not departed from the minds and platforms of activists seeking a Hollywood reformation. With no palpable movement toward reaching parity for African Americans in recent years, the industry’s racial disparities impede progress to achieving full equality in cinematic production. However, improving numbers alone cannot alleviate Hollywood’s extensive race problem. The missing piece is taking sustained and persistent action to diversify critical positions of power.
More than Mere Numbers
Though the directing profession still remains largely and disproportionately white, those who believe Hollywood is alleviating its racial woes point to the numerical and symbolic progress as evidence of a commitment to promises made in the spirit of the familiar civil rights rhetoric—that slowly but surely, in the words of the soul singer Sam Cooke, “change gon’ come,” eventually. To a great extent, the vision of change that has been articulated is a change of numbers or demography. The sociologist Herman Gray reports that demography became an essential point of reference following the push for representational parity in media industries. To assess representation and monitor its effectiveness, the salient benchmark became literally counting the number of workers in jobs.45 Scholars and industry professionals turned their focus to the issue of employment and unemployment, to the question of how many workers occupied each space. The central site for contestation and regulation naturally became a numbers game.
Even while representation in the film industry matters a great deal for directors, the interpretation of behind-the-camera representation has focused almost exclusively on a single dimension—numerical representation—and ignored other ways of conceptualizing representation. Calculating numerical representation, studies have assessed the level of inequality or equality primarily on the basis of the percentages of people present or absent. On these terms, the key measure of progress in Hollywood directing is the addition of more directors from underrepresented racial groups behind the camera, while the key obstruction to integration becomes the problem of underrepresentation.
Framing the debate about inclusion into Hollywood solely in binary terms of representation (presence) and underrepresentation (insufficient presence or absence) raises problems. If the primary issue is underrepresentation, then the singular resolution to racial inequality is increased representation. By this standard, true integration would be realized when African Americans and other underrepresented racial groups have reached parity with regard to their proportional representation in the U.S. population. In other words, once the proportion of Black directors of Hollywood movies reaches 13 percent, all inequality would be overcome. However, it is problematic to make a leap to equality from mere parity in numerical representation. Framing the debate as an either/or issue—either presence and inclusion or underrepresentation and exclusion—elides the key problem at hand. Many scholars and observers would agree that demography is a necessary but insufficient factor for adequate representation in cinematic production.
Indeed, Gray problematizes the idea of using diversity as a proxy for inequality. Namely, diversity is a sociocultural goal, while inequality speaks to a multitude of components: a specific history of exclusion, the vicissitudes of protest and unrest, and an ultimate mission of gaining access and equality. The sole reliance on demographic representation and the quest for greater diversity holds dear the assumption that becoming more diverse—achieving social parity via increasing numbers—would alleviate inequality in the film industry, redress stereotypical images and content, and usher in social justice.46 Adequate demographic representation is required to achieve diversity and is an important aim in and of itself for reasons of employment and citizenship, but demographic parity alone is insufficient to achieve equality.
While some measure of progress is captured through increased representation—if there are greater numbers of Black, Asian, Latino/a, and Native people working in Hollywood—only tackling the issue of numerical underrepresentation would not eradicate all racial inequality within Hollywood directing. Demography alone tells us little about the contours of directing careers, as numerical representation does not take into account qualitative differences that directors experience within their workplace environments. Numerical representation alone cannot explain whether there are qualitative differences in the movies Blacks and whites direct, a difference that in no small part facilitates racial disparities in career trajectories. Merely relying on numerical representation can result in observing progress that is more symbolic than substantive. African Americans can appear to have a greater presence in Hollywood, but upon closer inspection, their presence could remain only marginal to core film-industry operations. Having racial minorities occupy key decision-making positions is important to their prosperity in the film business. As Cheryl Boone’s leadership in the Academy illustrates, executive position matters in the opportunities generated for racial minorities. In cinema, what is being green-lit, by whom, and with what kinds of production budgets matter a great deal. These kinds of details cannot be captured by measuring demography but require a finer prism through which to examine the full spectrum of representation.
As studio executives in positions of power, African Americans are influential in bringing movies with Black casts, stars, and directors to audiences. For one example, Devon Franklin worked as a studio executive at Sony Pictures and MGM. At MGM, he worked on movies such as Be Cool and Beauty Shop. As senior vice president of production for Columbia Tristar Pictures for Sony, Franklin worked on The Karate Kid reboot, starring Jaden Smith, and The Pursuit of Happyness, Hancock, and Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith. In addition, at Sony, he developed and supervised movies that were geared toward the urban and faith-based markets. He worked on the faith-based hit movies Not Easily Broken and Jumping the Broom, both produced by Bishop T. D. Jakes, as well as Heaven Is for Real and Miracles from Heaven. Few executives from racial-minority backgrounds exist in Hollywood. The chief executive at Warner Brothers, Kevin Tsujihara, is a rare Asian studio executive in Hollywood. Just as white studio executives bring white movies to audiences, integrating the executive ranks would likely lead to more racially diverse movies on-screen.
Beyond inequalities of numerical representation, further obstacles to equality persist for Hollywood directors such that increased representation behind the camera cannot single-handedly close the racial inequality gap. There is no denying that Hollywood has made progress, since its exclusionary years before the civil rights era, toward greater inclusivity of African Americans in film directing. Yet it is premature to suggest that Black directors who do break into the film industry automatically experience work conditions on par with white directors working in the industry. Rather than asking how many racial minorities occupy directing positions, the more telling question is: How do the work experiences of directors from different racial backgrounds differ from one another? To allow for a more complete and complex understanding of obstacles to equality for film directors in twenty-first-century Hollywood, it is necessary not only to monitor the demographics of representation but also to understand recurring patterns of representation that result in racial hierarchies and unequal outcomes. Besides visibility and demography, other metrics for progress—such as access to lucrative opportunities and ample resources—are important for assessing inequality in film-industry work. Examining the hierarchical level of cultural representation, as it relates to who occupies what types of positions in Hollywood, gives a more refined portrait of privilege and power in the director’s chair.
Hollywood Black directors encounter an enduring racial inequality that is a direct product of the society that they inhabit and in which they work. In order to thoroughly investigate how racial inequality operates in Hollywood, it is first vital to comprehend how racial inequality operates within the larger American social context. Racial hierarchies of privilege, power, and oppression have been prevalent in the United States since the nation’s inception. Racial inequality was built into the fabric of the United States, residing deep within the bones of the nation’s social practices, pastimes, and organizations, while creating a kind of racial skeleton undergirding social life that shapes interracial relations among members of various groups.
In the early centuries of American social life under the prevailing system of slavery, to name one racial regime, white Euro-Americans trumpeted an ideology of white superiority and Black inferiority in order to justify hundreds
