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A review by colin_cox
The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry by Maryann Erigha
4.0
Pivoting from Michelle Alexander's stunning book on racial inequality in the United States prison system, The New Jim Crow, Maryanne Erigha's The Hollywood Jim Crow explores racial inequality in the American filmmaking industry. Erigha claims that the film industry produces, in part, cultural narratives about not only race but citizenship. Therefore, the limitations predominately white power structures place on African American workers in the filmmaking industry means "African Americans achieve only an incomplete cultural citizenship and belonging in the United States" (40). Erigha argues that this "incomplete cultural citizenship" manifests in everything from the sorts of films African Americans can direct (limited almost exclusively to the horror and comedy genres) to the fallacious logic that black films (i.e., films directed by black directors and predominately staring black actors) are financially dubious endeavors (i.e., "unbankable"). Erigha suggests that "Blackness is devalued and linked to cultural and economic inferiority, and whiteness is valued and linked to cultural and economic superiority" (81). This is precisely the crux of Erigha's argument; the American filmmaking industry is yet another site where blackness is, like W. E. B. Du Bois would argue, "a problem."
However, this crafting of blackness as a problem in the American filmmaking industry is precisely that, a crafting. As Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields suggest in Racecraft, the unequal narratives regarding race in the American filmmaking industry "originates not in nature but in human action and imagination...The action and imagining are collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine." This suggests that we can challenge these narratives, and Erigha has two potential solutions: installing more minorities in positions of power and building a Black cinema collective. These are not mutually exclusive solutions. Instead, they can work in tandem to enable "racial minorities to gain lucrative work opportunities and shape popular cinema from positions of influence" (192). Thinking of this opportunity as something that produces material (work opportunities) and immaterial benefits (shaping aesthetics sensibilities), positions Erigha between two significant black figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
While the opening chapters of The Hollywood Jim Crow are a little repetitive, the final three are well worth reading. While it is certainly not a flawless book, what The Hollywood Jim Crow offers is a timely and necessary supplement to Alexander's The New Jim Crow. By "using the Jim Crow framework in order to make sense of and challenge the film industry's status quo of perpetuating racial myths and disparities," Erigha demonstrates the importance and use-value of the Jim Crow paradigm in academic pursuits (14).
However, this crafting of blackness as a problem in the American filmmaking industry is precisely that, a crafting. As Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields suggest in Racecraft, the unequal narratives regarding race in the American filmmaking industry "originates not in nature but in human action and imagination...The action and imagining are collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine." This suggests that we can challenge these narratives, and Erigha has two potential solutions: installing more minorities in positions of power and building a Black cinema collective. These are not mutually exclusive solutions. Instead, they can work in tandem to enable "racial minorities to gain lucrative work opportunities and shape popular cinema from positions of influence" (192). Thinking of this opportunity as something that produces material (work opportunities) and immaterial benefits (shaping aesthetics sensibilities), positions Erigha between two significant black figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
While the opening chapters of The Hollywood Jim Crow are a little repetitive, the final three are well worth reading. While it is certainly not a flawless book, what The Hollywood Jim Crow offers is a timely and necessary supplement to Alexander's The New Jim Crow. By "using the Jim Crow framework in order to make sense of and challenge the film industry's status quo of perpetuating racial myths and disparities," Erigha demonstrates the importance and use-value of the Jim Crow paradigm in academic pursuits (14).