6
“Do Not Run Away from Your Blackness”
Black Women Television Workers and the Flouting of Strategic Ambiguity
Throughout this book, I have argued that women of color’s access to privilege and power in mainstream or ostensibly egalitarian, meritocratic spaces, is contingent upon strategic ambiguity, the tricky dance of postracial resistance, which I define as a performance that uses the rhetorical tools of postrace in order to resist its ideological tenets. Thought of another way: strategic ambiguity is a coping strategy designed to deal with disproportionality. This book has talked about what it looks, sounds, and feels like when Black women manage to be successful despite having to constantly fight the everyday iterations of such disproportionality. Televisual representations, as the last two chapters demonstrate, can provide us with a much-needed reprieve. But what, precisely, do the microaggressions, the everyday moments of racialized sexism look, sound, and feel like for Black women television professionals who create diverse images in Hollywood, that grant us such a reprieve? And how do these women use strategic ambiguity, if at all?
Methodologically following the circuit of culture,1 this book has arced from textual analysis to audience ethnography. In this final chapter, I move to another area of the circuit as I consider the creators of images, the ones who, in Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, are sending messages as, in John Caldwell’s description, “prestige” (i.e., on the creative and executive end) cultural workers (by, through, and with the mitigating corporate forces of their studios).2 Even though many media scholars utilize Hall’s model, most of us don’t examine how messages are encoded, even though, as Douglas Kellner explains, Hall hits all areas of the circuit by “focusing on how media institutions produce messages, how they circulate, and how audiences use or decode the messages to produce meaning.”3 In the last two chapters, I examined how certain audiences, a group of women of color sitting in front of screens, responded to racialized sexism; in this chapter, I look at the responses of the Black women who are behind the scenes in television, the writers, producers, directors, and studio executives. Would their responses look like the strategic ambiguity enacted by celebrities such as Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Shonda Rhimes? Or would they articulate a form of resistance more like the audiences?
Between 2014 and 2016, I had a series of conversations with four prominent Black women in the Hollywood television industry, whom I call “Yvonne,” “Cherise,” “Yolanda,” and “Valerie.”4 They are all in their 40s and 50s, and are successful writers, producers, directors, and executives, in addition to being mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. None are Los Angeles natives; all came to LA in order to chase their dreams in the entertainment industry. Without the benefit of insider status or nepotism of any kind, they worked their ways up their ladders, proved themselves, and grabbed mentorship where they could. All expressed their gratitude at being in their current positions. These women, all of whom I met through colleagues, friends, or friends-of-friends, are well-established in Hollywood and boast scores of credits to their names. They knew I was writing a book and that it had something to do with Black women and television. All of the women wished me well, and offered generous and (often) unsolicited advice; as Yvonne said to me as a prelude to one such moment, “you’re asking me for my path but I’m also giving you advice.”
When interviewing them, my goal was not to capture some existential truth about Hollywood or make generalizations about all Black women Hollywood workers. Instead I hoped to hear their stories and see how they connected to my audience study as well as the celebrity performances I analyze in the first half of the book. I wanted to know how these incredibly successful women navigated elite spaces in Hollywood; I wanted to hear about their paths, their experiences, and the lessons that they had learned in the process. I did not describe postracial resistance or strategic ambiguity to them so as not to foreground my agenda in an interview situation or to bias them towards articulating what I “wanted to hear.” But I listened to understand where they encountered racialized sexism, where they had to mete out their own critiques, and where they had to compromise themselves—particularly in a racialized and gendered way. This chapter provides notes towards a different form of resistance that falls somewhere between the celebrities and audiences, and somewhere between oppositional and negotiated resistance. I wanted to illustrate where the overlaps and similarities between approaches occurred. Moments of apparent redundancy are intentional to emphatically illustrate the points of overlap in these women’s stories. As this chapter makes a foray into yet another area of media studies, I begin by considering scholarship in production and media industry studies.
