The Hollywood Jim Crow. Maryann Erigha
images and content, and usher in social justice.46 Adequate demographic representation is required to achieve diversity and is an important aim in and of itself for reasons of employment and citizenship, but demographic parity alone is insufficient to achieve equality.
While some measure of progress is captured through increased representation—if there are greater numbers of Black, Asian, Latino/a, and Native people working in Hollywood—only tackling the issue of numerical underrepresentation would not eradicate all racial inequality within Hollywood directing. Demography alone tells us little about the contours of directing careers, as numerical representation does not take into account qualitative differences that directors experience within their workplace environments. Numerical representation alone cannot explain whether there are qualitative differences in the movies Blacks and whites direct, a difference that in no small part facilitates racial disparities in career trajectories. Merely relying on numerical representation can result in observing progress that is more symbolic than substantive. African Americans can appear to have a greater presence in Hollywood, but upon closer inspection, their presence could remain only marginal to core film-industry operations. Having racial minorities occupy key decision-making positions is important to their prosperity in the film business. As Cheryl Boone’s leadership in the Academy illustrates, executive position matters in the opportunities generated for racial minorities. In cinema, what is being green-lit, by whom, and with what kinds of production budgets matter a great deal. These kinds of details cannot be captured by measuring demography but require a finer prism through which to examine the full spectrum of representation.
As studio executives in positions of power, African Americans are influential in bringing movies with Black casts, stars, and directors to audiences. For one example, Devon Franklin worked as a studio executive at Sony Pictures and MGM. At MGM, he worked on movies such as Be Cool and Beauty Shop. As senior vice president of production for Columbia Tristar Pictures for Sony, Franklin worked on The Karate Kid reboot, starring Jaden Smith, and The Pursuit of Happyness, Hancock, and Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith. In addition, at Sony, he developed and supervised movies that were geared toward the urban and faith-based markets. He worked on the faith-based hit movies Not Easily Broken and Jumping the Broom, both produced by Bishop T. D. Jakes, as well as Heaven Is for Real and Miracles from Heaven. Few executives from racial-minority backgrounds exist in Hollywood. The chief executive at Warner Brothers, Kevin Tsujihara, is a rare Asian studio executive in Hollywood. Just as white studio executives bring white movies to audiences, integrating the executive ranks would likely lead to more racially diverse movies on-screen.
Beyond inequalities of numerical representation, further obstacles to equality persist for Hollywood directors such that increased representation behind the camera cannot single-handedly close the racial inequality gap. There is no denying that Hollywood has made progress, since its exclusionary years before the civil rights era, toward greater inclusivity of African Americans in film directing. Yet it is premature to suggest that Black directors who do break into the film industry automatically experience work conditions on par with white directors working in the industry. Rather than asking how many racial minorities occupy directing positions, the more telling question is: How do the work experiences of directors from different racial backgrounds differ from one another? To allow for a more complete and complex understanding of obstacles to equality for film directors in twenty-first-century Hollywood, it is necessary not only to monitor the demographics of representation but also to understand recurring patterns of representation that result in racial hierarchies and unequal outcomes. Besides visibility and demography, other metrics for progress—such as access to lucrative opportunities and ample resources—are important for assessing inequality in film-industry work. Examining the hierarchical level of cultural representation, as it relates to who occupies what types of positions in Hollywood, gives a more refined portrait of privilege and power in the director’s chair.
Hollywood Black directors encounter an enduring racial inequality that is a direct product of the society that they inhabit and in which they work. In order to thoroughly investigate how racial inequality operates in Hollywood, it is first vital to comprehend how racial inequality operates within the larger American social context. Racial hierarchies of privilege, power, and oppression have been prevalent in the United States since the nation’s inception. Racial inequality was built into the fabric of the United States, residing deep within the bones of the nation’s social practices, pastimes, and organizations, while creating a kind of racial skeleton undergirding social life that shapes interracial relations among members of various groups.
In the early centuries of American social life under the prevailing system of slavery, to name one racial regime, white Euro-Americans trumpeted an ideology of white superiority and Black inferiority in order to justify hundreds of years of enslavement of Black people. During slavery, the social order stratified whites and Blacks, labeling the majority of whites “free men” and the majority of Blacks “chattel slaves”—forced laborers brought in chains from African coasts across the Atlantic Ocean to become the property of free whites. With regularity, African people were subject to inhumane treatment and brutality of savage proportion—lynchings, whippings, rape, and killings at the hands of white Europeans who were themselves newly arrived on North American shores. The system of slavery not only relegated African Americans into inferior positions in society but also perilously threatened their life chances. On the other hand, the slavery era reserved advantaged positions, with privileges of property ownership and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, exclusively for whites. Entirely on the basis of racial membership, whites and Blacks were subjected to unequal treatment and outcomes. Nationally enforced laws and practices solidified persistent racial inequality, while weakening African Americans’ ability to fully participate in society.
Though the capitalist enterprise of American transatlantic slavery has ended, the centuries-long American system left behind an ingrained institutional legacy. The institution was formally dismantled, yet the disparate distribution of material resources and social conditions along racial lines was merely reproduced in other forms.47 The orchestrated social divisions between racial groups in the United States, along with the lawful discrimination and marginalization of African Americans that initiated during slavery, were manufactured in other ways even after slavery was officially abolished. Soon after slavery, the era of Jim Crow segregation bore its institutional legacy, once again establishing relations of domination and subordination, of privilege and disadvantage, between racial groups.
The organization of Hollywood is not far removed from the operation of racial inequality within the larger American context. Racial hierarchies prevailing in Hollywood privilege or disadvantage creative workers. In the face of obvious gains in proportional representation, racial inequality still persists in the film industry. Although Black directors have increasing access to Hollywood directing compared to earlier decades, the Hollywood Jim Crow prevents them from attaining full integration into the directing profession. The Hollywood Jim Crow creates obstacles to the advancement of Black films and directors, in the same racially hierarchical fashion that has disadvantaged African Americans during each era of U.S. history. Notions of representation in Hollywood are inextricably attached to the profit motive. Predetermined cultural and economic rationalizations made on the basis of race shape the projected value of popular cinema. Hollywood insiders perpetuate the myth that Black films and directors are unbankable, or unprofitable, and that they draw smaller audiences compared to white films and directors. As a result, Black directors face marginalization, segregation, and stigmatization that limits the scope and progress of their careers.
In the racialized film industry, resources and opportunity are distributed along racial lines, such that Black directors experience disadvantages compared to white directors. Rarely do Black directors obtain lucrative, high-status positions. The Hollywood Jim Crow thwarts them from achieving true equality in the motion-picture industry. Race divisions in the film industry have real consequences in the form of barriers that obstruct access to jobs and constrain the scope of American images and worldviews that are disseminated around the nation and the globe. Images from Hollywood are thought of as embodying American cinema, yet this slice of the American cinematic pie omits or obscures whole racial groups. The portrait of a liberal Hollywood and a complete integration for African American directors, as well as for Asian, Latino/a, and Native American directors, is thus far a fairy tale without a happy