucasian whose sex scenes with Nathan—which Ava implies were more rape than pleasure—take place offscreen and therefore are never visualized for the audience; Kyoto is the android who is shown actively occupying the role of Nathan’s sex slave and domestic servant. His treatment of Kyoto as his house servant and erotic dance partner underscores Nathan’s adherence to a stereotyped view of Asian women as purveyors of sushi and the sexual exotic. Even as the film illustrates that Nathan’s harem of androids is multiracial, he is shown exploiting Asian women more extensively than any other race. In his interaction with Jade on the file tape, he tries to justify holding her against her will because he considers her “special,” and his contact with Kyoto is far more visually intimate and sexual than we see with Ava or any of the other women. This reflects less on Nathan’s preference for the company of Asian females than his psychosexual attraction to turning them into exhibitionist objects, fetishizing their racial uniqueness, or, at worst, aggressively mastering their racial difference via sadistic punishment. Nathan’s fetishized collection of A.I. bodies is certainly unnerving to behold; however, they are not merely slabs of female meat from a slasher film. These inert racialized bodies are also employed against their creator to aid Ava in her bid for freedom, and they thereby reverse their colonization and become vehicles for subversive empowerment. Just as Kyoto’s self-sacrifice initiates Ava’s escape, Ava also receives help from

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Nathan’s other women when she “reconfigures” herself from their various anatomical components. This is a literal action, but it also takes on deep metaphorical significance as Ava essentially completes her own selfconstruction from a racial mosaic of android females—especially the Asian cyborg who donates her synthetic skin and left arm—that have been sexually exploited, subjugated, and sacrificed before her, and are now at least present visually to pay witness to Ava’s act of emancipation.10 Ava appropriates the identities and body parts from the various races and histories of A.I. women who have preceded her, bringing together physically as well as symbolically the females Nathan has warehoused to rebuild and finish herself in an act of transgressive self-definition. Ava thereby usurps Nathan’s power of design and control and claims them for herself; she participates in what Donna Haraway (1991) praises as the subversive coalition of hybrid cyborgs “synthesized from fusions of outsider identities” (p. 174). Ava’s self-branding is based on women whose bodies and quests for liberation have been thwarted, just as feminism and the civil rights movement advanced in successive waves and through the sacrifice of individual women representing different races and cultures whose historical legacies paved the way for hard-won freedoms enjoyed by future generations. The film lingers over a naked Ava examining herself in multiple mirrors after she has completed her android-to-human transformation. These mirrors signify her multiple selves—that her “humanness” is a hybrid composite of parts from the varied-raced females who reside inside each of the individual hidden “coffins” directly behind these mirrors. Like the hybrid creature in Frankenstein, Ava reanimates these female corpses, finding new life in the assemblage of their individual parts. What she views in her own self-reflections becomes ultimately a layered feminine anatomy, a body of diverse surfaces laid one upon the other, where singularity and difference dissolve in the images mirrored back, a multiracial mosaic inhabiting the same body. Additionally, it is evident that Ava obtains great pleasure in looking at herself reflected back through the mirrors. It is likely that this is the first time she is provided the freedom to appreciate what she looks like, especially in light of so recently completing her visual metamorphosis from machine hybrid into human female. As Garland posits in Through the Looking Glass (2015): “The real underlying story is about a machine becoming human, or at least a machine becoming equal to a human and then, arguably, better and more interesting.” What begins as a purely physical transformation takes

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on deep emotional resonance as the image Ava perceives looking back at herself in the mirror is that of a human female, no longer pure machine. She luxuriates in the recognition that she now possesses a physical image that matches her self-identification; her outside self now conforms to her inner self. We see early evidence of Ava’s racial anxiety as she seeks to advance her own transition from machine to human in “practice runs” performed in front of Caleb. When the latter is first introduced to Ava, the back of her head appears as a bald metallic plate that emphasizes her robotic condition, while her arms, lower torso, and legs seem composed of elongated transparent tubing tinted blue.11 However, as she gets to know Caleb, she designs a Turing Test of her own: Modelling dresses, white stockings, and a short black wig meant to disguise completely her appearance as a machine. Part of this effort is to seduce Caleb (“Do you want to be with me?”) by encouraging him to identify her as a human female. But she is also dressing self-consciously in preparation for her escape attempt, downplaying her status as a droid while promoting her identification with the human race. The Turing Test was designed to distinguish human from machine: is a human tester capable of recognizing a highly advanced cyborg? Humans designed the test, set the criteria for passing, and both administer and evaluate its results. The android must therefore prove itself in order to gain human status. All of this establishes and affirms a definite hierarchy that is analogous to racist distinctions that rely on bloodlines and ethnic percentages imposed by an external hegemonic force; the Turing Test is, essentially, another device for racist demarcation and exclusion. Ex Machina undermines the principles that support such criteria. Ironically, Ava passes the test by committing a violation of a core Asimov robotic prohibition by attacking and harming humans; no mere machine would dare transgress such an approbation. By the end of the film, the audience (and perhaps Caleb as well) finds itself responding to Ava as human female. The reasons why this occur have as much to do with Ava’s exercise in self-agency as they do with her physical appearance. In other words, Ava passes the Turing Test because she acts out of a belief in her humanness. Ava seeks Caleb’s validation when she asks, “How do I look?”, but she is likewise participating in the celebratory myth that Haraway (1991) associates with the cyborg’s ability to blur the traditional binaries that have sustained Western cultural hierarchies and uncover the “pleasure in the confusion of [these] boundaries” (p. 150). Ava is only

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truly permitted to realize Haraway’s sense of “pleasure”; however, after she connects with the other imprisoned female androids, blending her identity with their core racial identifiers—skin, hair, and individual body parts—and appropriating as well the white dress shown hanging on another closeted cyborg. Ava’s “passing” bears a close analogy both to the experiences of offspring of different races as well as transgendered people seeking identification through what Robert Young (1992) calls “a doubleness that both brings together [and] fuses” (p. 22). Moreover, her obvious self-satisfaction with the results is individualized and personal, and occurs beyond the authority of the male gaze. (Note the irony inherent in the pleasure she receives observing herself standing naked in contrast to the video evidence of Nathan’s torturing and assaulting other nude androids.) The final stage of Ava’s transformation from robot into human female is the result of a bizarre multiethnic sisterhood, but Ava’s connection to each of these other females serves to complicate and dilute her Aryan whiteness at the same time as it subverts her passive femininity.12 In applying these non-binary actions to and by herself and without patriarchal permission, Ava refuses to be bound to a static identity that a man has chosen for her; she rewrites the rules in the game of identity and identification. Her transition, both to be rid of Nathan and to pass as human, is finalized through her own bold quest for independence. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, Ava demands more life, a better life, and it is perhaps at this moment where she transcends the racial binary separating human from nonhuman, when the machine makes a conscious decision that she will not allow herself to be “switched off.” The film’s title is a half reference derived from the Greek and Roman theatrical convention—Deus ex machina—literally, the God in the machine, employed to resolve dramatic conflict in tragedies and to demonstrate the involvement of gods in the affairs of human mortals. The “Deus” is deliberately excluded from the film’s title because in the case of this particular “machina,” her god becomes an impediment to her narrative’s outcome; he must be jettisoned for Ava to reach her own independent resolution outside the imposition of her creator’s design— in other words, the “machina” is able to ameliorate her existential status only after she has toppled the “Deus” that created her. Because of the contagious excitement that Ava emotes at the conclusion of Ex Machina, one issue that has gone largely unexamined by film critics and audiences alike is the extent to which Ava is representative

