Disney Does Race: Black Bffs in the New Racial Moment
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 Disney Does Race: Black BFFs in the New Racial Moment SARAH E. TURNER, University of Vermont ABSTRACT The 2008 election of Barack Obama signalled the arrival of what social scientists and liberals alike have labelled a new racial moment in America that suggests the end of racism and instead signals the beginning of an idealised “we are all the same” racial discourse referred to as colourblind racism. No where is this colourblind approach more evident than on contemporary television programming in the foregrounding of diverse casts and characters. If television acts as the major discursive site for struggles over both the question and the meaning of racial representation, then what are the cultural implications of the overwhelming presence of black female characters in the secondary or supportive role to white female leads? Utilising the theoretical lens of colour-blind racism, this article will consider why the paradigm of the interracial buddy film has shifted from the legacy of male to female and will explore the possible interpretations of race as represented on television today. KEY WORDS colourblind racism, interracial buddy films, racial representational strategies, encoding, decoding, Black BFF A Complex Cultural Moment America is embroiled in a complex cultural moment in terms of race, and one seminal locus where that complexity is being explored is television.i Jim Crow laws, white only signs, and the Civil Rights movement are safely in the past, historical moments now, not day-to-day markers of racial struggle. The country has elected its first bi-racial president, and one third of Black Americans have entered the middle class. And yet, race still matters. When news of black Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain’s infidelity surfaced in the fall of 2011, he responded by accusing the media of a ‘high tech lynching.’ii When then presidential hopeful Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008, he was accused of being both too black and not black enough. Television, as Herman Gray argues, ‘remains a decisive arena in which struggles for representation, or more significantly, struggles over the meanings of representation, continue to be waged at various levels of national politics, expressive culture, and moral 125 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 authority’ (Gray, 2004: xvii). If, as Gray posits, television is a discursive site where struggles over the complex question of racial representation occur, reading that struggle through the lens of Stuart Hall’s theories of encoding and decoding provide a necessary framework through which to consider the possible meanings of race as represented on/through television today. Hall characterises television as a discourse that encompasses the messages ‘encoded’ by and through the production of a show and the messages ‘decoded’ by those watching the show; however, while both the production and the reception of the messages rely on shared frameworks of knowledge, Hall’s theories acknowledge that ‘distortion’ or a ‘misunderstanding’ frequently occur during the moment of decoding (Hall, 2005). Ten years ago, in 2002, the NAACP released the first of a series of reports documenting the state of racial representation on major American television networks.iii Out of Focus – Out of Sync Take 1 reported that of the twenty-six new shows that debuted in the fall 1999-2000 season, not one featured an actor of colour in a lead role. The fall 2011-2012 line-up on the major networks has twenty-seven new shows, and despite the fact that most white Americans espouse a colour- blind ideology, the belief that race no longer plays a central or significant role, there are no black female leads in any of the prime-time network shows and nearly all the male leads are white.iv This is not to say, however, that there are no black or minority roles on television; there are, but instead of being cast in the lead or starring role, black female actors are being cast more and more in the role of best friend to the white lead.v Drawing heavily on the legacy of inter-racial “buddy” films – originating as a male-dominated movie paradigm linking white and black men together in inter-racial friendships – contemporary programming links a white female lead with a supporting and supportive black woman who is ‘wise, loyal, and sassy,’ but always secondary, often sublimating her needs for those of the white lead (Braxton, 2007: Entertainment 29). What is especially interesting about this moment is that it represents a shift from the traditional male genre of interracial buddy films (think of 48 Hours [1982], Beverly Hills Cop [1984], Lethal Weapon [1987], The Fast and the Furious [2001]) to female-centred inter-racial relationships in both television and movies. For the purpose of this study, the focus will be on television, namely the Disney Channel;vi however, this new paradigm is not solely the