Emmys: How to Get Away With the Bare Minimum of Diversity

2017/09/20 Leave a comment

Sharp commentary:

Sunday morning, hours before this year’s Emmys ceremony, Being Mary Jane actress Gabrielle Union tweeted: “I’ve been doing TV since 1995. This will be my 1st time going to the Emmys & I’m presenting an award! 22 yrs later. #OvernightSuccess.”

The actress’ first credited appearance was in an episode of Saved by the Bell: The New Classand while that might not be the type of show that garners you an Emmys invite, it’s surprising that in 22 years as a successful actress Union hasn’t even been at the ceremony. But then again, she’s a black woman in Hollywood, so it’s not really surprising, is it?

This moment for Union comes two years after Viola Davis gave her a shoutout in her historic win as the first black woman to win a best actress in a drama Emmy. Awarded a statue for her role in How to Get Away With Murder, Davis who traded in roles like the one in The Help where she played a maid, Davis put her community to task for its lack of inclusion. “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line,” Davis said, quoting Harriet Tubman. She followed the quote by saying: “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So here’s to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes, people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black. And to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line. Thank you to the Television Academy. Thank you.”

Two years after the first best actress in a drama Emmy was awarded to a black woman shouldn’t be the year you pat yourself on the back. Especially not when Lena Waithe on Sunday was the first black woman to win an Emmy for best writing in a comedy. Or a night when Donald Glover was the first black male to win for comedy directing. Or a night where Riz Ahmed was the first male actor of Asian descent to win an acting Emmy. When we’re still in a business of firsts, you can keep your congratulations and you can keep your jokes about diversity, too. Sunday’s host, Stephen Colbert, followed in the footsteps of many white awards-show hosts who love making jokes about diversity to a room where there’s less black people in it than Williamsburg.

Because for an industry that loves to pretend it’s inclusive and diverse whenever awards season rolls around (like when Moonlight won an Oscar this year), it’s the bare minimum of diversity. The shows that these diverse nominees are awarded at are usually full of white people. The hosts are usually white—there hasn’t been a non-white Emmys host since Bryant Gumbel (don’t ask) in 1997. And the diversity usually extends to white women and black men. It’s true, women probably wouldn’t win any damn awards if they didn’t have separate acting categories, but the women that are nominated in these categories are usually white. When Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, and Laura Dern make pleas for more television starring women, it’s a lovely sentiment until you remember that the only black woman in Big Little Lies was Zoe Kravitz and there’s been three or four ensemble actress television shows starring white women since Charlie’s Angels. When Sex and the City was popular on HBO, we got a ton of knockoffs. Meanwhile, HBO has another female-led hit on its hands with Insecure, but there’ve been no influx of television series starring black women and HBO would rather greenlight bullshit like Confederate.

Meanwhile, out of all the black people who’ve won Emmys, the overwhelming majority are black men. Hollywood is a white world and it’s a man’s world. It usually benefits white men, white women, and then black men. There will plenty of more shows like Big Little Lies on the air, but will there be more like Being Mary Jane? Jane the Virgin? Fresh Off the Boat? Master of None? Asian-American actors are barely on television at all, and when they are, they usually portray terrorists in shows like 24 and Homeland.

True diversity in Hollywood means that it will have to step beyond the parameters of the usual suspects and start telling stories that look like the rest of America. I mean, it was absolutely shocking seeing some of the pairings chosen to give out awards—Gina Rodriguez and Shemar Moore, Riz Ahmed and Issa Rae, B.D. Wong and Matt Bomer (two openly gay men and one of them Asian?! You didn’t even see that on Looking)—and then realizing that you never see that kind of diversity on TV. Hell, these awards were on CBS and it was the most diverse thing you’ll ever see on this white as hell network.