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of the affinity Linda Williams (1996) observes between monster and woman, especially in light of the fact that she comes to possess a d ­ eviant body sutured together from the fabric of race, gender, and sexuality. Following Judith Halberstam’s (1995) definition of monstrosity, Ava “inspires fear and desire for the other, fear and desire for the possibly latent perversity lurking within the [viewer] herself” (p. 13). In the scene where Ava examines herself in the multiple mirrors, her celebratory look at her own self-recognition would seem to reverse what Williams argues as the visual identification between woman and monster. Rather than viewing her own monstrosity reflected back, what Ava sees produces in her neither repulsion nor fear. Whatever was once monstrous about her “impure” body has been displaced or subsumed underneath a ­humanoid exterior. If Ava is in possession of a monstrous affinity in this singular moment of triumph, it is in the act of usurping masculine control, thereby becoming ominous and threatening. That said, Ava murders Nathan in cold blood and then refuses to liberate Caleb from his entrapment at the end of the film, leaving him helplessly imprisoned presumably to die a slow death from starvation. Ava uses her sexuality and femininity to entrap Caleb, employing them to enflame male desire. After manipulating Caleb successfully with her honed “misdirection skills,” she could surely release him after Nathan’s demise without jeopardizing her own journey to freedom. Instead, Ava insists that Caleb remains locked inside a room after she switches off the facility’s power; had she allowed him free access to the house, he could follow her out the front door, which Caleb earlier reprogrammed to remain open once the power is cut off. In other words, Caleb’s murder is a premeditated act, and it evinces no bond of empathy (as we perceive unfold between Kyoto and Ava) between Ava as a former captive and Caleb as her prisoner. While Nathan’s murder emerges as entirely justifiable in the context of a living organism’s drive for self-preservation, Caleb’s fate is mostly the result of collateral damage, a prime illustration of what Martin Luther King Jr. warned about injustice dehumanizing not just the oppressed but likewise the oppressor. Although these issues complicate our response to Ava’s character, they do not set the film in conflict with itself because of the abuse Ava and her fellow cyborgs experience via Nathan’s puppet mastery; her heroic emancipation tends to override these other concerns, especially in light of the film’s sympathy for her as a gendered and racialized symbol of oppression. Like Nat Turner’s slave rebellion or women who rise up to kill abusive spouses,

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Kyoto and Ava pursue violence because it is the only recourse available for asserting their humanity in the face of racial and sexual tyranny. That Ava exits Nathan’s fortress fully cognizant of Caleb’s impending doom is perhaps a sobering reminder that she is unable to divorce her e­ volving humanness totally from her mechanical origins. On the other hand, Ava’s ability to walk away so coolly from the trapped Caleb may be the best evidence the film offers that she has passed the Turing Test. Her ­humanness, after all, has been programmed by Nathan; is it therefore any wonder that she is capable of making an emotionless break from both Caleb and her past? In one of her sessions with Caleb, Ava is asked where she would go if permitted to leave her glassed-in cell. Her response is a wish to visit “a busy traffic intersection … to provide a constant but shifting view of human life.” This choice is far more than a continuation of her training to mimic the mannerisms of the human race; it instead reflects Ava’s compulsion to become an integral part of that race, to be accepted as a human woman in the world. Her urge is to do what Nathan’s other androids are forever denied—to move beyond the enslaved and coffined and “traffic” openly with other people and other races at the literal “intersection” of human life. It is a desire for hybridity and acceptance, where boundaries are transgressed and identity categories merge, that Nathan has thwarted in dictating the sequestration and dismantling of successive generations of android women. When Caleb admits that he himself is in no in danger of being “turned off,” Ava challenges his secure complacency by insisting on the same right. Donna Haraway (1991) extols the cyborg as an evolutionary being that manages to transcend reductive categories of race and gender, pointing the way to the future of humankind, a “hybrid of machine and organism … resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (pp. 149, 151). This represents the range of contradictory evidence the audience possesses about Ava as she exits Ex Machina, a version of what Karlene Faith (1993) defines as “an unruly woman,” a figure of contradiction and defiance “who rejects authority which would subjugate her and make her docile. She is the offensive woman who acts in her own interests. She is the unmanageable woman who claims her own body” (p. 1). While Faith’s use of the term is employed strictly as a gendered trope to highlight female resistance in the face of patriarchal control, Ava expands her own “unruliness” to include, but also to extend beyond, gender and into

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the ethics of race. For Ava’s self-definition is not merely reflective of a woman subverting male authority, but it is also that of an android defying binary racial barriers that identify her as nonhuman; in its place, she issues a demand for human dignity, including all the attendant rights, especially the pursuit of happiness, that accompany being a member of the human race. In this way, Ava is unique among the majority of A.I. females (and Hollywood’s representations of women in general) insofar as she contradicts Mulvey’s (1975) insistence that the cinematic female is “tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not a maker of meaning” (p. 717). Her struggle serves as a triumphant metaphor for anyone who has been denied racial or gender acceptance. One of the few moments in the film where Ava expresses genuine happiness occurs at the end when she walks up the stairs and out the door of Nathan’s windowless fortress attired in a pure white dress, the signature symbol of the American women’s suffrage movement from early in the twentieth century, a female cyborg who also identifies with being a newly liberated human being, striking her way into morning’s color and light.13

Notes





1. The threat of miscegenation is also motivation for racial violence in the film Get Out (2017) where über-friendly bourgeois whites reveal a hidden agenda that lurks just beneath their liberal facades. As in Candyman, black male bodies are both objects of fear and targets for white aggression. 2. Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, for example, in their essay, “How much did you pay for this place?” (2000), focus on the importance of place as a racial signifier in Candyman, but fail to discuss both the omnipresence of the Sears Tower in Chicago as a reference point for class and racial separation as well as the fact that Helen is able to transverse white and black-coded spaces once she is forced to establish her identification with Candyman. Although more interested in connecting Helen’s character to depictions of the archaic mother as defined by Julia Kristeva (1982) and Barbara Creed (1993), Andrea Kuhn does offer the provocative speculation that Candyman’s deeds are actually Helen’s fantasies, “making both the Candyman and Helen protagonists in the woman’s dream” (para. 41). 3.  As closely as Ex Machina resembles Frankenstein, its more profound debt is to Stanley Kubrick, most notably his work in The Shining (1980), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and, of course, A.I. (2001). Alex Garland, Ex Machina’s director, and Oscar Isaac, the actor who played Nathan, have

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both acknowledged the influence of Kubrick on their collaboration. Isaac modeled his character after Kubrick himself “because he’s someone who was mysterious and powerful and incredibly smart and who I think is a genius” (Taylor). Kubrick’s influence on Garland’s film is perhaps most apparent in their mutual fascination with creating both natural and domestic spaces devoid of human presence; both directors extol filmmaking that is stripped of human emotion and bordering on technological fetishism. Nathan’s promiscuous sex acts with female droids are not very far removed from the dispassionate scenes of anonymous sexual intercourse that take place in the suburban masquerade that represents the climax of Eyes Wide Shut. Like Jack Torrance, who becomes so isolated within himself that he prefers the ghosts that haunt his imagination to the life-affirming relationship he could have with his family, Nathan loses both his humanity and social self in the pursuit of his erotic robotics. Closely resembling Kubrick’s “clockwork men”—Alex, Torrance, Dr. Harford—Nathan is equally ensnared within his own psyche, obsessed with indulging a universe of deep, growling desires. Trapped in an interiorized psychosexuality that usurps everyday normality, Nathan joins Kubrick’s wayward husbands into the uncharted and dangerous territory of unleashed libidinous urges. 4. As Garland opines in Through the Looking Glass (2015): “The question is whether she [Ava] has a consciousness and I think pretty quickly the audience begins to feel that maybe she does. [If so,] then the machine starts having the same kinds of rights that we do. If you are i­mprisoning the machine, and the machine doesn’t want to be in prison, then it suddenly turns into an ethical question”. 5. It is worth noting how often the cyborg film presents women who are highly sexualized constructions of gender stereotypes. Not surprisingly, there is no similar exploitation for male droids, who are usually depicted inhabiting warrior bodies (such as Roy [Rutger Hauer] in Blade Runner), or that of a desexualized scientist (such as Ash [Ian Holm], the robot in Alien [1979], or David [Michael Fassbender] the A.I. in Alien: Covenant [2017]). As Angela Watercutter opines, “Sentient male androids want to conquer or explore or seek intellectual enlightenment; female droids may have the same goals, but they always do it with a little bit of sex appeal, or at least in a sexy package … as if the package is the only way to deliver these qualities” (2017). In Blade Runner, the sexual objectification of women is a major element in the film. All the replicant/cyborgs in this movie—Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah), and Rachel (Sean Young)—are defined in terms of their attractive bodies; furthermore, their clothing choices, use of dramatic femme fatale makeup, and overall appearances are highly sexualized. Tyrell’s subversion of motherhood and

