whites. With regularity, African people were subject to inhumane treatment and brutality of savage proportion—lynchings, whippings, rape, and killings at the hands of white Europeans who were themselves newly arrived on North American shores. The system of slavery not only relegated African Americans into inferior positions in society but also perilously threatened their life chances. On the other hand, the slavery era reserved advantaged positions, with privileges of property ownership and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, exclusively for whites. Entirely on the basis of racial membership, whites and Blacks were subjected to unequal treatment and outcomes. Nationally enforced laws and practices solidified persistent racial inequality, while weakening African Americans’ ability to fully participate in society.
Though the capitalist enterprise of American transatlantic slavery has ended, the centuries-long American system left behind an ingrained institutional legacy. The institution was formally dismantled, yet the disparate distribution of material resources and social conditions along racial lines was merely reproduced in other forms.47 The orchestrated social divisions between racial groups in the United States, along with the lawful discrimination and marginalization of African Americans that initiated during slavery, were manufactured in other ways even after slavery was officially abolished. Soon after slavery, the era of Jim Crow segregation bore its institutional legacy, once again establishing relations of domination and subordination, of privilege and disadvantage, between racial groups.
The organization of Hollywood is not far removed from the operation of racial inequality within the larger American context. Racial hierarchies prevailing in Hollywood privilege or disadvantage creative workers. In the face of obvious gains in proportional representation, racial inequality still persists in the film industry. Although Black directors have increasing access to Hollywood directing compared to earlier decades, the Hollywood Jim Crow prevents them from attaining full integration into the directing profession. The Hollywood Jim Crow creates obstacles to the advancement of Black films and directors, in the same racially hierarchical fashion that has disadvantaged African Americans during each era of U.S. history. Notions of representation in Hollywood are inextricably attached to the profit motive. Predetermined cultural and economic rationalizations made on the basis of race shape the projected value of popular cinema. Hollywood insiders perpetuate the myth that Black films and directors are unbankable, or unprofitable, and that they draw smaller audiences compared to white films and directors. As a result, Black directors face marginalization, segregation, and stigmatization that limits the scope and progress of their careers.
In the racialized film industry, resources and opportunity are distributed along racial lines, such that Black directors experience disadvantages compared to white directors. Rarely do Black directors obtain lucrative, high-status positions. The Hollywood Jim Crow thwarts them from achieving true equality in the motion-picture industry. Race divisions in the film industry have real consequences in the form of barriers that obstruct access to jobs and constrain the scope of American images and worldviews that are disseminated around the nation and the globe. Images from Hollywood are thought of as embodying American cinema, yet this slice of the American cinematic pie omits or obscures whole racial groups. The portrait of a liberal Hollywood and a complete integration for African American directors, as well as for Asian, Latino/a, and Native American directors, is thus far a fairy tale without a happy ending.
Despite the film industry’s outward projection of equality, racial disparities persist. Hollywood liberalism appears to display what the sociologist Christopher Winship calls a veneer of consensus, a mere surface appearance that differs from the true reflection that lies beneath the surface.48 By this view, Hollywood’s liberal front is emblematic of complete racial integration only superficially, while beneath the surface lies a racially conservative industry that remains monopolized by white men. Although substantively this book focuses on film directors, this lens of hierarchical representation can be used to interrogate how inequality works in other creative professions off camera, from writing to producing. Rethinking representation to closely examine the quality of work within a systemic U.S. racial hierarchy provides a comprehensive way to assess progress toward racial equality in the film industry and beyond.
* * *
Representation in a popular-culture industry involves the interface among creative workers, media organizations, movies, and audiences around the globe. The character of representation takes on different forms. Representation is as much about securing jobs and depicting images as it is about having one’s voice heard, being counted, and belonging in a nation. Images and award recognition constitute a symbolic form of representation that stands for something beyond sheer numbers. Representation in the form of numbers ranges from seats around a table of decision-makers to people behind and in front of a camera. Both symbols and numbers are common ways of thinking about representation as a form of demography—counting the tangible presence or absence of racial minorities in a particular medium.
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