Take this for instance: RuPaul and Tituss Burgess were included in two of Colbert’s comedic bits and they stole the show. Moonlight won an Oscar this year, but how long until we see a queer person of color hosting one of these damn things? No, Hollywood won’t know what real diversity is until people of color stop being bit parts or window dressing (like Superior Donuts’ Jermaine Fowler as the emcee) to make their awards shows look more “hip.”

Getting back to Gabrielle Union: Being Mary Jane has been on the air since 2013 and was created by Mara Brock Akil, a black woman and TV veteran. Union’s work has yet to be recognized by her peers. Will it ever be? Or do we only notice women of color like Viola Davis when they star in television shows on a white network like ABC, in a show written by a white man?

Source: Emmys: How to Get Away With the Bare Minimum of Diversity

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How to talk about cultural appropriation: Andray Domise

2016/09/24 Leave a comment

While the focus of Domise is with respect to transgender, the issues apply more broadly:

At Sunday’s Primetime Emmy Awards, Jeffrey Tamborpicked up his second win for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. On the Amazon series Transparent, Tambor plays Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman whose transition forces her shallow, upper-class wife and adult children to grapple with their own shortcomings. Jeffrey Tambor is a cisgender man—which means someone who identifies with their sex at birth, or anyone who isn’t transgender—and when he accepted the award, he made an open plea to Hollywood to make him an anomaly. “Please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their story . . . I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a transgender character on television.” With his acceptance speech, Tambor was the first high-profile name in weeks to address the issue of cultural appropriation with any degree of tact. Up to that point, the mainstream response to claims of appropriation have been pleading childlike ignorance at best, and downright hostility at worst. It’s long past time for the conversation to evolve.

Because there seems to be a bit of confusion over the term “cultural appropriation,” let’s be clear on what it isn’t. White rappers aren’t appropriating culture by dint of their whiteness. There’s a reason that accusations of cultural appropriation don’t stick to Eminem, for example, but leave a rancid cloud trailing in Iggy Azalea’s wake. A white author writing Indian characters into the story is not prima facie cultural appropriation. Neither is a white chef specializing in Vietnamese cuisine. Whenever the conversation on cultural appropriation resurfaces, it always begins with unnecessary theatrics over the definition of the term, and drifts into hurt feelings when appropriators feel they’ve been compared to racists. After these exercises are complete, the conversation goes unresolved anyway.

Some refer to cultural appropriation as “borrowing” from other cultures, which is about the same as your least favourite houseguest “borrowing” your silverware. In the creative industries, where touching off trends among receptive audiences can bring multimillion dollar rewards, cultural appropriation is theft. It is plunder. It is lifting cultural aspects from underrepresented groups of people, and not only offering nothing in return, but expecting their gratitude for the promotion. It is trying other people’s identities on as costumes, while people who live within their skin, hair, culture, and gender identity struggle for acceptance. Navneet Alang, a writer for Hazlitt, wrote a piece last year on the appropriation of South Asian culture and offered a most succinct explanation of the phrase:

“[For] a certain kind of person, the whole world is waiting to be mined, packaged, and sold, regardless of what the things in question mean to people, or whom such selling benefits.”

Cultural appropriation is when Marc Jacobs affixes ludicrous neon dreadlocks to the hair of white models during New York Fashion Week, while the fashion industry has fewer high-profile black designers and models now than it did in the 1970s. It’s Jacobs’s claim “I don’t see colour,” in response to criticism, while putting his name on a makeup line whose colour scheme runs from “bone china” to “paper lunch bag,” and then claiming that Black women straightening their hair is also cultural appropriation. Never mind that many Black women’s hair is naturally straight, and that many curly-haired white women also straighten theirs. At a time when Black children are being disciplined by schools for wearing their hair in natural afros, when a biracial Zara employee in Toronto was reprimanded by management for her box braids, and when a Black employee at a Toronto Jack Astor’s was sent home for wearing her hair in a bun, this should not be a talking point.

