America on Film. Sean Griffin
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aliens, minor black and Hispanic characters frequently get killed off as the film progresses, leaving a white hero to save the day. This is especially egregious in a film like Battle Los Angeles (2011) which begins with a Hispanic Marine (Ramon Rodriguez) leading the attack on aliens, until he suffers a compete nervous breakdown, leaving the world to be saved by his stalwart white replacement (Aaron Eckhart). This phenomenon has become so prevalent that some audience members consider it a racist cliché. For many others, however, the phenomenon goes unnoticed, and the dominance of whiteness remains unquestioned.
Film scholar Richard Dyer’s work on how cinema represents whiteness ties this unthinking (or unremarked‐upon) white centrism to larger ideological issues of race. As pointed out in Chapter 1, a society’s dominant ideology functions optimally when individuals are so imbued with its concepts that they do not realize that a social construct has been formed or is being reinforced. The relative cultural invisibility of whiteness within the United States serves as a perfect example of this idea: the white power base maintains its dominant position precisely by being consistently overlooked, or at least unexamined in most mainstream texts. Unless whiteness is somehow pointed out or overemphasized, its dominance is taken for granted. A rare Hollywood film such as Pleasantville (1998) calls attention to whiteness, even down to its black‐and‐white visual design, in which characters are literally devoid of color. (The film is a satire of 1950s nostalgia as represented by that era’s all‐white television sitcoms.) More regularly, however, Hollywood films continue to use the token approach to casting non‐white actors. Jurassic World (2015) featured a mostly all‐white cast except for Irrfan Khan (as one of the villains who meets his justified end part way through the film), while Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) followed the same formula by casting Justice Smith as a cowardly nerd, whose frightened antics sadly look back to the African American stereotypes of the 1940s. (Both films also feature Asian American actor B.D. Wong in a few scenes, yet as the brainy amoral scientist, how far away from a stereotype is he truly?) Such tokenism, combined with narratives that frame non‐white people as marginal (at best) and villainous (at worst), while maintaining the centrality of white heroics and white romance, work to naturalize whiteness as a universal state of being.
Whiteness – as a complex and often unconscious structural ideology – can also effect people of color in seemingly contradictory ways. For example, in some communities of color, being born with a lighter shade of skin is itself a form of privilege. This phenomenon of favoring light skin, even within communities of color, is called colorism. It exists in African American cultures, as explored by filmmakers like Spike Lee (in films such as School Daze [1998] and Jungle Fever [1991]) and Chris Rock in his docu‐comedy Good Hair (2009). The title of Rock’s film refers to a black term for having long straight un‐curly hair, and the film shows to what great lengths many African American women (and some men) will go to achieve that goal, including harsh chemical hair relaxers and expensive weaves (somewhat paradoxically coming from dark‐skinned Indian women). Colorism also can be found within the Latinx community and within India and its diasporic population. Colorism is deeply enmeshed in the American fashion and beauty industries, which have traditionally promoted European ideals of feminine beauty (light skin, long straight blond hair, smaller facial features) to people all around the globe. Some people in developing countries spend their earnings on European cosmetics, while Asian women have been known to undergo plastic surgery – all in pursuit of a Western ideal of feminine beauty. Hollywood is no stranger to these ideologies, as it has always tended to cast lighter‐skinned black women in romantic roles, often not even being able to find suitable roles for darker‐skinned actresses (a topic explored at further length in chapter 4). It is only in the last few years that darker‐skinned African American actresses like Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis have gained leading roles (and appeared on the covers of beauty magazines).
When it goes unmentioned, whiteness is positioned as a default category, the center or the assumed norm on which everything else is based. Furthermore, aside from white supremacists and neo‐Nazis (who are restaging a comeback in the current political climate), whiteness is most often invisible to the people who consider themselves to be white. Many remain unaware of the subtle ways their whiteness affords them certain privileges. However, many non‐white individuals are often painfully aware of the dominance of whiteness, precisely because they are repeatedly excluded from its privileges. Sometimes racialized stereotypes get inverted to characterize whiteness. Thus, if people of color are stereotyped as physical and passionate, whiteness is sometimes satirized as bland and sterile, represented by processed white bread, mayonnaise, and elevator music. The stereotypes that white people lack rhythm, can’t dance, or can’t play basketball (as the title of the film White Men Can’t Jump [1992] would have it) are simply reversals of racist stereotypes that assert that people of color are “naturally” more in touch with their physicality than are white people. Many of these stereotypes seem to invoke (and probably evolved from) the racist beliefs of earlier eras. One such belief was the assumption that white people were a more evolved type of human being – and thus suited for mental and intellectual tasks – while non‐white people were thought of as being more basely physical and even animalistic.
This process of defining one group against another is sometimes referred to as Othering. More specifically, Othering refers to the way a dominant culture ascribes an undesirable trait (one shared by all humans) onto one specific group of people. Psychologically, Othering depends on the defense mechanism of displacement, in which a person or group sees something about itself that it doesn’t like, and instead of accepting that fault or shortcoming, projects it onto another person or group. For example, white culture (with its Puritan and Protestant taboos against sex) has repeatedly constructed and exploited stereotypes of non‐white people as being overly sexualized. Throughout US history, fear and hysteria about “rampant and animalistic” non‐white sexualities (as opposed to “regulated and healthy” white sexualities) have been used to justify both institutional and individual violence against non‐white people. Other character traits common to all human groups – such as laziness, greed, or criminality – are regularly denied as white traits and projected by dominant white culture onto racial or ethnic Others. In this way, and simultaneously, whiteness represents itself as moral and good, while non‐white groups are frequently characterized as immoral or inferior.
The process of Othering reveals more about white frames of mind than about the various minority cultures being represented. This was often embodied within classical Hollywood filmmaking, when racial or ethnic minority characters were played by white actors. This common practice allowed white producers to construct images of non‐white people according to how they (the white producers) thought non‐white people acted and spoke. How non‐white Others helped to define whiteness can also be seen in the silent and classical Hollywood film practice of using minority‐group performers to play a variety of racial or ethnic characters. For example, African Americans and Latinos were often hired to play Native American characters, and Hispanic, Italian, and Jewish actors played everything from Eskimos to Swedes. Such casting practices again reinforced the notion that people were either white or non‐white, and Hollywood did not take much care to distinguish among non‐white people, often treating them as interchangeable Others.
In socially constructing this concept of whiteness, Western culture had to define who got to be considered white. Many attempts were made over the past centuries to “measure” a person’s whiteness. In the United States, laws were passed defining who was and who was not to be considered white. People claimed that “one drop of blood” from a non‐white lineage excluded an individual from being “truly” white. Marriages were carefully arranged to keep a family lineage “pure,” and laws prohibiting interracial marriage were common in most states. If there were non‐white relationships within a family tree, they would frequently be hidden or denied. Throughout much of American history, lynching – the illegal mob torture and murder of a suspected individual – was a white community crime commonly spurred by fears over interracial sex. All these measures to “protect” whiteness indicate a serious cultural anxiety