Analyzing the “Culture of Performance”: Production and Media Industry Studies of Race and Gender
Just as in the last two chapters, in this chapter, I claim larger cultural significance and not representativeness for all Black women or all women of color in Hollywood. I analyze a slice of what John Caldwell calls the “local cultures and social communities” of Hollywood workers by using media industry and production studies. This emerging area of media studies, Caldwell asserts, illuminates how “film/TV production communities” are not simply incidental to readings of the text, but are, into themselves, “cultural expressions.”5 In this chapter, I continue, in the words of Amanda Lotz, “assembling a toolkit”; adding the burgeoning field of media industry studies to my toolkit “emphasize[s] practices and processes of text creation and circulation that precede, although are constitutive of, audience creation.”6 Taking such a tack is timely at this particular moment, industry scholar David Hesmondalgh explains, because “media industries research and education are booming. Since hitting a low point of fashionability in the postmodernist and post-Marxist 1990s, media production and media industries research has bounced back.”7
Production studies, Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell note, “itself is a cultural production, mythological and branded much like the onscreen textual culture that media industries produce.” This chapter, as my inroad into production studies, “draw[s its] intellectual impetus from cultural studies to look at the ways that culture both constitutes and reflects the relationships of power.”8 Including production studies ensures that the theory of postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity gets exercised across all aspects of media; as Banks writes, “production studies of media are predicated on the assumption that knowledge of the cultural and industrial modes of production will not just inform but alter one’s reading not only of the media text, but of the media.”9 This chapter analyzes reflections of what Felicia D. Henderson calls the “culture of performance … how gender, race, and class figure into the rules, roles, and rituals that inhabit the writers’ room”10 in addition to other industry spaces. Indeed, Henderson, a media studies scholar and successful Black woman television producer in her own right, notes that “much of what happens in the creation of weekly storylines has very little to do with the actual writing of scripts. The human interactions in writers’ rooms are forms of collective authorship because the sociocultural dynamics there heavily influence the narrative that finds its way to the page, and eventually to the screen.”11
I draw from Henderson’s notion of “collective authorship.” Furthermore, while I do not claim that the women I interviewed represent all Black women in Hollywood, their experiences are worthy of study because they indicate larger race/gender dynamics. According to UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report (begun in 2014 and analyzing data from two years prior), in the 2013–14 television season, writers of color accounted for just 9.7% (a match to the previous season); this means that television writers of color were underrepresented that season by a factor of almost four to one.12 Women were also underrepresented as TV writers but not nearly as dramatically, as they accounted for 32.5% of all writers credited for broadcast scripted shows. Race and gender are not analyzed together in these reports, so there are no factors for, for example, Black women. However, in 2012, African Americans comprised 4% of all WGA members, a small increase from 3.4% in 2007.13 Over that same time period, women writers in WGA slightly decreased from 24.7% to 24.2%.14 Looking at another measure, the wage gap, we can see that, over that same period of time, for every White man’s dollar, women’s earnings rose from $.80 to $.90, while “minority” earnings rose from $.76 to $.77.15 Since the official reports don’t disaggregate data for Black women, I asked sociologist Darnell Hunt, the lead author of the Hollywood Diversity reports, if he could share his numbers, and he generously did.
Of the 4599 total number of writers employed in 2012, there were 89 Black women writers, which amounted to 1.9 percent of all TV writers, while Black men amounted for 121 or 2.6%. To put this underrepresentation in perspective, the Black population of the U.S. is 13.2%. Furthermore, median earnings for employed Black women writers in 2012 was $98,155, as opposed to all female writers at $117,008, and all male writers at $127,537. Another measure that Hunt investigates in his reports is the 95th percentile of earners broken down by various demographic categories. 95th percentile earnings for Black women writers in 2012 was $357,191. However, the 95% earnings for White men was $704,844, which means that relative earnings for Black women writers at the 95th percentile in 2012 was 50 cents on the dollar.16 Hunt and his team are investigating the racialized and gendered effects of what media scholars Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz call the “political economy of media.” When considering, for example, such stark disproportionality, we should also ask: “how much agency [do] we have to make our own choices?” Havens and Lotz answer that we have “a perspective of circumscribed agency, which assumes that the choices we make in our lives are not wholly our own, but neither are they simply imposed by outside forces.”17 The women I interviewed told me that they were not satisfied with circumscribed agency, and they fought for larger structural changes.