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position as patriarchal robotic designer provide only sexualized and sexist roles to which the female characters identify. In the series Westworld, the character Maeve (Thandie Newton) plays an android host prostitute in the Wild West who, like many of her fellow robots in the program, is part of the theme park where wealthy patrons are willing to pay in order to live out their darkest fantasies, the majority of them blurring sex and violence. Like Blade Runner, Westworld centers on themes of violence and sexuality, and both are often played out on the bodies of women. Similarly, Major (Scarlett Johansson) in Ghost in the Shell wears only a milky-white latex bodysuit that provides her with tremendous freedom of movement while also completely revealing the details of her anatomy. One can trace analogous objectification in the women of Ex Machina, who appear naked (the hanging female torsos and those pictured in the videos Caleb observes), corseted in form-exposing tank tops and tight dresses with high stiletto heels (Ava), or scantily clothed (Kyoto) in short, silky-flowing garments accessorized with black high heels. 6. Although cast as a more sympathetic character than Nathan, Caleb is a version of the “soft core” side of patriarchal control; he still projects onto women a similar single-dimensionality as his boss. The film provides enough evidence to suggest that Caleb covertly envies his older employer, standing in awe especially of his financial freedom and biomechanical genius. Although Caleb may be repulsed by the sexual sadism Nathan exhibits toward his female droids, Caleb is far from an enlightened alternative. While Nathan exploits women for his own sexual pleasure and to reaffirm his superiority to them, the naïve Caleb idealizes women as helpless victims in desperate need of male rescue. In both cases, the men view themselves as intrepid figures while women are assumed to lack neither enough intelligence nor self-agency to affect self-rescue. To this end, the chaste Caleb plays the role of the patronizing white knight who would save and set free the imperiled maiden so that he might in turn possess her for himself. Ava is, after all, the physical avatar of Caleb’s pornographic preferences, but as the surprise ending of the film underscores, he neither fits what she wants in a mate nor to be part of her future. Indeed, Ava’s rebellion turns out to be not only against Nathan and Caleb; it is also against the anticipations of the audience, those viewers conditioned to identify with the priorities of the cinematic male hero and who are likewise sympathetic to a harmonious heterosexual union as the resolution to gender discord. Ex Machina undermines each of these positions, challenging its audience to reconsider assumptions about white male privilege, feminine helplessness and agency, and the expectations that attend heteronormative discourse in Hollywood.

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7. Not surprisingly, the gender critique weighted to the cyborg parallels the complaint raised against early feminist scholarship: That experiences of white women, particularly middle-class white women, are viewed as normative, and appear at the expense of women from other races. Barbara Smith (1985) and others have since helped white feminists to enlarge their focus to include women of color, especially as their needs and issues differ from those of white women. Consequently, contemporary feminist media writing has acknowledged the relationship between racism and sexism. And much of the most recent analyses on cyborgs, especially those commenting on Battlestar Galactica, have also explored this connection. 8. As a satyr, Nathan seemingly runs counter to the nerd-geek cultural identity that repudiates bodily pleasure and sexual relations in particular. Ron Eglash (2002) notes that the contemporary culture of science “still bears a strong influence from the clerical aesthetic culture of the Middle Ages Latin Church which rejected both women and bodily or sensual pleasures” (p. 49). On the other hand, Nathan’s obsession with female androids plays into nerd stereotyping via the implication that because he could not find a willing human sexual mate, he was forced to construct artificial females in their place, the latter satisfying his lascivious urges through a minimum of social interaction. Ironically, the more human Nathan’s fem-bots become, the less interaction they want with him, which underscores again his fundamental problem relating to human females. 9. Is it possible to read Nathan as an ethnically coded other, a racist ­portrait of the brown-skinned Indian (or perhaps Middle Eastern) overly successful tech giant from Silicon Valley? Although the actor, Oscar ­ Isaacs, is of Jewish-American descent, to what extent does Nathan’s obscure ethnicity in the film (the screenwriting notes make mention of him as Jewish), especially in contrast to Ava and Caleb’s blond whiteness, affect the racial dynamics in Ex Machina? Does his monstrousness affirm, even unconsciously, the audience’s antipathy toward nonwhite tech-industry billionaires? 10.  In contrast to Ava’s solidarity with Asian females evinced throughout Ex Machina, the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell has received steady “whitewashing” criticism from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) objecting to her selection as a white woman playing the role of Motoku Kusanagi, a Japanese cyborg from the manga series written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow. Ghost in the Shell originally appeared as an animated Japanese movie in 1995; according to Guy Aoki, president of MANAA, the 2017 Hollywood remake was reluctant to cast a Japanese actress as the main character because “there aren’t big enough Asian/Asian-American names to open a blockbuster film” (“Asian American Media” 2017). However, the success of 2018s Crazy Rich Asians seems to counter Aoki’s claim.

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11. Ava’s convincing visual admixture of machine and human female was no doubt a major reason for the film winning the 2016 Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. 12. To the degree that Ex Machina can be viewed as a prison escape film, as Garland has frequently characterized it (see Through the Looking Glass: “8 Behind-the-Scenes-Vignettes” 2015), the movie’s emphasis on interracial collaboration among prisoners would establish an immediate parallel with films as different as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Defiant Ones (1958). Like Ex Machina, these are biracial escape narratives where racial barriers are transcended, and true freedom is eventually realized in the least likely contexts of same-sex interracial bonding and cooperation. 13.  My thanks extended to Heather Bradley for influencing my thinking about Ex Machina and its relationship to feminist theory when she was a graduate student enrolled in my Hauptseminar entitled “The Prison and American Art” at the Universität Augsburg, Germany, Summer 2016. I am equally indebted to the editors of this volume, Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen, for the constructive criticism they supplied to multiple drafts of this chapter.

Works Cited A.I. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. Screenplay by Ian Watson. Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, 2001. DVD. Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett. Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions, 1979. DVD. Alien: Covenant. Dir. Ridley Scott. Screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper. Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions, 2017. “Asian America Media Group Accuses Scarlett Johansson of ‘Lying’ About Ghost in the Shell Whitewashing Controversy.” May 19, 2017. http:// variety.com/2017/film/news/scarlett-johansson-ghost-in-the-shellwhitewashing-1202020230/. Asimov, Isaac. “Runaround.” In I, Robot. New York, NY: Random House, 1951. 2004. Print. Battlestar Galactica. Dir. and Screenplays, Various. NBC, Universal Media Studios, British Sky Broadcasting, 2004–2009. DVD. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Screenplay by Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples. The Ladd Company, Warner Brothers, Shaw Brothers, and Blade Runner Partnership, 1982. DVD. Briefel, Aviva, and Sianne Ngai. “‘How Much Did You Pay for This Place?’ Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman.” In The Horror Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 281–304. New York, NY: Limelight Editions, 2000. Print.

280  T. MAGISTRALE Candyman. Dir. and Screenplay by Bernard Rose. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Propaganda Films, 1992. DVD. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993. Print. The Defiant Ones. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Screenplay by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1958. DVD. Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. New York, NY: Free Press, 1987. Print. Eglash, Ron. “Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text 71 (Summer 2002): 49–64. Print. Ex Machina. Dir. and Screenplay by Alex Garland. DNA Films, Film 4, A24, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2015. DVD. Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Warner Brothers, 1999. DVD. Faith, Karlene. Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang Publishers, 1993. Print. Get Out. Dir. by Jordan Peele. Screenplay by Jordan Peele. Blumhouse Productions, QC Entertainment, 2017. DVD. Ghost in the Shell. Dir. by Rupert Sanders. Screenplay by Jamie Moss. Dreamworks, Reliance Entertainment, and Paramount Pictures, 2017. DVD. “Goddess from the Machine: A Look at Ex Machina’s Gender Politics.” February 2, 2017. http://feministing.com/2015/05/28. Golumbia, David. “Black and White World: Race, Ideology, and Utopia in Triton and Star Trek.” Cultural Critique 32 (1995–1996): 75–95. Print. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. 149–181. Print. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print. Kuhn, Andrea. “‘What’s the Matter, Trevor? Scared of Something?’: Representing the Monstrous-Feminine in Candyman.” November 7, 2016. http://webdoc.subgwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/kuhn/kuhn. Lewis, Helen. “Alex Garland’s Ex Machina: Can a Film About an Attractive Robot Be Feminist Science Fiction?” The New Statesman, January 23, 2015. Accessed February 21, 2017. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/01/alex-garland-s-ex-machina-can-film-about-attractive-robotbe-feminist-science. Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Screenplay by Thea von Harbou. Universum Film, 1927. DVD. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975. In Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by