I spoke with April Reign, managing editor of Broadway Black, and the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that shook up Hollywood in the lead-up to last year’s Academy Awards. “In movies,” Reign said, “they hire cops as consultants in films. So why wouldn’t you respect someone else’s culture in an area where you’re getting paid? If you’re going to make money off my culture through your book, your fashion line, your movie, or your TV show, but you’re not being considerate of it, that’s where I really have a problem.” I joked that an answer might be, for example, to hire “Blackness consultants.” But Reign said the idea wasn’t so far-fetched, because in order to properly respect a culture, entertainment creators need to engage with people who were born into and live within the culture. These exchanges need to be meaningful and mutually beneficial.

Put another way, cultural appropriation is what keeps scores of trans actors underemployed, while cisgender men like Jared Leto and Eddie Redmayne are hailed for their bravery in playing trans women on screen. It’s Matt Bomer, another cisgender man, refusing to answer to trans women who questioned his decision to accept the role of a trans woman in the upcoming film Anything. It’s his castmate Mark Ruffalo pleading for compassion and understanding because the film’s already been shot, rather than showing compassion and understanding to trans women fed up with seeing their identities simplified to men in drag by the film industry.

Yet, with less than 30 seconds of speaking, Jeffrey Tambor showed how easy the dialogue on cultural appropriation can be. If he can use his platform to do this so effortlessly, then his creative peers are out of excuses.

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Emmy 2016 Awards: The Most Diverse Emmys Ever. Finally. – The Daily Beast

2016/09/20 Leave a comment

Noteworthy contrast with the Oscars, reflecting the range of TV programming:
Sunday’s Emmys were a celebration of diversity, an indictment of sexism, a championing of LGBT acceptance—and a plea for all these things to stop being Hollywood news.
“The only thing we value more than diversity is congratulating ourselves on how much we value diversity.” And so Jimmy Kimmel opened the Emmy Awards, offering a tongue-in-cheek critique on how self-congratulatory the television industry has become for its well-timed rewarding of a diverse slate of performers and creators.

Airing a little more than half a year after the Oscars, which famously embarrassed Hollywood while exposing our culture’s institutionalized racial biases, failed to nominate a single actor of color for the second year in a row, the Emmy Awards arrived Sunday night with a record number of diverse nominees.

Eighteen of the nominees for acting awards this year were people of color, and for the first time in the show’s 68-year history, performers of color were nominated in every leading acting category.

“The Emmys are so diverse this year, the Oscars are now telling people we are one of their closest friends,” Kimmel continued to joke, taking the piss out of the otherwise very serious conversation that’s lit up the zeitgeist over the deplorable state of diversity in media over the last few years.

Whatever the word you prefer—diversity, normalization (Shonda’s favorite), inclusivity (Ava DuVernay’s preference), or representation (my pick)—the fact that we’re even at a stage where a white guy in a suit is poking fun at the debate insinuates how important the discussion is.

Should we be past the point where we chart progress in awards milestones? That is, the firsts, the records, the groundbreaking achievements? Yes. But in acknowledging them and celebrating them, hopefuly we make room for progress. And Sunday night at the Emmys? Progress was made.

Sure, it was funny when Kimmel, during his opening monologue, had nominees of color reach out to a white nominee to thank them for their bravery. (It’s hard to nail this tone of joke, and we must give Kimmel credit for getting it right on the head.)

But it was funny and important when Alan Yang, from Tawainese parents, alongside Aziz Ansari, whose parents are from India, accepted their award for Best Writing in a Comedy Series.

“There’s 17 million Asian Americans in this country and there’s 17 million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos. We got Long Duck Dong,” Yang said, shaming all of our opportunity blindspots and institutionalized cultural (even if unintended) reductivism and, yes, racism in only five seconds.

 “We’ve got a long way to go,” Yang said, with one final plea: “Asian parents out there, do me a favor, just a couple of you. Give your kids cameras instead of violins.”
 Source: Emmy 2016 Awards: The Most Diverse Emmys Ever. Finally. – The Daily Beast

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