Abstract
The media have significant power. Arguably, entertainment media may even have the ability to construct public perception given the passive engagement of watching, listening and even reading. Implicit in both participation and the construction of entertainment media is a desire to be entertained and a mandate for profitability, respectively. It is in this symbiosis that entertainment media can reflect the prevailing social norms or push beyond them, providing an insight into what could be or even an opportunity for moral reflection with respect to what is and has been normalized. This is the topic that frames Elda María Román’s Race and Upward Mobility.
Román focuses on Black and Brown upward mobility through an evaluation of entertainment media portrayal, including books and film. Evaluating the depiction of marginalized groups, she categorizes character types into four groups: status seekers, conflicted artists, mediators and gatekeepers. However, she does also note that all the categories are aligned to a perceived sense of inadequacy and reflect variations in the need for legitimacy by the dominant society. Arguably, this is an assumption that given entertainment media’s influence can be both descriptive and influential with respect to observed behavior.
Status seekers essentially buy into the perception that their worth is bound to assimilation and shedding of what differentiates them. Their pursuit is material accumulation for legitimacy through all means available. Conflicted artists may appear as status seekers in that their vocation is consistent with mid to high socio-economic status of the dominant population but they themselves are from poor origins that are correlated with their ethnicity. Mediators represent those individuals who have achieved success and seek to promote the status of their own group, while gatekeepers strive to limit access for their ethnic cohorts, to promote and maintain their relative status within their group. As Román notes, these roles are not static and characters often move between classifications. However, these classifications, to the extent that they are defined and developed, both mimic and promote a stereotype that fits within the existing perception of the majority population. The stereotype fundamentally facilitates a single lens of judgment where assimilation and acceptance are what is assumed all non-White groups seek.
Over the course of six chapters, Román traces the evolving portrayal of race. From The Jeffersons to Chico and the Man, she highlights how mere inclusion in entertainment media created celebration, and how portrayal in Good Times and Sanford and Son maintained the socio-economic perception of people of color. Throughout her book, Román provides evidence of the complex relationship between reality and depiction, and the role of entertainment media in shaping perception.
In Chapter 1: ‘Mortgaged status,’ she shares the portrayal of a Black family in The Living is Easy, highlighting the depiction of status seekers as embodying colorism and classism. Román addresses through her discussion how the novel surfaces the internal discrimination within the Black community that separated the lighter skinned Blacks from darker Blacks and also how the variation in educational attainment imposed a hierarchy. She adds to this discussion the novel Brown Girl, along with other literary works and the popular television series The Cosby Show, to reaffirm how color and class explicitly was depicted to be accessible to White audiences.
In Chapter 2: ‘Class suicide,’ Román analyzes novels that depict the change in aspiration in Hispanic and Black communities, and reflect young people coming of age who find themselves no longer satisfied with a second-class middle-class existence. The discussion focuses on how the selected authors defined characters that attained the aspirational goal of a few generations before but were dissatisfied with being limited by their color when their mental capabilities proved their equality. Chapter 3: ‘Cultural betrayal’ examines the Chicano/a texts and the disconnect between assimilation into the US material culture and the preservation of the Chicano/a culture that to some extent opposed this perspective. The discussion highlights how assimilation interests and opportunity established heterogeneity related to class differences within the community. Chapter 4: ‘Status panic’ and Chapter 5: ‘Racial investments’ highlight how the portrayal of Blacks promotes stereotype, perhaps even enabling implicit bias. In Chapter 4, Román analyzes the depiction of a racially diverse middle class relative to the discourse on the need to eliminate Affirmative Action. In Chapter 5, Román turns the discussion to the negative bias created by entertainment media’s depiction of Blacks even in socially legitimate roles. A similar theme serves as the basis for Chapter 6: ‘Switched allegiances’; however, the discussion focuses on Hispanic stereotypes and the depictions used to redefine them.
Overall, Race and Upward Mobility offers both interesting insights and challenges. The reader is presented with the opportunity to delve deeper into the relationship between depiction, perception and reality, profit, societal power dynamics, and the formation and evolution of social norms. The book is a welcome addition to the study of race in the US, and given its use of texts and film can be readily supplemented with source materials to address the comments and relationships that Román provides. Additionally, the book is accessible and though framed at times in economic terms, it offers a refreshing vantage point to the study of racial integration, racial assimilation and the transformation of culture through both an intraracial and interracial perspective. Further, and perhaps importantly, the evaluation conducted provides credibility to the use of entertainment media as a tool to establish or maintain social perceptions and norms.