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Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj, 715–725. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. Print. Real Humans. Created by Lars Lundström. Dir., Various. Teleplays by Lars Lundström and Alex Harridi. Sveriges Television and Matador Film, 2012– 2014. DVD. Rose, Margaret. “Cyborg Selves in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Genre, Hybridity, Identity.” The Journal of Popular Culture 48 (2015): 1193–1210. Print. Schueller, Malini Johar. “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Think Race and Color of the Cyborg Body.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (Autumn 2005): 63–92. Print. The Shawshank Redemption. Dir. and Screenplay by Frank Darabont. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994. DVD. The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson. Warner Brothers, 1980. DVD. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 168– 185. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1985. Print. Through the Looking Glass: Creating Ex Machina: “8 Behind-the-ScenesVignettes” and “5-Part Featurette.” DNA Films, Film 4, A24, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2015. DVD. Washington, Mary Helen. Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1980. Westworld. Dir and Teleplays, Various. Bad Robot, Weintraub Productions, Warner Brothers, 2016–. HBO-TV. Wilkerson, Abby. “Ending at the Skin: Sexuality and Race in Feminist Theorizing.” Hypatia 12 (1997): 164–173. Print. Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 17–36. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 2015. Print. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Print.

CHAPTER 13

The End of the World, Hollywood, and the Endurance of Military Violence: Elysium and World War Z Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

In this chapter, we maintain that our society, as informed by the events of September 11, 2001, has fostered an environment in which war performativity becomes banal, and military-security ideology and violence are woven into everyday life in ways that affect all aspects of culture, including cultural production. We argue elsewhere (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2010, 2014) that all means of cultural production, including 9/11 cultural production, are impacted by the happenings of the broader society. We are focusing here on film, following John Markert’s assertion that “[s]ocial attitudes, social context, and movie themes are interconnected and each interacts with and influences each other” (2011, p. xxiii). Fears are part of both social attitudes and context

M. K. Bloodsworth-Lugo (*) · C. R. Lugo-Lugo  School of Languages, Cultures, and Race, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. R. Lugo-Lugo e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7_13

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and become relevant in this discussion, for as Wheeler Dixon claims, “Hollywood has a long history of turning widespread fears into cinematic spectacles … never before has the source of those fears been so singular, so easily isolated, so thoroughly disseminated” as it has been in the 9/11 context (2004, p. 201). We are proposing that although contemporary Hollywood does reflect a prescribed sense of diversity (one that perhaps is superficially colorblind), when analyzed more deeply, we can find films reflecting our contemporary color/gender/class/citizenshipconscious and color/gender/class/citizenship-anxious reality. We focus particularly on two Hollywood films, as mainstream films provide excellent illustrations of the relationship between cultural production and the broader society, including the ordinariness and everydayness of military and security narratives. In her article, “A Cultural History of the War Without End,” Melani McAlister (2002) considers claims by President George W. Bush and his administration, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 events, that the United States was facing an unprecedented crisis requiring a “new and different war.” McAlister maintains that given the shock that many Americans experienced in the face of those events, making a case for their historical uniqueness was not difficult. She refers to the official narrative around September 11, 2001, as marking a perceived point of rupture and “the ease with which U.S. officials characterized the military response in Afghanistan and the concomitant commitment to a wider, [and] worldwide, ‘war against terrorism’ as something entirely new” (p. 440). However, while the president’s claims of “a different kind of war that required a different type of approach and a different type of mentality” resonated with many Americans, McAlister indicates, through reference to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, that “changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias” (1983, p. 441). In the case of the “war on terrorism,” McAlister unpacks “the politics of the diverse representations of terrorism in recent decades,” which has included notions of unconventional war and “war on terrorism” as those shown in President Bush’s comments, to reveal a “mix of memory and forgetting” (p. 446). That is to say, McAlister conveys that such claims should be placed in historical context and that, by so doing, claims regarding a rupture with the past can be called into question as they betray the persistence of military violence. Using the work of Peter Kuznick and James Gilbert, we have made a similar claim in relation to the perceived temporal rupture of Cold War

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mentality, for as they tell us, “much of what is usually thought of as Cold War culture outlasted the Cold War itself…” (cited in BloodsworthLugo and Lugo-Lugo, p. 11). We conclude that “[t]he continuing impact of Cold War culture is evidenced by the rhetorical techniques invoking and demanding supremacy that were developed during that era,” which are still deployed to this day (p. 11). However, although they must also be placed in a historical context, we must ­acknowledge that both the events of September 11, 2001, and the massive and ongoing response to them by the US government have been distinctive and enduring phenomena in American and world history. Thus, on the one hand, September 11, 2001, offers us a temporal, cultural, and political break in relation to war, and on the other, and heeding McAlister’s and Kuznick and Gilbert’s arguments, the historical moment that proceeded the date has also offered a number of historical continuities in relation to American bellicose sensibilities and understandings. These sensibilities and understandings are part of what Jeffrey Melnick (2009) calls a “9/11 sensibility.” As we argue in our previous work, as important as the date September 11, 2001, is in understanding our current social and political ethos, “9/11” goes beyond the date and can be described as “a value-laden project of social and cultural import” as well as an ideological and a socio-political project…[with] long-term impacts on Americans and their perceptions of threats, security, and even Americanness” (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo, p. 3). Thus, when we use 9/11 here, we are invoking more than a fateful date. McAlister invokes the shock experienced by Americans as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, and we consider that shock to be at the root of our discussion in this chapter. We would like to use Naomi Klein’s (2007) idea of the “shock doctrine” as she develops it in her book of the same name. Klein insists that after a major cultural/political/social/natural disaster, when the population is still disoriented by and preoccupied with (or more to the point, in a state of shock because of) the event, governments tend to make monumental changes to their reach and operations by passing major legislation and/or restructuring strategic aspects of its constitution and function. In relation to September 11, 2001, Klein tells us that as an event, it “exploded ‘the world that was familiar’ [for millions of Americans] and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited” (p. 16). And she expounds:

286  M. K. BLOODSWORTH-LUGO AND C. R. LUGO-LUGO Suddenly, we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero, in which everything we knew of the world before could now be dismissed as “pre-9/11 thinking.” Never strong in our knowledge of history, North Americans had become a blank slate— “a clean sheet of paper” on which “the newest and most beautiful words can be written,” as Mao said of his people. A new army of experts instantly materialized to write new and beautiful words on the receptive canvas of our post trauma consciousness: “clash of civilizations,” they inscribed. “Axis of evil,” “Islamo-fascism,” “homeland security.” With everyone preoccupied by the deadly new ­culture wars, the Bush administration was able to pull off what it could only have dreamed of doing before 9/11: wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home. (p. 16)

Looking at the intricate connection between the waging of war after September 11, 2001, and the development of the corporate security complex in the homeland that Klein references requires a lens flexible enough to understand American society as a pugnacious society, in which military endeavors have become standard operating procedure or the new “life as we know it.” Of course, we are not saying that this is the first time in American history in which war occupies a predominant role in society, but we are claiming that it is the first time in American history in which the lines between military, security, and civilian life are not only blurred but at times non-existent. This is evident in the deployment of military personnel and use of drones at the US-Mexico international border (BBC News 2014a, b), to the housing of undocumented immigrants in centers reminiscent of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (Lovato 2009), to the utter ­militarization of the police force (ACLU 2014), to the treatment of schools as military systems (Saltman 2007), to the militarization of the American language (Gray 2006), to the militarization of sports (Astore 2011) and entertainment (Armitage and Candrall 2005), and so on. Although some of these elements can be found at other historical moments, this is the first time in which an all-out effort to militarize every aspect of US society has simultaneously infected so many aspects of everyday life so deeply and thoroughly. This is the security-military-industrial complex that Richard Sylves (2014) discusses in his book. This continuum of military and security practices and ideologies brings us to Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of a “state of exception” (2003). Similar to Klein’s (2007) discussion of the shock doctrine, for Agamben, a state of exception results from “a political crisis, which, as