Indeed, when the successes of diverse network shows coming in the wake of Shonda Rhimes’ many creations, namely Empire (2015–present), Black-ish (2014–present), Fresh Off the Boat (2015–present), and Jane the Virgin (2014–present), promised to usher in a different televisual landscape, not everyone celebrated. The backlash arrived far before the demographic data demonstrating a transformation in Hollywood. For example, one television columnist wrote of this moment: “as is the case with any sea change, the pendulum might have swung a bit too far in the opposite direction. Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year [2015], making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal.”18 With a dizzying array of mixed metaphors, the article continued to discuss the “flood of roles for ethnic actors” but sniped that the “talent pool of experience minority performers—especially in the younger range—is pretty limited.” She went on to talk about the “quota of ethnic talent” and the subsequent shutting out of White actors. Such a column perhaps demonstrated pervasive Hollywood logic. But this columnist didn’t have the last word. As I demonstrated in chapter 3, Shonda Rhimes did (Figure 6.1). In reaction to this column, Rhimes wrote in an un-strategically ambiguous manner laden with Black woman code on Twitter: “1st Reaction: HELL NO. Lemme take off my earrings, somebody hold my purse! 2nd Reaction: Article is so ignorant I can’t even be bothered.”
Figure 6.1. Rhimes’ un-strategically ambiguous reaction. Image in Debbie Emery, “Shonda Rhimes Blasts Deadline Diversity Article as ‘Ignorant,’ Twitter Outraged.” The Wrap. March 24, 2015. Viewed November 21, 2016. www
At this moment, Rhimes refused to engage in coded, strategically ambiguous postracial language. Her twitter remarks gestured to the fact that disparities clearly happen behind the scenes, and in the writers’ rooms. And the anti-people of color sentiment alongside the official numbers, while abysmal, only provide part of the picture. But what do Black women’s stories tell us to help complete the picture? In this chapter, I focus on stories of four prominent Black women in Hollywood—three television writer/producer/directors and one studio legal counsel—to discern their thoughts on how Hollywood manages Blackness today, including the “post-Black” question and strategically ambiguous resistance through postrace. What happens when the culture the women represent butts up against television production culture? How is their membership into it both racialized and gendered, and thus considered perhaps contingent? How do they negotiate their contingent status and, in their negotiations, do they use strategic ambiguity? In the remaining parts of this chapter, I will showcase the women’s stories of racialized/gendered barriers that are erected before and even once one becomes a player and, thus, how the game never ends.
“Working in the Ghetto”: Segregation in Hollywood
Although all four of the women I interviewed work in television, their televisual landscapes are different, as they work in either comedy or drama, and the two genres are racialized very differently. As Cherise put it, “here’s the running joke that I always say—drama is the North; it’s very integrated. Comedy is the South; it’s completely segregated.” Valerie explained a similar sentiment, lamenting “the segregation of the Black sitcom writers and then … [extended pause] the world of drama.” Cherise began working in Black comedy and moved to drama because, in her words, she didn’t want to keep writing “into a stereotype that I didn’t want to [uphold] … I didn’t still want to write in it. And I didn’t want to pitch, you know—I would have fights with people like, why is this woman running through the strip club with a frying pan? Aren’t we trying to run away from that image? I didn’t want to write in that, and [moving to drama] was a chance to write about real people to me.” Whether in comedy or drama, these women fight the conventional Hollywood logic that, as Darnell Hunt articulates it, “successful programming must, first and foremost, comfort white audiences—the largest (but shrinking) racial block of viewers throughout most of commercial television’s history—which is like religious doctrine whose implications for storytelling are accepted as matters of faith.”19
Like Cherise, Yolanda made the move from comedy to drama, or what she deemed “from half hour to one hour.” But Yolanda, who asserted that “I feel like one hour is friendlier to Black people in general,” didn’t balk at the content of half-hour Black comedies like Cherise; instead she felt the problems were structural ones. Yolanda explained that “what happened was, there used to be networks, UPN and the WB, and that’s where a lot of sitcoms starring Black people were. So that’s where, like, all the Black writers were. And once they went away, those two networks, you saw a lot of Black sitcom writers out of work.” The shuttering of these two networks eliminated Black sitcoms, and hence jobs for Black writers. At the same time, structural problems prevented Black writers from becoming insiders because, as Yvonne said, “the staff writing position has been boxed out.” With the changes in the structure of television, media scholar and showrunner Henderson explains, television writing has become an even more difficult arena in which to enter: “with the increase in short-order employment in cable and more and more examples following suit, a large number of writers—a critical mass of writers—are working on shows under the restrictive contracts.”20
While all writers would have trouble getting jobs with this shift in industry practices, Black writers had extra difficulty finding other jobs as Hunt describes how “those with track records established on black situation comedies during UPN’s heyday, were often typecast as only being able to write ‘black’ shows.”21 With the elimination of Black-oriented non-cable television stations, Black writers found themselves struggling to sell themselves in the segregated world of comedy. As Yolanda put it, “the thinking was, by a lot of White executive producers, ‘you know, Black people can’t be universal in their sense of humor. You know, White people can tell jokes for Black people and White people, but Black folks can only be comedic from their own perspective.’” Echoing the sentiments of all four of the women, Yolanda pointed out that racialized notions penetrate more deeply in comedy than drama. In drama, Yolanda noted, “I feel like the world is just a lot more open. It’s not dependent on, you know, your sense of humor, whether that’s universal or not, it’s, ‘I’m going to fill the room with different people who have different experiences to make my drama the best it can be,’ you know?”
