The controversy launched in the wake of this year’s all-Caucasian cast of Academy Award nominees is in the past. Yet film continues to play a role in constructing perceptions of the world with images defining beauty, power, love and whose stories are worth telling.
Until recently I was blind to the extent of cultural invisibility in film. White people are are so used to watching ourselves we sometimes forget who is missing. I was appalled to learn that the mostly white Academy members choose which films they will preview.
It’s not surprising that they select films reflecting their cultural landscape. Chris Rock, the Oscars’ host, condemned the Academy with lines that stung. “We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematography,” he said. “When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.”
The audience’s discomfort was palpable. While Rock indicted Hollywood for its “sorority” brand of racism, the white presenters and Oscar recipients never said a word about Hollywood’s shame. The implicit message was that racial exclusion is not a concern for white people.
Actress Charlotte Rampling earlier claimed the campaign to boycott the awards was “racist to white people.” Most disturbing were the words of Gerald Molen, a producer of “Schindler’s List,” who said, “There is no racism except for those who create an issue.” His message to black actors was to “be patient .… Of course it will come. It took me years to get an Oscar.” Their words trivialize the profound ways in which racism impacts people of color in the U.S.
We live in a segregated society, where our social interactions are mostly with people who look like us. The Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision (separate education is not equal education) came more than 60 years ago, yet children continue to learn in mainly segregated classrooms.
When schools are diverse, students often self-segregate based on color, as described in Beverly Tatum’s book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” According to a study last year published in The Guardian, 43 percent of Latinos and 38 percent of blacks in this country go to schools where less than 10 percent of their peers are white. Only 15 percent said they have a lot of friends of different races.
Our close relationships are reserved for those who look, speak and dress like us. We may chit-chat in a supermarket line next to a woman wearing a hijab, or interact in the workplace with folks whose first language isn’t English. Or we may casually converse with a dark-skinned person on an airplane.
But our engagement with these people doesn’t extend to dinner dates or Saturday night at the movies. They are not the people we reach out to when we’re in crisis. My friend, Dina, who grew up white in South Africa, told me over dinner in a socially segregated restaurant, that she witnessed more racialized divisions in the U.S. than in apartheid South Africa. Social segregation perpetuates stereotyping and mistrust on both sides of the color divide. We don’t seek out opportunities to interact with those we deem “other,” because we fear being judged or saying the “wrong” thing.
We see difference first. A social order exists in this country in which marginalized groups may stay together to create a nurturing and sustaining environment in a world that defines them as “less than.”
Cultural and racial segregation have negative consequences. Those with racial privilege remain blind to the impact of racial disparities on the lives of others, ignorant of the disastrous effects of mass incarceration, drug raids, stop-and-frisk searches and the militarization of law enforcement on urban communities of color.
Years ago, the only African-American student in my social work class poignantly described attending a job interview. The prospective employer had been cordial over the phone, but when their eyes met, everything changed. She was told the position was filled. She told the class it was racism. The students told her she was wrong. They denied her reality. This is color-blindness.
Donald Trump’s call to “Make America great again” is code for restoring a social order that will keep non-whites “in their place.” Michelle Alexander, in “The New Jim Crow,” explains how politicians have fomented racism among poor and working class whites, causing them to perceive the world through a racial lens, rather than one based on racially shared economic inequality.
The only people who benefit from this calculated divide and conquer race-baiting are those who use their racial and class privilege to give themselves unlimited access to power, while destroying our democracy.
“Part of the problem is that no one wants to hurt each other anymore.” Trump’s twisted words are fodder for the hatred that engulfs too large a segment of our nation. It’s imperative that we understand and concern ourselves with what this kind of language means for those who have already been targeted for discrimination.
We must respond to such dangerous words by reaching across divides and joining together to resist the caste system that separates us.
Sara Weinberger of Northampton is a professor emerita of social work and writes a monthly column.