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such, cannot really be understood only in the political and juridical constitutional sphere” (p. 3). He maintains that the transformation that occurs under a state of exception “was only meant to be a provisional and exceptional measure in a normal technique of government that threatens to transform completely (and has already transformed completely) the structures and meanings of traditional distinctions between constitutions” (p. 3). But, as he also points out, under certain circumstances, the provisional and exceptional measures become a rather dominant, if not permanent, form of government. Within the post-September 11, 2001 United States, Agamben ­indicates that “faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war,’ the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics,” representing a “transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government” (2003, p. 2). Moreover, Agamben points to the “military order” issued by President G. W. Bush on November 13, 2001, “which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’… of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities” (p. 3). He explains that detainees “are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight” (p. 4). Expanding on this point, Agamben (2005) describes the state of exception as a legal civil war that “allows for the physical elimination not only of political enemies but of civil citizens which for one reason or another cannot be integrated into the political system (31).” It is this effort involving the physical elimination of those who cannot be integrated into the ­political system that has led to the “creation of a permanent state of exception (even if it is not officially declared),” which in his view “has become one of the essential tasks of the modern state. This includes states who declare themselves to be democracies (32).” A 9/11 militarized permanent state of exception that governs civilian life is today an un-extraordinary experience. It could be argued that the permanent state of exception has led to the enduring capacity of the “security-military industrial complex,” which is to say, to the enduring capacity of war and war efforts (even as the United States removes troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan). This enduring capacity of war must be examined carefully, as it links the hyper-militarization of US society to the permanent state of exception doctrine developed after the shock

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that the events of September 11, 2001, produced. The enduring ideologies created by US military interventions abroad (specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the more amorphous “war on terrorism”) can be articulated as a certain kind of ordinariness or everydayness; something that becomes unremarkable, not because of its nature, but because of its overuse or pervasiveness. In this case, we are talking about a strategically developed endurance confounding militarism with security and construing military engagement as a necessary response to every perceived problem or threat. We take the hyper-militarization of US society after September 11, 2001, to analyze two particular Hollywood films. Specifically, we explore how 9/11 military interventions by the United States have created a security-militarized state of exception that is both present and represented in two films released over a dozen years after September 11, 2001: Elysium (2013) and World War Z (2013). Given that September 11, 2001, has been called “the day that changed American forever”—an “end of the world as we know it” moment—we highlight two futuristic films, one apocalyptic and one post-apocalyptic, to show that (1) the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and the War on Terror have informed the ways in which we envision the future, and (2) even in films that work against “every day,” life-as-we-know-it settings, American viewers still witness a familiar security-militarized routine and norm. That is to say, they experience the films through a narrative that uses war and security as its framework. In a sense, then, the enduring everydayness of such militarization serves to anchor stories that are otherwise set against fantastical, out of the ordinary backdrops that would not ring true or perhaps would be considered strictly fantasy. More to the point, these films become palatable and comprehensible to American audiences through their engagement with war and security culture and military ideology as we understand it today. The films might portray dystopian and implausible futures, but through a security-military lens, they become portrayals of everyday life. This is especially so for an American public that has endured September 11, 2001, and has acquired what Jeffrey Melnick has termed a “9/11 sensibility.” Melnick sees 9/11 as an event that has been transformed into “a concept, a discourse, and a language” (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo, p. 14). That sensibility includes an emphasis on security and militarization. Thus, we chose these films, not because they are about the future but because they are narrations about enduring fears and anxieties

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as they exist and are manifested today. As John Markert argues, “[e]ven science fiction films that are cast into the future or historical films that delve into the past are seen from a contemporary lens” (2011, pp. xv– xvi). We would like to take that further and argue that in addition to being “seen from a contemporary lens,” these films are being produced (by producers and directors) and processed (by audiences) through a contemporary lens that utilizes military and security tropes to manage everyday situations (ibid.).

Elysium and the Endurance of the Military State in a Dystopian World In Elysium, the year is 2154 and Earth has been “ruined” by overpopulation and destruction. The planet is dusty and dried up, and the population looks unclean, riddled with disease and social unrest. We ­ quickly learn that the population on Earth is also always looking up to a spot in space, bright as a star. That spot is Elysium, an artificially created paradise where wealthy humans went to escape the unhealthy and almost unbearable conditions on Earth. Elysium is a state of the art facility, with state of the art security and medical services, where these selected and selective humans live in mansions operated and maintained by robots and other technological marvels. The most remarkable of the technologies are the medical bays installed in every household. The bays look like contemporary tanning beds, but they are able to instantaneously cure all physical ailments and medical conditions. The divisions between Earth and Elysium are rooted in social class and access to resources, and the film uses different signifiers throughout to emphasize the stark differences between the two worlds. One of those signifiers is language, as people on Earth speak a combination of English and Spanish, whereas the people of Elysium speak a combination of English and French. Another important signifier is race. Mainly, most of the people on Earth are ambiguously raced, or Latino-looking, whereas the people on Elysium seem to be unambiguously White, or non-White. Max (played by Matt Damon), the main character of the film, provides the most prominent and telling exception as he is unambiguously White and a resident of Earth, although he does speak the English-Spanish combination spoken by everybody else. Finally, adding to the chasm between the two populations, while people on Earth aspire to go to Elysium (mostly to make use of the medical bays), people on Elysium

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live their lives pretending people on Earth do not exist. However, people on Elysium depend (quite heavily so) on the work performed by overworked and underpaid workers on Earth. They also control Earth, in every way possible, including its air space and traveling. For instance, Elysium officials have the capability of jamming all communication on Earth and declaring “no-fly zones” over specific areas. Like other films in this genre, Elysium deploys the cliché of the White Savior, as Max, who lives in what is left of Los Angeles, ultimately achieves redemption by sacrificing himself and saving the Earth’s population from extinction by disease. He also ends up saving the Elysium population from itself. In order to do that, however, Max must become a cyborg by having an exoskeleton suit surgically attached to his body, brain, and nervous system, perhaps suggesting that technology may be both our damnation and our salvation. At the beginning of the film we learn that Max was raised in an orphanage, where he made a promise to one day go to Elysium and take his best friend Frey with him. The film is heavy handed on social commentary, but it is in its depiction of the security and military state and military ideologies that the film becomes intelligible to a post-September 11, 2001 US audience. We see indications of this militarized security state everywhere, as the human population on Earth is controlled by robots who serve as cops, parole officers, and even emergency response personnel. Although they are robots, they are highly militarized—especially the ones serving as police. When we first meet Max as an adult, he is on his way to work and is stopped by two of the robot-police officers who are reminiscent of US soldiers and militarized police today. One of the robots indicates to Max that “all parolees must have weapons inspection” after observing that Max has an “extensive criminal history.” Max has a smart mouth, ends up with a broken arm, has to go to the hospital and then has to appear in front of his robot parole officer. At the hospital, we learn that they are ill-prepared to care for most people’s ailments. In fact, in a remarkable contrast to the sleek medical bays on Elysium, the hospital looks very similar to our hospitals today, minus the equipment and necessary medications. After a brief exchange, the robot parole officer takes Max’s sarcastic comments as hostile and extends his parole an additional eight months. Max finally makes it to work at the Armadyne factory (owned by people on Elysium), and his supervisor nearly fires him for being late. The next day he uses Max’s tardiness as leverage to force him to do a dangerous maneuver that ends up exposing Max to a lethal dose of radiation. The medic robot gives him five

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days to live and prescribes medication to keep him functioning normally until his death. Finally, he thanks Max for his service. As we continue to learn how Max’s life is affected by the general living and working conditions on Earth, three inbound “undocumented vessels” are attempting to make the trip from Earth to Elysium. Once they leave Earth’s space, the vessels are warned that they “have made unauthorized entry into Elysium space.” As they continue their journey, Secretary of Defense Delacourt (played by Jodie Foster) activates a “sleeper agent” on Earth and orders him to “shoot them down.” Although two of the vessels are destroyed, one makes it through Elysium’s atmosphere and is able to land. Delacourt orders “everyone coming out of that vehicle [to be] apprehended” for violating the Immigration Act and to thus be sent “to deportation.” As robots continue to search for the people who came in the vessel, Delacourt continues to receive updates indicating how many “illegals” are still at large. In this tale, space becomes the new “border,” Earth humans the new undocumented immigrants, and Elysium the epitome of the militarized State in a permanent state of exception. While Max wants to go to Elysium to cure himself, he also wants to hurt Armadyne Industries. Max’s friend Spider, a technological wiz, helps by surgically embedding the exoskeleton suit on him. They then hijack the vessel that Armadyne’s CEO is using to travel and are able to remove important data from his brain before he dies. The same sleeper agent and his team, reminiscent of special forces units or private military contractors, are now in charge of tracking down and capturing Max. After they apprehend Max, there is a struggle and the vessel crashes in a suburban area of Elysium. Before that scene, the audience hears Delacourt talking to Armadyne’s CEO about the company providing Elysium missile defense batteries, droids, “and everything we need to protect our liberty.” Nicholas D. Krebs refers to this as the racialized reality depicted in Blomkamp’s moviemaking, featuring “death-worlds with chosen populations in clear binary categories of subject/object, life/death, and/or citizen/deportable body” (2015, p. 3). The racialized reality described by Krebs gets channeled through a recognizable and even palatable militarized lens, one rooted in our militarized state. In the end, as mentioned above, Max saves humans on Earth by ­giving Spider the stolen data and making it possible to make every citizen on Earth a citizen of Elysium—thus blurring the lines between Elysium ­residents and residents of Earth.