As opposed to comedy or half-hour, Cherise’s experience in drama or one-hour was with integrated writers’ rooms: “I saw a very mixed world of people just being seen as writers.” Since the diversification of the writers’ room was normative for Cherise throughout her career, when she got a job as an executive producer for a successful one hour drama, and “I got to hire—I replicated that. Because that’s what I had come to find out … Come to grow up with. But a lot of people did not have that experience. Like a lot of people will say they’ve been on dramas where they’re the only Black person.” Cherise expressed optimism that, when it comes to the issue of diversity in Hollywood—“I think it’s getting better”—but in the same breath she acknowledged that her optimism also comes from her experience in diverse writers’ rooms which in itself makes her, in her own words, “an anomaly.”
Valerie noted that “it’s even hard for a Black writer to get in to get a job on a Black show, because the idea is that, ‘oh you’re a Black writer, you couldn’t be on Seinfeld or on, on White sitcoms. The only voice that you could capture is that of Black sitcoms and Black characters.’” At the same time, Yvonne, whom the industry firmly identifies as a comedy writer (despite also having written a successful screenplay for a film drama), has both felt safety in Black comedy spaces, in which she describes experiencing almost all-Black writers’ rooms, as well as feeling trapped into not being able to move to non-Black comedies. She started out noting: “I have to say this to the Universe, I am blessed. I have worked over twenty years in the business. I started writing the ‘90s when there were a lot of Black comedies on TV.” But she also quickly admitted: “I have not had … the same financial and public success as my White counterparts, who do the same exact thing I do. I’ve had very few opportunities to staff on White shows. I only know of one Black co-executive producer in comedy who’s gone onto a White show [This Black writer was hired onto a White show as an executive story editor and rose through the ranks].” Yvonne added: “White showrunners hire writers they’ve either worked with or writers who have worked with someone they know and trust, or are coming off a huge White comedy … which means they hire White people.” Yvonne explained that such a practice of workplace discrimination and segregation in Hollywood is “called working in the ghetto.” Yvonne’s statements centered on two ideas: her gratitude for her success, and her understanding that her success is limited because it is contingent upon segregation and discrimination. As all four of the women asserted, this segregation and discrimination is tied to the issues of convention and genre—and the liminal position of Black women within each.
Liminality is racialized and gendered in Hollywood as in other privileged spaces across the United States. Valerie, who found herself as one of the only Black women in her workspace, explained how White executives mistook her for a secretary instead of a television executive. She explained that “you could be standing there in your [executive] outfit, with your briefcase and your navy suit and, you know, your glasses and looking like you know you could just walk right out of an ad and people would still, you know, it’s just presumed … that you, surely, the White guy you’re with who is the [secretary] must be the [executive] and you’re the [secretary].” Valerie continued: “I think there’s just these presumptions about particular professions that you know, that professor, doctor, lawyer, all these that just that, just not as between a White male and somebody else and that the White male gets the presumption.” Constantly navigating the misreading of one’s professional identity, particularly when that identity is racialized and gendered, is exhausting.
