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Part II
RACE AND ETHNICITY AND AMERICAN FILM

INTRODUCTION TO PART II:

What is Race?

This part of the book examines how different racial and/or ethnic groups have been represented in American film. Although most Americans would probably say they have a fairly good understanding of race, American ideas about race often vary a great deal. Sometimes it is confused with ethnicity, or nationality, or religion, or some other marker of cultural difference. What one person regards as a “racial” issue may be regarded as something else by another. What this means from the outset is that ideas about race are heavily dependent upon social, ideological, and historical concepts. (These multifarious and intersectional ideas about race are being increasingly theorized by scholars across many academic fields, and are sometimes referred to collectively as critical race theory.) Although historically race was “invented” by scientists to categorize human beings based upon perceived biological evidence, today we approach race as a set of social and cultural understandings about human difference – understandings that are malleable and ever‐changing. As with all labels, the terms we use to discuss race tend to reduce the complex nature of human beings and their differences into separate and often simple‐minded categories. Sadly, the historical cost of dividing human beings into such broadly labeled racial groups has been enormous. Wars, genocide, slavery, bigotry, and prejudice have all resulted from understanding people not as individualized human beings, but rather as members of a racially designated grouping.

For generations of Western culture, textbooks defined race as a division of humankind based upon a set of identifiable traits that are transmitted generationally, that is, through sexual reproduction. Scholars and scientists of earlier eras spent considerable time and energy examining people of the world according to their external features: hair texture, head shape, nose and lip size, and most notably skin color. These studies were done to classify people into one of three main racial groupings: Caucasoid, or the “white race” (people descended from European heritage); Negroid, or the “black race” (people descended from African heritage); and Mongoloid, or the “yellow race” (people with Asian and/or Native American roots). Although people of previous centuries felt that skin color was a significant marker of human difference, today we recognize that even though human beings come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, all of us are basically the same on the cellular and genetic level. For example, no human beings are actually white, black, or yellow in coloration. No one on earth is the color of this page or the ink printed upon it. Instead, all human beings are different shades of the same human skin pigment, melanin. Melanin is thought to have evolved to protect human beings from the harmful effects of the sun’s radiation and the skin cancers it can cause. People whose bodies’ cannot produce melanin are diagnosed as having albinism, and sometimes referred to as albinos. Sadly, human beings have persecuted such individuals throughout history, and they are sometimes linked with villainy in popular media texts like The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Da Vinci Code (2006). Further complicating the simplistic categories of race, is that each of these three main racial labels (Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid) encompasses a large variety of diverse individuals, groups, and cultures. There is also considerable mixing and overlap between these three simple racial categories. There is no such thing as a “pure” race, and contemporary cultural theorists sometime argue that there is only one race: the human race.

These allegedly “scientific” theories of race have now been debunked as culturally constructed ideological arguments meant to uphold the supremacy of one group over another. Historically, it has always been easier to discriminate or even enslave one group of people when another group can justify “scientifically” that groups of people are either inferior or superior. Another way of putting this is that skin color in itself does not make someone better or lesser than someone else: it is the cultural and ideological meaning of skin color that allows for such classifications to be made. Scientific discourse, though, is not the only manner in which ideological messages about race are dispersed. Consequently, even as modern science has given up the idea that race is an important biological distinction to make, it remains a powerful socio‐cultural concept embedded in many ideological state apparatuses, including the media. To the present day, most people still consider human beings according to certain racial criteria.

Complicating matters further is the concept of ethnicity, which is a term similar to race but often used in less specific ways. Unlike most classical definitions of race (based on “scientific” data), definitions of ethnicity usually acknowledge a social dimension to its meaning. Ethnicity is thus understood as a social grouping based upon shared culture and custom. For example, while Native Americans as a whole have been historically thought of as part of the Mongoloid race, the various Native American tribes that flourished hundreds of years ago might perhaps be thought of as ethnic groups within the race, bound together by shared cultural customs. Race and ethnicity are also sometimes confused with nationality – the grouping of people based upon geographical and/or political boundaries. Obviously, cultural experiences and customs (ethnicities) often overlap with and themselves help define nationality, although in today’s world most nations are themselves comprised of people from a multitude of racial and ethnic groups, as is The United States of America.

As with race, ethnicity and nationality are classificatory systems that reduce the vast complexity of human experience to single, simplified terms. Too often people think of race, ethnicity, or nationality as absolute categories and fail to understand the great differences that exist within any given grouping. Conversely, consistently grouping people according to their race, ethnicity, or nationality overlooks or undervalues the similarities and commonalties that exist between all human beings. Around the globe throughout history, many wars have been fought and lives have been lost over questions of nationality, race, and ethnicity. Even today, people continue to be rounded up and imprisoned, or treated differently by police and the justice system(s), because of their perceived membership in one of these categories. Within American culture, there is a long history of white people and white institutions discriminating against various racial and ethnic groups. Such discrimination stems from racism, the belief that human beings can be meaningfully categorized into racial groups and designated as superior or inferior on the basis of those characteristics. Similarly, ethnocentrism means regarding one’s own ethnic group as better than another, while nationalism or jingoism means believing that one’s national grouping is superior to all others. Although racial discrimination in America was officially outlawed by the Civil Rights Amendment of 1964, politicians, public figures, and media producers still invoke racist and ethnocentric concepts in order to win votes, sway opinions, or “merely” entertain.

As this introduction implies, many people today argue that race and ethnicity (and even nationality) are outmoded concepts that only foster inequity and violence. Some cultural theorists have suggested that these concepts should be done away with altogether, reasoning that the only way to move beyond them is to stop speaking of them. While there is strength in this position, such an argument has also been used to downplay or ignore America’s racist past, and deny its racist present. Simply because race and ethnicity are increasingly recognized as social concepts, it does not follow that they no longer have tremendous power to shape the actual lives (and deaths) of Americans today. We cannot simply pretend that race and racial concepts have suddenly disappeared from American society. Despite certain assertions to the contrary, America is still a nation that is deeply divided by race, which suggests the ongoing importance of race to discussions of culture and politics. Many academic theorists as well as everyday citizens feel that it is absolutely necessary to examine the history of race and racial oppression, in order to better understand how America (and the rest of the world) deals with race and racism today.

The following chapters explore how Hollywood film (and to a lesser extent television) has represented America’s changing concepts of race and ethnicity in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. By focusing on the issues explored within these chapters, it may seem as though they are attempting to divide Americans into separate groups rather than unite us as one. However, it is not the goal of this part of the book (or the book as a whole) to divide people, but rather to explore the histories of how and why such divisions have been created in the past, and how they continue to be exploited in the present. Chapter 3 introduces the topic of whiteness and further examines some of the critical concepts raised in this introduction. Chapters 4 through 7 serve as an introduction to the history and issues involved in representing African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics on our nation’s movie screens. In most cases, Hollywood has contributed to simplified notions of race and ethnicity via the use of stereotypes. In other films, Hollywood has rewritten our racist and ethnocentric past in order to downplay America’s role in national tragedies such as slavery or the so‐called Indian Wars. In yet other instances, some more recent Hollywood films have challenged racist and ethnocentric assumptions, and have helped bring about social change. The rise of American independent filmmaking in the last few decades has also tended to make American movie screens more sensitive to racial and ethnic issues. However, while there have been considerable gains for racial and ethnic minorities in Hollywood over the years, both Hollywood narrative form and the industry itself continue to marginalize non‐white people in many ways. That said, in recent years newer production and distribution platforms (as discussed in Chapter 2) seem to be contributing more diverse images of racial and ethnic minorities. As the media landscape continues to change, so will our understanding(s) of race and ethnicity.