Decompiling Oppression #14
Sam McVeety
One of the many urgent conversations of our current moment concerns representation, and why representation matters. It's far too large a topic for a single post, so we're going to focus today on representation in media and art. We're seeing this play out across the reframing of older works like Gone With the Wind (and the quiet changes happening to Splash Mountain and its Song of the South trappings), as well as conversations around blackface in modern television and voice acting in animation.
The importance of representation in media is nothing new, and was in fact addressed by the Supreme Court in their Metro Broadcasting, Inc v FCC decision, one of the few bright spots in post-Brown antidiscirimation jurisprudence. In their ruling, the court upheld a minority preference for distributing broadcast licenses. The decision reasoned that there was indeed a public interest in having a diversity of owners for broadcasting, and this interest was sufficiently strong to justify taking a "race-aware" approach to distributing power. While our discussion today focuses on Black/white issues, erasure and lack of representation is a problem across all groups of color, from Miss Saigon to Ghost in the Shell.
There's an excellent article (Regrouping in Singular Times by Patricia Williams) that goes into much greater detail, and the import of its arguments are still extremely relevant today, decades later. A key point that Williams argues is that there is a reasonable rhetorical middle ground between complete "colorblindness" and an opposite extreme that assumes monolithic, essential racial identities. It is in this middle ground that we can make reasonable statements that, while a Black producer does not provide the final say on the "Black perspective", they are likely to tell some stories differently than a white producer. As she puts it:
"The literal biological truth that blacks (or members of any other racial or ethnic groups) are not born with genetic inclinations for "'things black" is often used to obscure the fact that "black" (like most racial or ethnic classification) also defines a culture. Blackness [...] usually evokes a shared heritage of language patterns, habits, history, and experience."
This is precisely what we're seeing play out today. While we might have seen Moonlight from a straight white male director, it's doubtful, and Barry Jenkins is inarguably a more likely source. Likewise, representation is a project that Ava DuVernay has made central to her filmmaking, to use her position and power to tell stories (13th, When They See Us, Selma, Queen Sugar) that are hers and her communities' to tell. We've looked previously at Afrofuturism, and how for many artists, the first step towards realizing a more equitable future is to first imagine it into being.
These previous examples correspond to many positive images (or in case of trauma, dignified and empathetic portraits). Centering and portraying Black joy is just as important as speaking truth about Black pain. When it comes to portrayals that are overtly negative, Williams cites this as another major point where representation matters. While her example is Amos 'n' Andy, one could argue that the modern ascendance of shows like COPS occupies a similar pathological place in the popular consciousness. Critically, she observes that:
"To pretend (as we all do from time to time) that film or television, for example, is a neutral vessel, or contentless, mindless, or unpersuasive, is sheer denial. It is, for better and frequently for worse, one of the major forces in the shaping of our national vision, a chief architect of the modern American sense of identity."
It's this complete spectrum of portrayal that shows how media is far from innocuous, and in fact a critical center of power for explicitly shaping power and popular consciousness. While it wasn't available at the time of the article, we now have studies that show how our society has been overwhelmingly conditioned to associate criminal with "Black" more than "white". In a society that prides itself on the neutrality and fairness of trial by jury, we see longer sentences and harsher punishments for Black defendants rather than white ones, and it's wildly implausible to argue that media and culture have nothing to do with it.
When we talk about lifting up Black artists and content creators, all of the above reasons are why representation matters. Alone, it's not sufficient, but it's necessary -- if we had truly achieved an equitable society, these disparities in representation wouldn't exist, so eliminating them is a necessary step towards getting there. This week's invitations:
Personal: In the different media that you consume, think about the portrayals of individuals of different races. How many are positive vs. negative? Spend some time reflecting on how that might impact your views on the individuals and groups.
Communal: Organize a screening or reading around some media that tells a counterstory about a group that you aren't a part of, and think about how and why these depictions aren't the norm.
Solidarity: Please support Ijeoma Oluo's COVID relief program for artists, managed by Langston, a Seattle-based non-profit that promotes Black excellence in the arts.
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