“White Guys Run the Show”: Black Women, Mentorship, and “Fitting In”
The women stressed to me numerous times that Hollywood, like so many elite industries, is not a meritocracy. What television shows they were able to work on were determined by whom they knew. They stressed how particular forms of mentorship, most often offered by White men for the career-enhancing purposes of other White men, garnered individuals entrée into elite spaces. Noting herself lucky—and unusual—to have received cross-racial mentorship, Cherise explained that she felt herself to be unique in that “there are very few people who had the opportunity to get mentored in [one long-running show she worked on], one of the fiercest camps in town.” The high-profile show on which she worked and was mentored created a “springboard [that] is huge. And to have one of those, you know, king makers kind of tap you, it’s—it’s huge.” Yolanda, who did not discuss having such mentorship, stated that, since “White guys run the shows, they want to feel comfortable, and the way they do that is surround themselves with people who look like them. And then they say and do things that aren’t going to make them feel self-conscious about [being White guys]. If they happen to tell a joke that’s offensive, no one is going to care, because everyone is of one race.” The person of color thus functions as the fun police in this formulation, the hyper-sensitive, humorless dolt who sucks the creativity along with the enjoyment out of the room. Thus, people of color and women are rarely taken up as a mentee, a “little me” in Hollywood writers’ room mentoring relationships.
Each of the women noted that beyond not registering as a “little me,” women of color remain questionable in majority White male writers’ rooms as those who “don’t fit in.” Valerie noted that the fear is “the struggle of people thinking, ‘will this person fit,’ ‘cause that’s the first thing the executive producer says when they’re hiring a writer, ‘how’s this person gonna work in the room? Are they going to fit in?’” Furthermore, Valerie explained, while what the decision-makers might say is, “what kind of sensibility is she going to bring at the table?,” really this type of coded, postracial language is “doublespeak for … ‘is this Black woman going to fit in with the rest of the White guys or is she going to make us feel uncomfortable because she’s going to bring up race issues and talk about gender and we just want to write our show?’” Valerie lamented that this issue never goes away for Black women as “the fitting in part is a constant hurdle: ‘we don’t know her, can she write characters who aren’t Black or is she just the Black voice?” White writers also express the presumption that diversifying the writers’ room isn’t really necessary: “we think we can write Black voice characters without her.” In other words, before one is even allowed to interview for a job, a series of racialized and gendered assumptions limit Black women’s access. In Valerie’s assessment, the real challenge lay in “getting over those hurdles and that’s like before anybody even looks at how well you write and all that other stuff, getting past that is what is, has been a real challenge for Black writers period.”
Yvonne explained that the segregation of the genre means that Black writers simply have fewer options. She stated: “I’m sorry, I keep going back, but when you are on Black shows, you’re working with Black writers … You know, everything is on recommendation. People hire people they know or they’ve worked with. So if you’ve only worked on Black shows, you need someone to create or get a job running a White show to hire you … for the most part, they’re not coming off of a Black show. That White showrunner is going to need a recommendation, but he’s probably not going to ask for a recommendation from someone they don’t know, on a (Black) show they don’t watch.”
And recommendations can only take you as far as the shows that are greenlit by the studios. In Yvonne’s words, “you know, when they go on, you go on. You know, you work because your reputation is set. So if they’re just going onto Black shows, you’re going onto Black shows.” The problem is that separate is inherently unequal. Yvonne noted that the segregation of shows produces a racialized sponsorship model where “It’s the White person that really has to pluck you off a Black show. Bottom line is you want to work with people who will move on to other shows, so they can hire you.” She explained: “If you worked on [the White sitcom] Frasier, people from that show went on to run other shows and took their colleagues with them. If you were on [the Black sitcoms] Living Single or Martin, that Frasier showrunner won’t be looking for you.” Because Black TV shows experienced a significant decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and because writers weren’t largely in integrated writers’ rooms, they didn’t have the benefit of being mentored into network television in sufficient numbers, or, in turn, mentoring each other.
What Hollywood’s racialized writers’ economy means is that, again as Valerie explained, while hiring a White writer can feel like a “sure thing,” employing a Black writer always feels like one is “taking a chance,” even when that writer has a stellar resume. Valerie has seen how White showrunners “go to the same [White] people over and over again for the next idea, the next show, when they think about like ‘who do we wanna get into a development deal with?’” The showrunners’ first instincts will be to say, in Valerie’s words, “well, we know these ten people. They came in and pitched us these ideas like, ‘let’s go with one of these ten.” In Valerie’s words, “the way that the institution runs, is that showrunners pick people they know who they’ve worked with, who tend to look like them.” If someone tries to introduce a person of color, saying “what about this person over here?,” the response will be, “well, we don’t really know that person … I don’t know if they can deliver.” However, Valerie noted, in the case of an inexperienced White person, “a network would be willing to go with some relative unknown person, right, that [a White] somebody else has said is you know, credible, talented, all that, and hire a second show executive producer to back that person up because they don’t have the experience.” White people are given jobs on a promise; people of color earn jobs on the basis of over-qualifications.
