– all in pursuit of a Western ideal of feminine beauty. Hollywood is no stranger to these ideologies, as it has always tended to cast lighter‐skinned black women in romantic roles, often not even being able to find suitable roles for darker‐skinned actresses (a topic explored at further length in chapter 4). It is only in the last few years that darker‐skinned African American actresses like Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis have gained leading roles (and appeared on the covers of beauty magazines).
When it goes unmentioned, whiteness is positioned as a default category, the center or the assumed norm on which everything else is based. Furthermore, aside from white supremacists and neo‐Nazis (who are restaging a comeback in the current political climate), whiteness is most often invisible to the people who consider themselves to be white. Many remain unaware of the subtle ways their whiteness affords them certain privileges. However, many non‐white individuals are often painfully aware of the dominance of whiteness, precisely because they are repeatedly excluded from its privileges. Sometimes racialized stereotypes get inverted to characterize whiteness. Thus, if people of color are stereotyped as physical and passionate, whiteness is sometimes satirized as bland and sterile, represented by processed white bread, mayonnaise, and elevator music. The stereotypes that white people lack rhythm, can’t dance, or can’t play basketball (as the title of the film White Men Can’t Jump [1992] would have it) are simply reversals of racist stereotypes that assert that people of color are “naturally” more in touch with their physicality than are white people. Many of these stereotypes seem to invoke (and probably evolved from) the racist beliefs of earlier eras. One such belief was the assumption that white people were a more evolved type of human being – and thus suited for mental and intellectual tasks – while non‐white people were thought of as being more basely physical and even animalistic.
This process of defining one group against another is sometimes referred to as Othering. More specifically, Othering refers to the way a dominant culture ascribes an undesirable trait (one shared by all humans) onto one specific group of people. Psychologically, Othering depends on the defense mechanism of displacement, in which a person or group sees something about itself that it doesn’t like, and instead of accepting that fault or shortcoming, projects it onto another person or group. For example, white culture (with its Puritan and Protestant taboos against sex) has repeatedly constructed and exploited stereotypes of non‐white people as being overly sexualized. Throughout US history, fear and hysteria about “rampant and animalistic” non‐white sexualities (as opposed to “regulated and healthy” white sexualities) have been used to justify both institutional and individual violence against non‐white people. Other character traits common to all human groups – such as laziness, greed, or criminality – are regularly denied as white traits and projected by dominant white culture onto racial or ethnic Others. In this way, and simultaneously, whiteness represents itself as moral and good, while non‐white groups are frequently characterized as immoral or inferior.
The process of Othering reveals more about white frames of mind than about the various minority cultures being represented. This was often embodied within classical Hollywood filmmaking, when racial or ethnic minority characters were played by white actors. This common practice allowed white producers to construct images of non‐white people according to how they (the white producers) thought non‐white people acted and spoke. How non‐white Others helped to define whiteness can also be seen in the silent and classical Hollywood film practice of using minority‐group performers to play a variety of racial or ethnic characters. For example, African Americans and Latinos were often hired to play Native American characters, and Hispanic, Italian, and Jewish actors played everything from Eskimos to Swedes. Such casting practices again reinforced the notion that people were either white or non‐white, and Hollywood did not take much care to distinguish among non‐white people, often treating them as interchangeable Others.
In socially constructing this concept of whiteness, Western culture had to define who got to be considered white. Many attempts were made over the past centuries to “measure” a person’s whiteness. In the United States, laws were passed defining who was and who was not to be considered white. People claimed that “one drop of blood” from a non‐white lineage excluded an individual from being “truly” white. Marriages were carefully arranged to keep a family lineage “pure,” and laws prohibiting interracial marriage were common in most states. If there were non‐white relationships within a family tree, they would frequently be hidden or denied. Throughout much of American history, lynching – the illegal mob torture and murder of a suspected individual – was a white community crime commonly spurred by fears over interracial sex. All these measures to “protect” whiteness indicate a serious cultural anxiety about the permeable borders between white and non‐white races. In reality, the sexual commingling of different racial and ethnic groups was common in the United States almost from the moment European settlers landed on the continent. On the Western frontier, white men often took up relations with Native American women. In the Eastern United States, many white slave owners regularly forced sex upon their female slaves. Even President Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings. A few romanticized and revisionist films about this situation do exist: the independent film Jefferson in Paris (1995) and the TV miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000). Even today, many Hollywood film and TV producers still consider interracial relationships to be a touchy and “controversial” topic.
Struggles over the definition of whiteness were especially pronounced during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, when film was in its infancy. The idea of the American melting pot arose during this period. The metaphor expressed the way various immigrant cultures and traditions were to be forged or melted together into an overall sense of American identity. Obviously, the American melting pot most readily accepted those groups that could successfully blend into or assimilate into the ideals and assumptions of white patriarchal capitalism. Assimilation was (and is) easier for some groups than for others, and the reason for that was (and is) based on longstanding notions about racial difference. European immigrants, although from different national and ethnic cultures, were more readily assimilated into mainstream white American culture than were people of African, Asian, or Native American backgrounds. Partly this was because European immigrants had a certain amount of cultural, racial, and religious overlap with white Americans; people from other areas of the globe were (and still are) more likely to be considered as racially and culturally Other. Nonetheless, even European immigrants had to struggle for acceptance in the United States, and a history of those struggles can be found in that era’s cinematic record.
Assimilation remains a contested issue to this day. While many people (of all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds) support the idea that Americans should strive to assimilate into the dominant (white) way of life, others find that proposition disturbing. Many people feel that racial and ethnic cultures should be celebrated and not phased out of existence, arguing that one of the basic strengths of America is its very diversity of cultures, and – hopefully – cinematic representations. Another controversial issue related to assimilation is the phenomenon of passing, wherein some people of color deny their racial or ethnic backgrounds in order to be accepted as white. People who pass are sometimes accused of “selling out” their racial or ethnic heritages. (The flip side of that is the far more rare example of white people passing for non‐white, as when civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal was revealed to be white after posing as an African American; she was subsequently reviled for this act, which many saw as the epitome of white people appropriating blackness for themselves.) However, people of color who can pass for white often choose to do so precisely because whites are still afforded more privilege and power in our national culture, and those who pass often want to share in those opportunities. It is this social reality that led many European immigrants to work toward assimilation and acceptance as being white. That process can be seen occurring in American films made throughout the twentieth century, especially in regard to changing representations of Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans. In film and culture‐at‐large, the shift to whiteness occurred for these groups of people when they were no longer