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World War Z and the Endurance of a Militarized Apocalypse In World War Z, humanity faces elimination through a zombie pandemic. The film starts with a family—mom, dad, and two grade ­ school age girls—who are going through their morning routine on a regular weekday in Philadelphia. We quickly learn that dad, Gerry Lane (played by Brad Pitt), formerly worked for the United Nations. As the family begins their morning drive, they encounter a chaotic scene. Soon they realize that the chaos involves people acting strangely, running incredibly quickly, making high pitched noises, and lunging at others trying to bite them. The Philadelphia crowd quickly turns into a r­ioting, looting mob, and the Lane family gathers that an extreme crisis is ­developing. Their first action is to find provisions and asthma medication for one of the daughters. They also seek to escape but are soon trapped in Newark, where they seek refuge. The chaos the Lanes experience conveys to the audience that the society/life that they know and understand is crumbling at an accelerated pace. As this is happening, Gerry receives a call from his former boss, Thierry Umutoni, who promptly arranges a rescue mission for the Lane family the next day. He tells Gerry he will call later with “an extraction point.” It is in the attempt to rescue the family that viewers receive their first indication of who is dealing with, managing, or combating the ­situation: the US military, as Gerry and his family are rescued from the rooftop of a building by a military helicopter with US soldiers. When approaching the “extraction point,” one of the soldiers says to the pilot: “That’s our target. Get us down there.” Lane and his family are evacuated to a UN/US Naval command center ship at sea, where the military hierarchy seems to be intact, perhaps the last thing to remain so in the unfolding new world. One of the first things Thierry tells Gerry is that the President (of the United States) is dead, and that four of the Chief joint chiefs and the Vice President are missing. He then adds that there are “reports of ganglands on the streets of the capital, there are parties of hanging.” And finally, that “[t]he bigger cities are worst off,” concluding that “the airlines were the perfect delivery system.” This last comment, highly reminiscent of September 11, 2001, should make intelligible to the audience the extent of the damage. The audience quickly gathers that, as under-Secretary of the United Nations, Thierry is one of the highest-ranking government officials of our current world left alive.

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The UN/US connection established by Thierry and the Naval command center manned exclusively by US military personnel is relevant here, given that he does not report on the condition of any other national government. However, it is clear from the moment Gerry steps foot on the ship that the US Navy Commander (and not Thierry) is the person calling the shots. Gerry tells his wife, Karyn, as much when she objects to him being recruited to investigate the situation: “but you don’t work for them anymore… What about Thierry, can’t he do anything?,” and he responds: “What can he do? Thierry isn’t in charge anymore.” But it is Thierry who recruits Gerry to track and investigate the origins of the pandemic. He offers him a Harvard-trained epidemiologist and a team of Navy Seals to “do the heavy lifting” as they investigate. In search of “patient zero,” their first stop is South Korea. As they are on their way, Gerry instructs the epidemiologist on how to work with the Seals: “They move, we move. They stop, we stop. If things were to get crazy, just focus on their boots, focus on their voices, we’ll be alright. These guys are hammers. And to hammers, everything looks like nails.” The virologist, not an expert on the handling of weapons, trips and kills himself when leaving the military aircraft at an American South Korean base. The audience continues to get the sense that although brains will be relevant in figuring out and surviving the zombie apocalypse, military training and expertise will be equally, if not more, important. A former CIA agent turned spy and held prisoner at the South Korean base and the soldiers stationed there help Gerry figure out that his next move should be to go to Israel, and he and the pilot get on their way. When Gerry arrives in Jerusalem, he confirms that the city is completely walled off (as he had been told by the CIA agent), and they are letting people (Palestinians as we can see) inside because “every human being we save is one less zombie to fight.” Jerusalem was a turning point for Gerry and the zombie apocalypse for it was there that he finally had an insight regarding how to combat the spreading of the disease. Using a “fighting fire with fire” approach, Gerry discovers that the zombies will leave untouched anyone with a terminal disease. It is also in Jerusalem that the military framework eases as Gerry takes a commercial flight to escape Jerusalem, which crashes in Wales. He takes Segen with him, an Israeli soldier whose life he saves after she is bitten by an infected ­person. After the crash, Gerry and Segen are able to make it to a ­ building ­operated by the World Health Organization and create a vaccine that camouflages the human population from the zombies.

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The world of World War Z is one in which racial and ethnic ­ ifferences are no longer relevant: the Lane family adopts a Mexican d child during their ordeal; Israel is letting Palestinians inside their walled haven; and Thierry, representing the most powerful governmental structure still in place, is a black man from a not-identified African country. But within the changes, the military and its structure is the one aspect of our society that remains relatively intact, grounding the apocalypse and making it intelligible. Gerry’s final words are meant to haunt the ­audience, making it understand why the military is so important: “[i]f you can fight, fight. Be prepared for anything. Our war has just begun.”

Conclusion: Military Violence and the Endurance of War We could have chosen a great number of (post-) apocalyptic Hollywood movies that have been released since 9/11 (e.g., Children of Men (2006), I Am Legend (2007), 28 Weeks Later (2007), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Oblivion (2013), Pacific Rim (2013), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) are but a few examples). We chose these two films in p ­ articular because they were released very close to each other, well over a decade and one presidency removed from September 11, 2001, thus ­ ­demonstrating the enduring effects of 9/11 and the militarization and securitization of US society. In his review of Elysium, critic Alan Travers (2013) conveys that social commentary in the film, though interesting, is ultimately flawed. In his words: [I]t’s impossible to believe, no matter how grim a view of humanity you may have, that nobody, not one single person, on Elysium would feel a pang of guilt, compassion or charity for their fellow man in turmoil on their home planet. There are no charity organisations [sic] or volunteers working on Earth from Elysium. Rich people are portrayed as a kind of evil, distanced people, happy enough to ruthlessly murder innocent people who try to steal free medical care from their new world. (para. 5)

He concludes that, surely, someone would have donated a medical bay to the population of Earth, where people could just line in front of it around the clock and get their ailments cured. Travers’s concerns with the representation of the rich as “evil, distanced people” who “ruthlessly

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murder innocent people” are telling. First, Travers is more willing to question and argue against the particular representation of the wealthy than any other aspect of the film—which is filled with all sorts of behaviors and technologies that might be difficult to fathom today. For instance, it seems difficult to see a population on Earth where some people still steal cars for a living (as Max and his friends used to and still do), when we hardly see any cars in the film or people who could afford them. It is also difficult to envision an Earth population being policed exclusively by robots. More telling is the fact that Travers did not think to question that the stark differences would exist to begin with, or that humans would still be using the language of deportation and homeland security, or using covert operatives that look like special forces soldiers. The level of militarized security portrayed in World War Z also seems to have escaped critics as something worth analyzing. For instance, in his review of the film for The New Yorker, David Denby suggests that the film “evokes the hectic density of modern life; it stirs fears of plague and anarchy, and the feeling that everything is constantly accelerating. At times, it has the tone and the tempo of panic” (2013, para. 1). Though we agree that the film has a tone and tempo of panic, it is the military as security framework that gives viewers respite from the panic. We ­wonder what the film would be like without this military thread. Could this kind of film be made without the use of the military (especially the US military)? Is there a way to envision Gerry going around the world looking for answers on his own, using commercial or private planes? Would that exacerbate the level of panic? Would it make it less believable or ring less true? Finally, we would argue that such forms of potential destruction (one—wealthy humans leaving Earth—more plausible than the other— zombies) also mirror the post-9/11 world as perceived by everyday Americans. That is, such films work to underscore and further normalize an all-encompassing military surveillance and violence that has become an enduring and permanent fixture (the permanent state of exception Agamben discusses in his work) in the post-September 11, 2001 United States. At the same time, these films also serve to create a world that reflects our fears and anxieties, that is to say, a world that as ­impossible and implausible as it may seem, reflects us and our “mix of memory and forgetting” (McAlister 2002). The words of Denby in his review of World War Z are important here:

