Race and Ethnicity

CHAPTER 3 Race and Ethnicity Victor Joseph: You gotta look mean or people won’t respect you. White people will run all over you if you don’t look mean. You gotta look like a warrior! You gotta look like you just came back from killing a buffalo! Thomas Builds- But our tribe never hunted buffalo—we were fishermen. the-Fire: Victor Joseph: What! You want to look like you just came back from catching a fish? This ain’t “Dances With Salmon” you know! Smoke Signals (1998) Furious Styles: Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community? The Old Man: Why? Furious Styles: I’ll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves. Boyz n the Hood (1991) he history of race and ethnicity in Hollywood films reflects the racial and ethnic inequalities of American society. In the early 20th century, movies Twere created and exhibited to Eastern European immigrants to encourage assimilation. Whiteness was a status to be achieved, a way of life to emulate, with homogeneity as the goal, at least for immigrants from Europe. However, the portrayal of most nondominant groups in American film was the story of the “objec- tified Other” (Collins, 2000), created and controlled through practices of exclusion, expulsion, and violence. 65 66 CINEMATIC SOCIOLOGY In 1915, D. W. Griffith made history with the first blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation. Historians have called the film a major landmark for American cinema, and a “sacrifice of black humanity to the cause of racism” (Cripps, 1977, p. 40). Demonstrating the power of film to influence, and even shape, social events, this film sparked a political response from African Americans and supportive whites across the country. The release of the film, with its demonizing of African Americans (played by white actors in blackface) and sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan, led to a nationwide protest and educational campaign organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP published a 47-page pamphlet titled “Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest Against The Birth of a Nation,” in which they referred to the film as “three miles of filth” (Lavender, 2001). Sociologists were among those who protested the film. W. E. B. Du Bois published scathing reviews of the film in The Crisis, the official pub- lication of the NAACP, and Jane Addams, in an interview for the New York Evening Post about The Birth of a Nation called it “unjust and untrue,”noting that “one of the most unfortunate things about this film is that it appeals to race prejudice”(American Social History Project., n.d.). The most important, and perhaps defining, outcome of the film was the nationwide heightened awareness and collective identity of African Americans, reinforced by success in both censoring the most objectionable scenes from the film and banning the film from theaters in major cities (Cripps, 1977). Griffith’s work, based on exploitation of nativist and miscegenation themes, became central to the cinematic construction of the American racial order (Denzin, 2005). Movies throughout the 20th century reflected not just race prejudice, but the subjugation of people through their absence or, when included, in narrowly defined, stereotypical roles. This was true for all groups defined as Other, with some variation in the specific stereotyped roles between broadly constructed categories, such as Native American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and African American. As Victor Joseph tries to explain to his hapless friend in the movie Smoke Signals, there is a stereotype associated with being Indian that is important for him to learn and use to survive in the white man’s world. While many would agree that there has been significant progress in addressing racial inequality over the past century, there have also been major roadblocks. In recent years, there has been a reversal of the achievements of the mid- 20th-century movements for racial justice, as evidenced by “the dramatic increase in black prisoners, and the growth of the prison-industrial complex, crumbling city infrastructures, segregated housing, soaring black and Latino unemploy- ment ...and deepening inequalities of incomes and wealth between blacks and whites” (Giroux, 2002, p. 237). Additionally, the “new racism” (Collins, 2004) oper- ates in the guise of a color-blind society where the successes of the civil rights movement have been achieved and racial equality has been realized. Racist portrayals of African Americans in contemporary films are plentiful, with persistent linking of violence with men and “sexual promiscuity to the nature and identity of African American women” (Littlefield, 2008, p. 677). Such negative portrayals are not limited to African Americans, but are also seen in images of Latinos/as (as criminals), Native Americans (as clichéd savages), and Asian Americans (as immigrant shopkeepers or martial artist experts). Oftentimes, a Chapter 3 Race and Ethnicity 67 (white) hero in a film is established through the creation of a minority enemy, or “second-fiddle” such as Tonto to the Lone Ranger or Kato to the Green Hornet. The readings in this chapter focus on race and ethnicity in film. In the first reading, Ed Guerrero examines contemporary black screen violence, tracing its origins from Hollywood’s blaxploitation period, to the ’hood-homeboy films of the 1990s to “historical agonies” in black/African history. A central theme is the possibility of collective social change in the tradition of the black liberation movement versus the “grim, violent struggle for individual survival.” Even when the latter is presented as a heroic action-adventure story, any political significance is undercut by what Guerrero calls “popcorn” violence. Ultimately, he asks the question, “How does one make a feel-good Hollywood movie, with big box office expectations, about some of history’s most wicked crimes: racism, genocide, and slavery?” In the next reading, Susan Searls Giroux and Henry Giroux analyze the popu- lar, award-winning film Crash, pointing out that the film begins with a paradox about the loss of community in modern society and ends in an exchange of racist slurs. In keeping with the “new racism” noted above, Searls Giroux and Giroux claim that “most Americans believe that racism is an unfortunate and bygone episode in American history, part of a past that has been more than adequately redressed and is now best forgotten.” They are critical of Crash for presenting racism as a function of private discrimination, rather than a “systemic political force with often dire material consequences.”Perhaps most tragic of all is that the conditions that produce structural racism also destroy the possibility for an engaged democracy. In the last reading, Carleen Basler addresses the image of Latino/as in film. Beginning with a brief historical overview of Latino/as, Basler examines the stereotypes that have been cemented in the American mind, noting that throughout history, there has existed an “us” (white Americans) and “them” (Latinos) attitude that is evident in the stereotyping of Latinos in film. She concludes by exploring the ways Latinos have found to subvert and resist negative stereotypes, typecasting, and the status quo way of making films. The readings in this chapter draw our attention to the ways that race and ethnicity are socially constructed and how systems of inequality are structured and main- tained. At the same time that film projects racial and ethnic inequality, it can also be a vehicle for challenging racist ideologies. As we engage with film as viewing audi- ences, we can apply the sociological imagination to understand the historical con- texts, individual experiences, and social consequences of racism—old and new. References American Social History Project. (n.d.). Reformer Jane Addams critiques The Birth of a Nation. Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4994/ Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, P.H. (2004). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York: Routledge. 68 CINEMATIC SOCIOLOGY Cripps, T. (1977). Slow fade to black: The negro in American film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denzin, N. (2005). Selling images of inequality: Hollywood cinema and the reproduction of racial and gender stereotypes. In M. Romero & E. Margolis (Eds.), The Blackwell com- panion to social inequalities (pp. 469–501). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Giroux, H. A. (2002). Breaking in to the movies: Film and the culture of politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lavender, C. (2001). D. W. Griffith: The Birth of a Nation (1915). New York: Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/birth.html Littlefield, M. B. (2008). The media as a system of racialization: Exploring images of African American women and the new racism. American Behavioral Scientist, 51, 675–685. READING 3.1 THE SPECTACLE OF BLACK VIOLENCE AS CINEMA1 Ed Guerrero he raw synergy of comedy and history is a revealing place to start an explo- ration of black violence in American commercial cinema. African TAmericans living today, more than 40 years after the end of the civil rights movement, are confronted with many daunting ironies and unsettling paradigm shifts. As Chris Rock, one of the incisive, funky heirs to the politicized early comedic style of Richard Pryor, acidly implores in his stage monologue, wherever you find a boulevard named after this nation’s great apostle of nonviolence, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “run ...because there’s some violence going down.” One must now read the post–civil rights era in the broader, less optimistic twilight of “postslavery.” With declining resources, and the hegemony of race and class privilege reasserted in the neoconservative language of a post-9/11, post-Katrina, world, the complexities of American society are sharp, and often very obvious.

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