In other words, Valerie has seen the situation where the network will be so averse to diversifying the showrunners that “they’re willing to take a [White] person [with] relatively little experience … [and] they’re willing to, like, bring in somebody else to help that person, like, get the thing off the ground to deal with the inexperience issue.” At the same time, “like, say … in this other situation [we won’t] take a chance per se [with] a writer of color, who maybe comes to the table with maybe not as much experience.” But Valerie also stressed that this racist system doesn’t need to be a self-perpetuating one; laughing a bit ruefully, she told me, “this issue [of women and people of color’s exclusion] can be overcome if there was serious push and commitment from the top down, like, I don’t care, I want a Black showrunner, I want, you know, I, I insist that there be Black writers, women writers on the shows, and you’re gonna do it or we’re not hiring you.” While those on the bottom can make incremental changes, true change can occur, Valerie noted, only if the most powerful members of an institution vocally and vociferously demand diversification.
“When They Go On, You Go On”: Navigating Racist Culture and Racist Structures in Hollywood
In our conversations, all four of the women toggled between discussing the culture versus the structure of the industry. Both presented racialized and gendered barriers. Yvonne noted that the reproduction of White male dominance in Hollywood emerged from decisions being made, in her words, in “an ivory tower,” or by an elite few White male executives within an industry that relies upon “the cult of the individual,” in Durkehim’s classic formulation.22 Yvonne pointed out that “everyone wants the big star … and Black people, for whatever reason, have to be a really big star. Their Q [or quotient score—a rating of entertainment appeal] has to be huge so that they can get big numbers.” Yvonne told me that TV executives ask: “who’s the big person, who’s the big get? … Who’s hot? Who came off the hot whatever?” These questions, she said, do not set up African Americans in Hollywood for success; as she laughingly remarked, “if you are Black you don’t come off the hot whatever.”
Yvonne said that the heyday of Black sitcoms drew from standup—male standup where “back in the day … we had all these comedians that we would develop for.” Standup is, of course, a very male space, as comedy scholars Mel Watkins illustrates in On the Real Side and Bambi Haggins notes in Laughing Mad.23 A desire to write for “big stars, not big stories” means that there is no assumed universality to Black stories. Furthermore, in Color by Fox, Kristal Brent Zook identifies the first of the “four key elements of black-produced television” as “autobiography, meaning a tendency toward collective and individual authorship of black experience.”24 In addition, Zook notes, Black shows “have a tendency to revisit issues of deep significance to in-group audiences.” She goes on to define “in-group” or “in-house” as “audience members who are not necessarily Black, but who identify with what may be described as shared ‘black’ positionalities, experiences, memories, or desires.”25
Such Black shows came from a particular moment, what was produced by a particular set of programs intended to level the playing field. One of the structural ways that Hollywood has attempted to address the issues of the underrepresentation of women and people of color in writers’ rooms was through various diversity initiatives, a number of which, as of this writing, are defunct. These programs were designed to, in the words of Miranda Banks, “create cultural producers with[in] a media industry [with] imagination, artistry, and inventiveness.”26 One of the first and most impactful programs, according to the women I interviewed, was the one Bill and Camille Cosby created, the currently suspended Guy Hanks and Marvin Miller Writing Program at USC. Colloquially known as the Cosby Workshop, this program for Black writers was created in 1993 for the explicit purpose of “deepen[ing] the participants [sic] appreciation for and comprehension of African American history and culture.”27 This program, which boasts alumni who “have written and produced for top ten shows on television as well as news and reality shows,” chose up to fifteen participants for two evening meetings a week, one devoted to “lectures and discussions about African-American history and culture” and the second to workshopping scripts.
