but surely, notions of colorblindness and postracialism are being supplanted by more direct rhetoric. Race is no longer in the shadows but a pivotal characteristic that shapes how Hollywood insiders view prospective movies.
The title of the book, The Hollywood Jim Crow, highlights how racial inequality and hierarchy in Hollywood take their cue from the structure of race relations in society. The Jim Crow metaphor describes the enduring structure of racialization, or sorting of groups and individuals along racial lines, that occurs in the film industry today. Jim Crow is an infamous symbol of Black oppression at the hands of whites in the United States. The name originally represented the popular nineteenth-century song-and-dance theatrical minstrelsy stage act in which white entertainers dressed in Blackface, wore tattered clothing, and impersonated buffoons in an attempt to ridicule Black Americans and entertain white audiences. A racial slur, the Jim Crow caricature was a symbol of offense and oppression to Black people in popular culture and the racial imagination.
Informally named after the symbolic minstrel figure, the Jim Crow regime that enforced oppressive government laws and societal customs was enacted in the majority of U.S. states in some form from the late 1800s up to the civil rights era. Under Jim Crow segregation, an ideology of white superiority was used to justify the distribution of privilege to white Americans, while subjugating other racial groups. Jim Crow laws effectively denied equality for Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native people in America. Buttressed by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in many areas of social life—for example, within public facilities in schools, housing, transportation, and the military—and granted white Americans sole access to the best of those facilities while relegating other racial groups to inferior facilities. Basing social systems on racial difference and ratifying the difference under the law, the resulting organizational practices created racial disparities of advantages for whites and disadvantages for Black Americans and other racial groups.
In a Jim Crow system, mistreatment of Blacks and privilege of whites is normalized, resulting in the legal discrimination and marginalization of large segments of the population. At earlier points in U.S. history—for example, during periods of Native American colonization, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation—it was commonplace, albeit immoral, to delineate between racial groups to determine outcomes. During slavery, as in the Jim Crow segregation era, biological notions of racial inferiority and superiority were acceptable bases for social divisions. Institutional legacies of racial inequality and difference fester like a sore, untreated wound. Though Jim Crow laws were formally dismantled during and following the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era, systems of racial inequity still remain intact within the United States. On the surface, the dominant racial order in society has evolved over time to encompass several different racial regimes such as slavery and Jim Crow. However, each regime characterized race relations in a similar racialized manner—one that normalizes and lifts white Americans atop a racial ladder and meanwhile marginalizes and sediments Black Americans to the bottom, all within the boundaries of the law.
The basic structure of Jim Crow remains intact in contemporary U.S. society. In the present era, the Jim Crow practices still form the backbone for processes that facilitate unequal hierarchies of racial advantage and disadvantage. Collectively, three basic rules govern the Jim Crow framework. (1) Jim Crow systems operate under a philosophy of racial difference. (2) The systems label and stratify racial groups on the basis of the assumption of difference. (3) The systems produce a result of advantages for whites and disadvantages for other racial groups on the basis of the stratification system.10 The stratification of racial groups into hierarchical systems engenders grossly unequal outcomes, at times as opposite as freedom and bondage, for whites and Blacks, respectively—resulting in overall positive outcomes for whites and negative, often life-threatening outcomes for Blacks.
The arguments, form, and structure that underlay the Jim Crows of yesteryear are the necessary and precipitant conditions for racial hierarchy in contemporary Hollywood cinematic production. The Hollywood Jim Crow shows how inequality shapes representation in the film industry in a way that reinforces ideas of white supremacism. Racial ideology in prior Jim Crow systems helps illustrate the inequality that is pervasive in Hollywood today. Hollywood embodies the racial makeup of the society that it inhabits, exhibiting a racial system that privileges and disadvantages different racial groups, similar to previous racial systems that structure the order and organization of social life. The Hollywood Jim Crow works against African Americans in all the same ways that Black people have been disadvantaged and legally marginalized in everyday life under prior racial regimes within U.S. society—though the present context adds new layers to the age-old practice of racial difference.
In this new era of racial politics, race is explicit in conversations about difference once again, but the reasons for justifying difference have evolved while inequality persists. The Hollywood Jim Crow uses cultural and economic notions of racial inferiority and superiority as grounds for racial difference. An insistence on the economics of the movie business reverberates in discussions about Hollywood. Assumptions about economics guide thinking about cinematic production. Indeed, many people assert that the guiding force and principal aim of the film business is profit, or the bottom line. According to the film scholar Janet Wasko, “the profit motive and the commodity nature of film have implications for the kind of films that are produced (and not produced), who makes them, how they are distributed, and where/when they are viewed. While it is common to call film an art form, at least Hollywood film cannot be understood without the context in which it is actually produced and distributed, that is, within an industrial, capitalist structure.”11 Moreover, Wasko adds that “the commercial and profit-motivated goals of the industry are assumed and rarely questioned.”12 Hollywood’s economic logic deserves more careful attention and interrogation, especially as it pertains to the focus on foreign-market profit and the way that race is linked with expectations of profit. This book reveals that this discussion about economics is not far removed from race politics. In fact, the two are linked, often explicitly.
Although the current racial politics dismisses race as purely biological, it nonetheless unabashedly invokes race in other ways. Racial difference in Hollywood is explained away as an outcome of competitive, market forces determined by audience preferences for some cultural products over others. The practice of using biological difference as a proxy for race is reproached for being discriminatory, but meanwhile the act of using cultural or economic justifications as a proxy for race is labeled nondiscriminatory and, more insidiously, an objective fact. Couching racial difference in economic and cultural terms by attributing cultural and economic deficits to racial minorities does not cause immediate social outrage and therefore provides an effective vehicle for perpetuating racism.
Jim Crow racial regimes are connected through their shared assumption of racial difference, labeling of difference, and production of unequal outcomes for members of different racial groups. Following this pattern, Hollywood executives’ make allegations of racial inferiority and superiority, legitimate the allegation through labeling, act on the labels, and ultimately marginalize African Americans and privilege white Americans. Making economic rationalizations, Hollywood decision-makers label Black films and directors “unbankable” to advance the assumption that Black films and directors are inferior financial investments at the box office compared to white films and white directors. Due to the “unbankable” label, Black directors and movies with Black characters are disadvantaged in the production process compared to white directors and films with white characters—in a way that imposes limits on the future careers of African American directors. Once the “unbankable” label is established, film companies are freely and legally allowed to marginalize Black films and directors on the basis of the assumption that they are not economically viable investments. The end result is that Black films and directors are prevented from accessing the same markets and privileges as white films and directors. Racial disparities in Hollywood mean more work and visibility for white directors and films and less work and visibility for Black directors and films. These differences for which media become normalized or otherized have abstract ideological implications and tangible outcomes for unequal livelihoods.
Of course,