296  M. K. BLOODSWORTH-LUGO AND C. R. LUGO-LUGO Thinking about the Jerusalem sequence, I realized why I felt uneasy in Times Square. The zombies aren’t like us; they are us, just degraded a little. And what the zombie media splurge may unconsciously express is not just a fear that people might become hostile but a desire to be free of the crowd—to “decrease the surplus population.” (para. 7)

Regardless of what unconscious desires involving the surplus population audiences may have, it is clear that military presence and the security state seem to act as soothing and intelligible aspects of our current visions involving both of the end of the world and the reimagining of a future world. In that way, war, the military, and security transform into enduring everyday occurrences: They are what remains after all else is gone or the world otherwise ends.

Works Cited ACLU. “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” ACLU, 2014. https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/war-comes-homeexcessive-militarization-american-police-report. Agamben, Giorgio. The State of Exception–Der Ausnahmezustand. Lecture at European Graduate School, August 2003. Transcribed by Anton Pulvirenti. Retrieved August 25, 2014, from http://www.egs.edu/faculty/ giorgio-agamben/articles/the-state-of-exception/. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso, 1983. Armitage, John, and Jordan Candrall. “Envisioning the Homefront— Militarization, Tracking, and Security Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 1 (2005): 17–38. Astore, William. “The Militarization of Sports—And the Military Service.” HuffPost Sports, July 28, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sports/. BBC News. “Texas Governor Rick Perry to Deploy Troops to the US Border.” BBC NEWS, July 21, 2014a. http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-28414189. BBC News. “US-Mexico Border ‘Patrolled by Drones’.” BBC NEWS, 2014b. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30044702. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Mary K., and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Containing (Un) American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2010.

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Bloodsworth-Lugo, Mary K., and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Projecting 9/11: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Recent Hollywood Films. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Denby, David. “Life and Undead: World War Z.” The New Yorker, July 1, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/life-and-undeath. Dixon, Wheeler. Film & Television After 9/11. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Elysium. Dir. Neil Blomkamp. TriStar Pictures, 2013. Film. Gray, Vicki. “The Militarization of the American Language.” Truthout, August 30, 2006. http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/65175:vicki-gray– the-militarization-of-the-american-language. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Krebs, Nicholas D. “The Necropolitics of Neill Blomkamp: Deportation and Maiming in District 9 and Elysium.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in Toronto, Canada, 2015. Lovato, Roberto. “U.S. Immigration Policies Bring Global Shame on Us.” The World Post, March 29, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/us-immigration-policies-b_b_170309.html. Markert, John. Post-9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011. McAlister, Melani. “A Cultural History of the War Without End.” The Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002): 439–455. Melnick, Jeffrey. 9/11 Culture. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Saltman, Kenneth. “Education as Enforcement: Militarization and Corporatization of Schools.” Race, Poverty, and the Environment: A Journal for Social and Environmental Justice (Fall 2007): 28–30. Sylves, Richard, ed. Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security. Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2014. Travers, Alan. “Elysium (2013) Movie Review.” Moviequotesandmore.com, 2013. http://www.moviequotesandmore.com/elysium-2013-movie-review.html. World War Z. Dir. Marc Forster. Paramount Pictures, 2013. Film.

Index

A Abstract liberalism, 116, 117, 127– 129, 131, 136 Affirmative action, 4, 16, 18, 65, 66, 77, 153, 156 Agamben, Georgio, 199, 286, 287, 295 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 220, 221, 225 Ali, 158 American Dream, 17, 93, 99, 104, 135, 158 Anthropomorphism, 67–71, 74, 75, 81 Anti-miscegenation laws, 142 Asimov, Isaac, 259, 271 Avatar, 180, 183, 184, 189, 277 B Bad Boys, 159, 163 Baker, Josephine, 141 Battlestar Galactica, 259, 278 Bedoya, Kathleen, 50–52 Belafonte, Harry, 143, 151, 154 Beltran, Mary, 159

Berg, Charles Ramirez, 232 Berumen, Frank Javier Garcia, 232 The Best Man Holiday, 90, 96–98, 100, 102, 104 Black Best Friends, 96 Black-context films, 91, 95–97, 103, 106–108 #BlackLivesMatter (Black Lives Matters), 8, 19, 27, 61, 66, 70, 83, 117 Blade Runner, 259, 264, 272, 276, 277 Blaxploitation, 24, 144, 153 The Blind Side, 7, 94, 114, 117–124, 126–129, 131–133, 135–137 Bode, Patty, 114, 115, 127 Bogle, Donald, 90, 143, 144, 186 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 13–17, 19, 22, 26, 93, 114–117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 175, 216, 238, 242, 243, 249 Boyega, John, 24, 149 Bruckheimer, Jerry, 241, 242, 244, 245 Bush, George W., 101, 199, 284, 287

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 Sarah E. Turner and Sarah Nilsen (eds.), The Myth of Colorblindness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17447-7

299

300  Index Bush, Jared, 70, 73, 84 Butler, Judith, 198, 199, 207 C Cammarota, Julio, 120, 136, 137 Candyman, 258, 259, 275 Capitalism, 52, 105, 149, 203, 206, 207, 239, 249 Castile, Philando, 28, 61, 64, 70, 84 Chappelle, Dave, 101, 108, 148 Charlottesville, VA, 20, 92, 113, 115, 137 Clover, Carol, 203, 205, 210 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 64, 216, 227 Cold War, 151, 152, 284, 285 Colombiana, 225, 226 Colorblind racism, 4, 5, 7, 28, 114, 239, 242, 243 Comprehensive Annenberg Report On Diversity in Entertainment (CARD), 35 Cosby, Bill, 144, 151 The Cosby Show, 94, 134, 147 Creed, 90, 173 Cruise, Tom, 145, 159 Curry, Thomas J., 82, 83 D Dakota Access Pipeline, 237 Dances with Wolves, 184, 240, 241 Dangerous Minds, 128 Daston, Lorraine, 69 Dávila, Arlene, 219 Dawkins, Richard, 200, 201, 210 Dawn of the Dead, 203 Deadline Hollywood, 45 Dehumanization, 69, 74, 81, 83, 165 Delpit, Lisa, 127, 135, 136 Denby, David, 295 Depp, Johnny, 8, 24, 157, 239–241, 243, 245–247, 249, 252–254

Deus ex machina, 272 Dick, Philip K., 259 Dilulio Jr., John, 81, 85 Disney Story Trust, 73, 75, 78, 83 Disney, Walt, 6, 62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 240, 243–245, 247–250 Dixon, Ivan, 143, 151, 284 DJ Jazzy Jeff, 145, 146 Dominant scripts, 219, 225 Dope, 97–99, 102, 103, 105 Double consciousness, 145, 165 Dworkin, Andrea, 268 Dyer, Richard, 25, 151, 152 E East Los High (ELH), 37, 42, 48, 50 Elysium, 8, 288–291, 294 Enlightened exceptionalism, 134, 135 Epley, Nicholas, 70, 75, 81 The Equalizer, 144 Ethnicity, 6, 7, 19, 36, 37, 45, 46, 52, 72, 157, 160, 185, 220, 221, 227, 278 Ex Machina, 8, 258, 260, 261, 267, 268, 271, 272, 274, 275, 277–279 F Faith, Karlene, 274 Fast and Furious, 180–182 Feagin, Joe, 15, 20, 143, 176, 177, 179, 188, 227, 231 Finding Forrester, 128 Fiske, Susan T., 68, 75, 80, 85 Forman, Tyrone, 4, 21 Frankenstein, 260, 267, 270, 275 Freedom Writers, 128 Freeman, Morgan, 157, 161, 186 Freire, Paulo, 137 The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, 147, 156, 163