purview of Disney or television. A recent LA Times article outlines the prevalence of this pairing on television and in movies, citing, for example Merrin Dungey’s character in Alias (2003), and the pilot for Grey's Anatomy spin-off Private Practice (2007), Wanda Sykes in The New Adventures of Old Christine (2005), Brandy in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), Amerie in First Daughter (2004), Regina King in A Cinderella Story (2004), Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005), and Legally Blond 2: Red, White and Blonde (2003), Alicia Keys in The Nanny Diaries (2007), Kellee Stewart in My Boys (2007), Stacey Dash in Clueless (1995), Cress Williams in Hart of Dixie (2011), Maya Rudolph in Up All Night (2011), and Aisha Tyler in Ghost Whisperer.vii 126 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 Two current Disney Channel shows, Shake it Up (2010- ) and Good Luck Charlie (2010- ), feature white female leads and black females in the buddy or best friend position (BBFF: Black best friend forever).viii Keeping in mind the fact that television, as the major discursive medium today, plays a central role in the articulation and constructions of racialised identities in the US, this study will explore the impact of Disney's representational strategy on its children and tween viewing audience through Hall’s theories of encoding and decoding. While previous studies of race/racism and/in Disney do exist,ix studies of Disney's role in the perpetuation of the politics and ideology of colourblindness, especially in the twenty-first century, are lacking. This study does not seek to vilify Disney; rather it is an examination of the complexity of representation Disney writers, producers and executives, and other channels, face in America’s “Obama moment.” Disney Does Race At first glance, 21st century Disney and its multi-racial casts seem to embody the move towards inclusiveness and diverse representation on its cable network Disney Channel. And yet, a closer examination of the most popular shows on Disney Channel over the past decade suggests that Disney Channel’s diversity is in fact representative of this new colourblind racism, presenting diversity in such a way as to reify the position and privilege of white culture and the white cast members. While appearing to foreground race through racially diverse casts, Disney Channel exemplifies one of the tenets of colourblindness that suggests it is not necessary to see race because in fact America has moved ‘beyond colour or race [and instead is able to] focus on the content of a person’s character’ (Neville et al., 2005: 29). Not seeing race effectively erases race and suggests that “we are all the same”, and yet this seemingly liberal viewpoint works to deny the existence of social, cultural, economic, and/or political disenfranchisement that is the result of institutionalised racism. In this way, colourblindness serves to legitimise racism and certain racial (read white) privileges. Thus audiences can see and celebrate multicultural assimilation while disregarding existing racial hierarchies. As Angharad N. Valdivia argues, ‘to be sure, Disney does not pursue new representational strategies unless it is certain that profits will increase without alienating the bulk of its audience’ (Valdivia, 2008: 286). If that audience exists in a colourblind world, then Disney’s representational strategies work to reify that ideology. Disney’s racial representational strategies have shifted or evolved over time; the result is that contemporary Disney is seemingly no longer open to charges of overt racism or over-reliance on stereotypes. Instead, the new Disney, both television and movies, reflects a shift to the politics of colourblindness – an evolution from the “presence of absence” (Lizzie McGuire [2001-2004], Hannah Montana [2006-2011]) through a targeted race-specific format (That’s So Raven [2003- 127 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 2007], Corey in the House [2007-2008], The Cheetah Girls [2003]) to the new Black Best Friend format.x While many Disney Channel shows are notable for their inclusion of main or supporting characters of colour, this article will argue that such representation, idealised as colourblind, instead works to locate those characters in stereotypical roles that disenfranchise, not empower, the groups represented. A close examination of Disney’s 21st century representational strategies suggests that many shows at one level actually work to erase difference and imply that are the characters are the same, no matter what they look like, and that they share the same social experience. That these shows are geared toward younger viewers suggests that Disney is exposing these viewers to what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2010) calls ‘racism without racists’, outwardly presenting an ideology of “we are all the same” while at the same time subtly adhering to a post-racial doctrine that undermines while it represents (Bonilla- Silva, 2010: 4).