In a similar vein to the Cosby Workshop, ABC/Disney previously hosted a program called “the ABC Disney Diversity Program,” which is also no longer active. Instead, as of this writing, ABC/Disney has a year-long “Writing Program” (no “diversity” in the title) as well as a five-week intensive program for Latino/a writers, the “National Latino Media Council (NLMC)/National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) Television Writers Program.”28 Also now defunct is NBCUniversal’s “Diversity Initiative for Writers.”29 As of this writing, CBS currently supports a “Writers Mentoring Program,” which is listed under the network’s “Diversity Institute,” but, in a strikingly postracial manner, does not name race in its materials. For example, the website explains that “The CBS Writers Mentoring Program helps aspiring writers to understand the unwritten rules of breaking in and moving up. It is a combination of mentoring and networking opportunities.”30 The website does not describe race and gender in any of the actual application materials, despite the programs being organized under “diversity.”
The women with whom I spoke entered the industry at an earlier moment in the 1990s, and three of the four of them reported going through previous “diversity programs.” Yolanda said that her entry into Hollywood came through one of the formerly active diversity workshops. She noted that it “used to be [that] several studios had programs like this to try and get women, people of color, into the business. Because for so long, it’s been a business open largely to White men.” However, this workshop was not what she expected. Prior to attending the workshop, Yolanda anticipated it being a specific mentoring space for people of color, so she was surprised when on “the first day I look around, I think there was a Chinese guy, and one other Black woman, and myself. And that was it.” Yolanda explained that she later found out that the studio workshop she attended became majority White after “so many White guys complained about it being unfair that [the studio] changed it … and it was no longer a diversity program … So anybody was able to get in.” It appears as though the mere intimation of “reverse discrimination,” absent the proof of actual demographic data, ended a series of programs intended to create a more level playing field.
In another attempt to address change structurally, the networks also created diversity initiatives designed to create incentives for showrunners to hire more people of color and women on their staff. The diversity initiatives, according to Cherise, have helped: “in terms of the mix on staff, it’s getting better.” However, she also noted that “there’s a big problem now because of what occurred about 10 or 15 years ago, when the network started putting in diversity programs, what occurred was—and everyone feared this was going to happen—it incentivized showrunners to hire ‘diverse,’ but to get them free from the network.” In other words, the “diverse” person, the writer of color, was not someone in which the network had made a long-term financial investment, much like hiring contingent labor (lecturers without multi-year contracts) in the university. Cherise explained that the result of this program was that, “when they were no longer free, a lot of people would fire that person and then hire another free person.” As a result, “what happened was you didn’t have enough people matriculating through the system. And you have a huge traffic jam at the bottom of the business.” Echoing this sentiment, Darnell Hunt writes that “the major broadcast networks (with the exception of CBS) … offered programs that subsidized the placement of a ‘diverse’ writer on each of their current primetime shows.” Hunt explains: “whether this foot in the door actually led to the long-term career opportunities for these writers is unclear. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the writers who filled the ‘diverse’ writer slots were sometimes marginalized in the writers’ rooms, pegged as ‘freebies’ by other writers on staff, and frequently not asked to return after the initial season of employment.”31 This Band-Aid approach to diversity does nothing to attend to the gaping wound of underrepresentation in Hollywood.
The women also described the problem of the mere intimation of so-called reverse discrimination, what Cherise described as “a divide in the room where the White people look at the Black person or the Asian person or the Latino person as ‘oh, you’re the diversity person, you are already less than.’” This divide came not from facts of resumes or demographics but rather a fabricated postracial discourse of White disenfranchisement for minority enfranchisement. Cherise continued: “now you have this un- not even unspoken—this chatter among, you know, White people that ‘the minorities are taking our jobs.’ But the stats do not show that. They don’t show that.” Instead, what Cherise explained is that not only have people of color not taken over, but “people [of color] have not moved through [i.e., risen through the ranks to positions of power] enough. They’re moving now, slowly, but enough people have not moved through. You don’t have a ton of showrunners. But you have more than you had before but you don’t have a ton. And you have a ton of people at the bottom who can’t get to the top.” Creating change from the bottom-up remained a tremendous challenge.