Index

G Gaffney, Frank, 200, 210 Gatekeeper theory, 177–179 Ghost in the Shell, 259, 277, 278 Globalization, 153 Goldberg, David Theo, 220 Golumbia, David, 265 Goodwin, Ginnifer, 63 Gould, Stephen Jay, 69, 76 Gradualism, 143, 144 The Graham Norton Show, 147 Green Book, 1, 2, 38 Guare, John, 155, 163 H Halberstam, Judith, 273 Hall, Stuart, 6, 36–39, 41, 92, 209 Haney-Lopez, Ian F., 239, 240 Haraway, Donna, 270–272, 274 Havens, Timothy, 46, 141, 146, 147, 150 Hegemony, 6, 22, 25, 36, 37, 39, 40, 164, 210, 238, 267 Hollywood Diversity Report, 5, 90 Hopps, 73, 76–81, 83, 84 Howard, Byron, 70, 72, 74 Huckin, T.N., 127 Hughey, M.W., 15, 25, 120, 175, 186 Hulu, 36, 37, 48–50, 52 Hunt, Darnell, 5, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44, 46, 70 I I Beat the Odds: From homelessness to the Blindside, and Beyond, 118 Identity formation, 199, 210, 219, 225 Imperialism, 14, 144 In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, 118

  301

Independence Day, 159, 161–164 Ingram, Rex, 151 Inside Out, 180, 186, 189 I Spy, 144 K Klein, Naomi, 285, 286 Kristeva, Julia, 265 L Lasseter, John, 69–71, 74 Latinidad, 215, 218–223, 225–227, 230, 231 Lee, Spike, 1, 2, 38, 160, 161 The Legend of Bagger Vance, 159–161 The Lego Movie, 180, 186, 190 Lehman, Christopher, 68 Lewis, Amanda, 21, 93, 95 Lewis, Helen, 263 Lin, Justin, 181 Loftis, Cory, 78, 81 The Lone Ranger, 8, 24, 238, 240– 250, 253, 254 Lowe, James, 151 M Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, 180, 184 Magical Negro, 25, 160, 165, 186, 247, 249, 254 Mahiri, Jabari, 115 Make America Great Again (MAGA), 23, 115, 238, 247 Man on Fire, 219, 226 Markert, John, 283, 289 Marx, Karl, 238, 239, 253 Mason, Clifford, 156, 160 McAlister, Melani, 284, 285, 295 Melamed, Jodi, 45

302  Index Metropolis, 259 Mickey Mouse, 67–69, 76 Minimization, 116, 117, 127, 128, 131 Miscegenation, 258, 268, 275 Mission: Impossible, 144 Mitman, Gregg, 69 Modern Family, 44, 46 Mogambo, 143 Molina-Guzmán, Isobel, 6, 37, 42, 46, 219, 222, 225, 226, 230, 232 Montez de Oca, Jeffrey, 118, 137 Moonlight, 226, 227 Moore, Rich, 70, 72–74, 76, 78, 80 Morris, Greg, 144 Mota, Katie, 48–50 Multiculti action film, 181, 183, 188 Mulvey, Laura, 275

P Patch of Blue, 143 Patriarchy, 258, 259, 261, 263 Perry, Lincoln, 151 Perry, Tyler, 149, 160, 252 Pixar, 69, 70, 189 Plaut, Victoria C., 3, 4 Plessy v. Ferguson, 65 Poitier, Sidney, 141, 143, 151, 156, 160, 254 Population Media Center, 49 Post-racial, 4, 8, 15, 16, 20, 26, 27, 91, 93, 95, 100–103, 107, 108, 165, 175, 195, 197, 201, 208, 250 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 202 Pursuit of Happyness, 158, 159, 163

N Naturalization, 16, 17, 116, 125 Nelson, George, 147 Neoliberalism, 153 Nichols, Nichelle, 144 Nieto, Sonia, 114, 115, 127 Night of the Living Dead, 202 9/11, 8, 210, 283–288, 294

R Race, 3, 4, 6–8, 13–16, 18–20, 25, 27, 36, 37, 45, 46, 52, 61, 63, 65, 66, 71, 89–97, 102, 103, 105–108, 114–117, 120, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134–136, 142–147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 174–179, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189, 197, 201, 202, 205, 216, 218–222, 225, 227–233, 239, 258–262, 265–275, 278, 289 Race as biology, 225, 232 Racial ideologies, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25, 70, 107, 114–117, 125, 127, 129 Racism, 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 13, 15–28, 38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 62–67, 71, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102, 104, 113–117, 128, 131–137, 143, 144, 154, 155, 158, 163, 177, 188, 197, 201, 227, 238, 239, 243, 250, 266, 267, 278 Racism, classical, 14, 18

O Obama, Barack, 4, 5, 7, 15, 19, 20, 47, 64–67, 70, 80, 94, 134, 175, 176, 179, 181–183, 187, 188, 196, 238, 242, 250 Occupy movement, 207 Odds Against Tomorrow, 143 #OscarsSoWhite, 2, 3, 6, 8, 26–28, 90, 145, 173 Osombie, 204, 205, 208, 209 Otherness, 39, 175, 195, 196, 199, 207, 209, 240, 257–260, 263, 265

Index

Racism, cultural, 17, 20, 23, 116, 121, 127, 129, 134, 249 Racism Without Racists, 15, 116, 175, 243 Raisin in the Sun, 143 Ranciére, Jacques, 206 Real Humans, 259 Reflection hypothesis, 177–179 Reign, April, 2, 3, 27 Rhimes, Shonda, 36, 42, 47, 95 Ribeiro, Alfonso, 147 Rio, 180, 184–186 Robeson, Paul, 141, 151, 152, 154 Robinson, Bill, 151 Rose, Margaret, 266 S Schueller, Malini Johar, 265 Scott, Ridley, 176, 178 Sessions, Jeff, 66 Seven Pounds, 159, 161, 163 Sevillano, Veronica, 68, 75, 80, 85 Shaun of the Dead, 202, 203 Shelley, Mary, 260 Shock Doctrine, 285, 286 Six Degrees of Separation, 155, 158, 159, 161, 163 Smith, Will, 7, 95, 141, 145, 147, 148, 153–157, 159, 160, 163, 164 Snead, James, 142, 143 Sobchack, Vivian, 162 Spielberg, Steven, 174–178 #StandForOurAnthem, 117 Star Trek, 144, 225 Star Wars: The Force Awakes, 24, 149, 183 Stereotype Content Model, 85 Straight Outta Compton, 90, 97, 173, 174, 252 Suicide Squad, 155, 159

  303

Superpredator, 63, 81–85 Symbolic colonization, 222 T Tarzan, 143 Taubin, Amy, 164 Terminator, 259, 260 Through the Looking Glass, 261, 270, 276, 279 Tolan, Peter, 148 Tonto, 8, 24, 238–241, 243–254 Top Five, 46, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 223 Travers, Alan, 294, 295 Trump, Donald, 5, 6, 18, 21, 22, 62, 66, 67, 70, 84, 92, 106–108, 114, 115, 117, 137, 188, 196, 197, 202, 207–210, 216, 227, 232, 238, 242, 250, 251, 254 The Trump Effect, 114 Turbo, 180, 184–186, 189 Turing Test, 263, 271, 274 V Valdivia, Angharad, 46, 232 Verbinski, Gore, 245 Visible Identities, 220 W The Walking Dead, 202 Walt Disney Animation Studio, 62, 69 Warm Bodies, 202 War on Terror, 288 Warren, Elizabeth, 250, 251, 254 Washington, Denzel, 144, 164 Washington, Mary Helen, 266 Weber, Max, 178 Westworld, 259, 260, 277

304  Index White habitus, 116, 122, 123, 125, 126 White racial frame, 143, 159, 176, 177, 179, 184, 188 White Savior, 1, 119–122, 136, 137, 174, 290 White Shit/things white people do, 99–101 Whitewashing, 176, 187, 188, 219, 232, 278 White Witch Doctor, 143 Wilkerson, Abby, 266 Williams, Linda, 257, 258, 273

Wise, Time, 48, 134, 135 Wood, Robin, 258 World War Z, 8, 203, 288, 292, 294, 295 Y Young, Robert, 272 Z Zootopia, 6, 62, 63, 68, 70–84