Matters integral to understanding Hollywood’s racial production and distribution culture include how ideas about race, economics, and culture are socially constructed in culture industries, how racial divisions of whiteness and otherness are enacted and operate in everyday film-industry practices, and how inequality persists to shape difference and power, film after film, year after year. Race and racial hierarchies are explicitly embedded and institutionalized into decision-making processes about moviemaking—in the employment of workers and in the production, distribution, and exhibition of movies across international markets. As gatekeepers, white Hollywood insiders signify that racial difference has economic and cultural relevance, to shape unequal trajectories for movies and talent, which ultimately affects the careers and identities of Hollywood workers. Racial inequality is rationalized and protected by the structure of the film industry.
Despite the appearance of the U.S. culture industries, such as Hollywood, and their professions and occupations, such as film directing, as venues of solely harmless, feel-good entertainment, they are deeply embedded in inequality making—in manufacturing, reinforcing, and reproducing hierarchies of racial difference. This book reveals contemporary racial structures within organizations and occupations in a major U.S. popular-culture industry: Hollywood cinema. Popular-culture industries are not simply sites for innocuous enjoyment. They are also sites where power structures buttressed by racial inequality are created, reinforced, and reproduced.
The Hollywood insider Steve clearly makes an adamant case for why a Black actor such as Denzel Washington and a Black director such as Antoine Fuqua should not headline a western-genre film. What is somewhat surprising is that his argument, for who should act and direct in a western and for how much the movie should be made, is based on racial logics. While his language about elements and pedigree are race blind, he also directly refers to race, to Caucasian audiences and African American audiences, as a basis for making decisions about the production of movies.
On the surface, this use of direct racial language appears to violate social norms of racial equality, a product of political correctness birthed out of the civil rights era. Although it was law and custom in the United States to use race as a viable justification for unequal opportunities and outcomes of disadvantage and privilege prior to the 1960s, the post-civil-rights period ushered in a new era that universally condemned the explicit use of race to exercise discrimination or prejudice. Immediately following the civil rights movement, outright racism was condemned in public society and outlawed through legislation. Racial prejudice and discrimination could be accomplished through covert means but were opposed and countered if overt. Individuals and organizations, if biased, thus adopted implicit ways to covertly signal race, meanwhile producing the same effect of inequality that existed in prior eras.
In the post-civil-rights era, guiding ideologies of colorblindness and postracialism suppose a waning significance of race in shaping life outcomes. Describing how colorblindness is used to advance racial inequality in the twenty-first century, the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains, “Whites have developed powerful explanations—which have ultimately become justifications—for contemporary racial inequality that exculpate them from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”8 Colorblind racism has gained its validity from juridical and legislative systems and has been legally inscribed in areas from college admissions decisions to voting-rights laws. It repackaged social practices that were prominent during the Jim Crow era of race relations to make them appear to be nonracial. Ideas about colorblindness—particularly, that race is no longer a relevant factor in social life—are constructed, disseminated, and used to explain away racial inequality. Most prominent is the use of abstract liberalism, a philosophy that suggests that there is equal opportunity and meritocracy for all, despite opportunities and outcomes being structured on racial grounds.9 Even further, postracial rhetoric relegates the relevance of race to a distant past. Postracialism is best symbolized by the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Born to a white American mother and a Kenyan father, Obama became the first African American and nonwhite president in U.S. history. Soon after his election, however, decades-long societal norms about race that discouraged explicit racism showed signs of waning.
Perhaps the backlash against the Obama presidency prompted a monumental shift in racial norms—from subdued, implicit racism to a bold, unapologetic racism and a rise in overt racial discourse. Some social scientists argue that the image of a Black family in the White House spurred a renewed, overt nationalism among white Americans, one that brought the salience of white (American) racial identity to the forefront and ushered in the election of President Obama’s successor: the white Euro-American billionaire Donald Trump (no matter that his mother is an immigrant from Scotland and his grandfather is an immigrant from Germany). In the 2016 presidential election, Trump decisively won every category of white voters (i.e., white women, white men, college-educated whites, upper-class whites, middle-class whites, etc.). Meanwhile, challenges to immigration policies aroused Latino/a Americans’ racial and ethnic identities, and threats from state-sanctioned violence spurred Black Americans and Black racial identities to action with groups such as #BlackLivesMatter. In a matter of years, the auras of colorblindness and postracialism gave way to explicit racial relations, discrimination, activism, protest, and violence.
The prevailing societal milieu of explicit race discourse extends its pervasiveness to the film industry, where decisions about film production and distribution have undeniable racial underpinnings. Now it appears that race is no longer a covert force and is increasingly accepted as a means to explain advantage and disadvantage. In a sense, we are back to the Jim Crow days, with race being explicit and racial inequality justifiable. Steve does not use entirely coded language to imply that race should be a major factor in decision-making about movie budgets and productions. His discussion about race—about African American actors and directors and Caucasian audiences—is outright and explicit. Slowly 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