Who’s Got Power? Just Ask the Kids

When I was a kid, I had a facility with statistics. I had a head filled with Guinness world records, city populations and Dodger batting averages. Since my parents raised me with their love for movies, the Academy Awards were a natural. Not only could I rattle off the nominees for best supporting actor in 1956, I could also give you the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award recipient.

Now it’s years later, and I have trouble remembering even last year’s best picture. (Age? Or have movies become more forgettable?) I teach high school now, and numbers for their own sake are less important to me. Current educational wisdom says statistics are only as valuable as the concept they support.

My students and I were exploring the particular concept of power in our Social Justice class recently. Our reading described how “dominative power,” or “power over,” came from insecurity and was ultimately destructive, while “shared power,” or “power with,” had the ability to generate progress. It was, however, the first class of the day and the discussion was as exciting as the orange schoolroom carpet my students were all staring at.

I decided to mention to my media-savvy class an Oscar statistic I wish wasn’t so memorable. It had to do with the exact number of actors of color nominated in 1996: none. Since then, of course, a magazine article and protests have used this and similar facts to charge the industry with racism. But three weeks ago it was just another gray morning when I said, “I notice there are no ‘minority’ actors nominated this year.”

Student reactions mirrored those I had received from friends and colleagues when I’d made the same statement. Some hadn’t noticed, some gave a “what-do-you-expect?” shrug. Several, though, alarmed me with their precocious cynicism. “What you have to understand, Mr. C.,” one girl said, with all the patience she could muster, “is that Hollywood is a business.” “She’s right,” agreed another, and then, in an inflection worthy of a Judith Krantz heroine, told me, “You see, Hollywood is all about . . . power.”

Exactly. Unfortunately, it’s an exclusionary “power over,” not “power with,” and the power in question is so governed by commerce and unconcerned with justice that apparently even a school kid knows it.

I’m not saying the motion picture academy is racist; I understand how the academy votes. I’m simply pointing out what many others have been saying during the last few weeks. The business doesn’t discriminate when it takes box-office dollars from people of color; it just doesn’t bother to represent them.

The industry mantra and excuse, “Hollywood is a business,” doesn’t work. Hollywood is a business, but it’s a business that takes particular pride in its liberalism. The Oscar audience beams after Christopher Reeve’s moving challenge to use its power to effect social change, and congratulates itself for having the “courage” to produce “In the Heat of the Night” or “Driving Miss Daisy.”

I watched and thought: “This, from a ‘community’ so notoriously resistant to casting Asians, Latinos and other minorities in even the smallest parts? This, from a group that dismisses those who call attention to this hypocrisy as ‘whiny,’ ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too politically correct’?”

One billion people, we’re told, watch the Oscars each year. And yet only a fraction sees itself represented in the front rows of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The sound of back-patting may be deafening, but the jewels don’t blind us to the de facto apartheid practiced by a town that boycotted South Africa.

In a May 25 Counterpunch, Cameron M. Turner gave an impressive list of African Americans in the industry who have been honored (“Accusing Academy of Racism Is Both Unfair, Inaccurate”). Latinos and Asian Americans have a considerable shorter list. I loved “Babe,” but it seems that it’s easier to get a movie made about a pig than it is a Latino.

*

As a Mexican American, I note this with particular irony. You see, there are many Latinos working in the film industry. There’s the busboy who tries not to interrupt the power lunch at the Ivy or Spago or Eclipse. There’s the Latina on a tight cleaning schedule of studio offices for execs who cover the phone and mouth, “Can you come back later?” And of course, there’s the catering staff at the post-Oscar Governors Ball, under pressure to make sure the ice sculpture and buffet are just so. Hollywood doesn’t seem to have a problem “employing” Latinos; it just has very specific job descriptions.

These issues are raised again and again and all-too familiar promises are made. Just be patient. Things will change. (You know, just like all those changes that came after “La Bamba” or “Stand and Deliver,” the years when the percentage of Latinos on TV actually went down from 2%.)

Meanwhile, Whoopi kisses off concerns of discrimination with a joke in her opening monologue, and it’s “done.” The winners thank their children in their acceptance speeches, and the Salvadoran nanny whisks them to bed. The limos come and go and the next day people at lunch talk about Sharon Stone’s choice of blouse. That darn protest has already become a footnote in a book on the Oscars a kid might memorize someday. We return to the “business” as usual.

I guess it’s my business as a teacher, and a Latino, to stay bothered by it all. The arrogant abuse of power bothers me. It bothers me that society’s “class discussion” on this topic seems to be over. And it really bothers me that when my students, or I, go to the movies and the lights go down, the screen we see is still white.