While most of our readings this week address race in television, I would like to address race in the motion picture industry. The Colorlines blog entry from January 25, 2011, entitled “Get Ready for the White Oscars in a Decade,” brings up many relevant points to our class. One member of the Academy, John Singleton, said, “It’s more difficult than ever to get a picture made with any serious subject matter—let alone an ethnic-themed one.” The pictures in recent years that have included non-white Oscar winners were mostly “ethnic-themed.” Now I’m just assuming that what he meant by this term is that the movie’s characters are primarily of one race on purpose to represent the culture, e.g. the movie Precious. Do you think that the frequency of non-white actors on the stage at the Oscars is at all correlated to Americans’ feelings of racism at the time? The article seems to suggest, as I would imagine is the case, that there are ebbs and flows of various races based on what movies happened to be released that year (i.e. how prevalent were “ethnically-themed” movies.) But how correlated is this to racism or other worldly events? Given that movies are released probably around 3-5 years after the development of their concept, do you think movies are a lagging indicator of racism in America? Furthermore, I’d like to extend this discussion to Brewer’s idea of ingroup love versus outgroup hate. How do “ethnically-themed” movies gain traction to mainstream American audiences? Is it a case of ingroup love? Outgroup hate? Or, as I hypothesize, a fascination with getting an inside look at another ethnicity? According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States) America is 80% white. Given that it is the racial majority, and certainly the majority among the Academy, by what mechanism do “ethnically-themed” movies gains popularity? Another interesting point, if you look at America’s racial makeup based on ancestry, African-American is actually second at 12.9% to German at 15.2%. Would a movie about German-Americans be “ethnically-themed”? Would such a movie ever be popular? Why does America then break categories down by white, black, etc., when you could look at it in so many ways? Do you think that The Wire is “ethnically-themed,” even though some of the characters, including the main character, the detective, is not black?
(P.S. I highly recommend checking out the Wikipedia link I just posted for a very interesting map on ancestry in America!)
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