Abstract
Racial inequalities in contemporary society are inextricably intertwined with artistic and cultural representations. Understanding race, as scholars including Anamik Saha (2018), Francesca Sobande (2020), Karen Patel (2020), Tobie Stein (2020) and Alfred Martin (2021) have all recently demonstrated, is essential to understanding contemporary culture. In this context, Maryann Erigha’s The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry is an important addition to the recent literature, as well as essential reading for academic, industry and public audiences.
The Hollywood Jim Crow focuses on directors in Hollywood and uses a variety of sources to identify and analyse racial inequalities in this context. Much of the material it draws on is public, including box office data and press interviews, reflecting McRobbie’s (2016) observation on the value for creative economy research in using a multitude of media sources. The book’s analysis is also bolstered by emails from Sony Pictures, accessed via Wikileaks, which lay bare the hidden conversations that shape what the book describes as Hollywood’s assumption that Black directors and their films are ‘unbankable’.
Within the book’s analysis, ‘Jim Crow’ – the name for the laws that codified a system of racial apartheid in the US – serves as both a metaphor and as a means to capture a grim reality within contemporary cultural, as well as specifically Hollywood cinema, production. The idea of the Jim Crow legacy in America points towards three principles organising contemporary social divisions: a philosophy of racial difference; labelling and stratification of racial groups based on assumed differences; and the attendant advantages for whites and disadvantages for other racial groups. In the context of Hollywood, Jim Crow is grounded in assumptions held by decision-makers about the likely economic performance of Black directors and their movie projects. Irrespective of the facts of possible and probable return on investment, and audience demand, these racialised assumptions result in restricted access to finance, resources and support for Black film makers. Moreover, this system not only penalizes Black film makers, it also privileges their white counterparts, who do not face the same set of racialised assumptions, and thus the consequential constraints, on their work.
The book unfolds the analysis of Hollywood’s Jim Crow, first with historical and quantitative contextualisation in the early chapters, before then moving to explore the (racist) rationales underpinning the assumption that Black film projects will be ‘unbankable’, set alongside analysis of the career experiences of Black directors. The later chapters engage with the consequences of the Hollywood Jim Crow system for representation in cinema, both on-screen and in the workforce, before focusing on the need for a reformed Hollywood and, more importantly, a Black cinema collective.
Chapter 4 of the book, ‘Making genre ghettos’, provides a direct connection to the overall theme of this special issue ‘Genres and Inequality in the Creative Industries’. Genre is also a useful focus for the themes that run throughout Erigha’s analysis. The book itself opens with a discussion of the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven, showing how key ‘insiders’ assumed that the audience for a Western would be white, and that they would be unlikely to show up for a Black-led film in this genre. Two things are going on here. There is the assumption of audience behaviour based on race (Black audiences are assumed to be uninterested in Westerns, at least not in sufficient numbers to see the film making significant profit), and there is the perhaps more depressing assumption of audience prejudice, whereby the existing audience for this beloved and canonical Western are presumed to be sceptical of a Black star and a Black director leading the remake.
Genre is thus fundamental to the insidious operation of the Hollywood Jim Crow. Black directors are overrepresented in some genres, for example, music, and underrepresented in others, including sci-fi and blockbuster franchises. This is not a reflection of creative preferences, nor of genre-related talent and career stage. The racialised sorting by genre is dependent on racist assumptions. In turn, it has career-defining consequences that then further reinforce the view that Black directors and their projects will not find audiences nor make sufficient returns on investment. In particular, the importance of sci-fi to the modern studio system, along with the relationship between this genre and the most successful modern franchises, means Black directors are not given the same levels of budget and thus the same access to high-profile projects as their white counterparts. They are, in effect, ghettoised in lower budget genres where they are assumed to have experience from the music industry, and in the telling of (narrowly drawn) Black stories. Erigha further draws out the implications of this ghettoization into music, connecting it to the longer standing social and cultural assumption of African Americans as being capable only as entertainers and performers. In this analysis, genre becomes an important frame through which to view cultural and workplace inequalities.
Within the discussion of genre, and indeed throughout the book, we see the weight of race bearing on filmmakers. Making it in any creative career is extremely difficult, and we should be conscious of the struggles that all creative workers face to sustain their careers. This is especially so in the context of the huge financial investments that are coupled with high levels of creative risk aversion in screen industries. Yet, these struggles are unevenly distributed, according to race, gender, class, disability and other demographic characteristics. Some of the additional struggles are against assumptions about creatives and audiences, but there is also a powerful fear, held by Hollywood decision-makers, of a project being labelled a ‘Black film’ and becoming an economic failure. Erigha compellingly demonstrates that the stigmatisation of ‘Black film’ is reflective of racialised assumptions and racist hierarchies that permeate Hollywood and US society more broadly (as well as globally).
As the conclusion notes, the book was written at the moment of a possible future for Black directed major franchise films, particularly Black Panther. The book should also be read in the context of Black Lives Matter and various responses to that movement in cinema production and reception, especially with regard to the politics of awards. Although published in 2019, the impact of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, coupled with significant shifts to digital forms of distribution, might yet transform Hollywood’s Jim Crow. The assumptions of Black films being ‘unbankable’ might be shifted by the crisis, and the campaigns, that we are seeing in the current moment.
However, the most important point that the book makes is the structural nature of the racist assumptions underpinning Hollywood decision-making. As Eithne Quinn’s (2019) A Piece of the Action has recently noted, Hollywood has a history of possible futures that are never realised. The nature of Erigha’s analysis leads to the suspicion that there will be a sequel to The Hollywood Jim Crow, perhaps in a decade or so, explaining back to industry insiders how they missed the lessons of our current moment in favour of assumptions for which there is little business, cultural, and perhaps most crucially, moral grounding.
University of Edinburgh, UK