Like Cherise, Valerie also talked about the barriers in place that prevent diversification as she explained, from the top-down: “there’s just a handful of people of color, whether it’s [names two studios] you still can count the number of Black executives and know who they are throughout the company. Although you know the numbers are getting better but there’s still, hmm, not where certainly I think they ought to be.” Valerie described diversity in the decision-making executive roles as key to solving the “on-going challenge to get more people of color behind the camera in roles as writers, exec producers, directors, all of that.” Like the other women, Valerie noted that “the industry, no matter what studio, it’s sad, but it’s just sort of across the board, it’s just a system of nepotism and people hire the people they know and they’ve worked with.” This nepotistic system counters the alleged spirit of diversity initiatives and as a result, “when you try to … just make the suggestion that, how about diverse candidates, you know, people, the showrunners feel very much put upon because they feel like you’re somehow trying to lower the bar by making them hire minorities and women.”
This notion of “lowering the bar” is a fallacy, Valerie illustrated, emphatically repeating herself, that hides the reality that “the people that they’ve always done business with, you know, who look like them, are the people who they feel comfortable with.” This dynamic played out for Valerie when “I see that constantly on the shows that I work on, where we talk about the WGA initiatives, you know, where the company had said that we have to remind the showrunners of these initiatives; the corporate initiatives and WGA initiatives that you have to get a certain number of scripts. A fair numbers of like one or two scripts have to be given to freelance writers, and those freelance writers should be women or people of color.” As a studio executive, Valerie enforced the initiatives where she must “remind them [the showrunners] constantly that they have to do it and the idea is that, well, if you gave these freelance scripts to these people of color and women, this would be an entrée and opportunity.” Valerie clarified that, through the initiatives, the writers of color or female writers “wouldn’t be staff writers, right, but at least they would get exposure and experience as a result of having written the script and that might open opportunities for them on other shows to get staffed.”
But the response Valerie regularly received from showrunners is “like pulling teeth mentioning it on the production call [with me saying], ‘hey what about the whole diversity thing, have you guys reached out?’ [and them responding] ‘oh yeah, we’re taking [care of it], we’re working on it,’” while never really making a change. The M.O. of the showrunners, Valerie explained, is that “towards the end of the season if there’s 24 episodes, you know, like episode 22 and 24 are the freelance ones that finally, you know hmm, get rolled out” as diversity hires. Such tokenization means that the initiative candidate ended up “not get[ting] hired from that show at least, as a permanent person … [The hope is that] you get staffed as a staff writer and you move up each season, as, you know, a producer and you ultimately, you climb the ranks and hope that one day you can be a showrunner, but if you can never sorta get in the door, and follow a show for a couple of years to write so the ranks, so ultimately [never] get to a position where you could be a showrunner then.” Even when programs and initiatives were rolled out to alter the structure of Hollywood, White male culture proved itself intractable to change. The question remains of how the women dealt with such misreadings, and if they used postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity.
Not Just the First Five Names: Creating Our Own Networks
This chapter thus far has illustrated cultural and structural barriers to Black women in television that created few opportunities to even utilize postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity. But what happened when, despite all of these barriers, they made their ways into vaunted Hollywood spaces? The women I interviewed did describe performing strategic ambiguity, but it was in a manner related to, albeit markedly different, from both the celebrities whose performances I read in the first half of the book, and the young women audiences in the previous two chapters. Like the audiences and unlike the celebrity performances, what I found was their explicit group as opposed to individual orientation. In this group orientation, they described how they explicitly created their own diverse spaces. Like the celebrity women, and unlike the younger women who had yet to begin their professional careers, they had to learn how to compromise and play the long game. But the Hollywood women had their own very special inflection on strategic ambiguity.
Cherise noted that now that she had, in her word, “influence,” she was able to spot how very easy it would be to hire an entirely non-diverse staff as the studio simply provides “the first five names.” These first five names, Cherise clarified, are “just whoever the studio has, or the line producer gives you. Here’s the first five names. It’s not that they’re the best, it’s who that line producer knows.” Instead of accepting those first five names, Cherise described her process as, “you can make more calls, you can ask.” Diversifying is possible, Cherise explained, once you simply do a little more work and move beyond the preferred candidates, who are often White and male. In fact, she also noted that not just she moves beyond “the first five names”: an increasingly pervasive collective orientation among her colleagues of color and female colleagues means that “an army of people … have reached out to me to say, ‘hey, you’re in the spot, here’s a list of names. Here are all the inclusive names of EPs, production designers, of costumers, of writers, and that’s key, you know?” Her networks are global, Cherise explained, because “now, it’s like, somebody will email you from London and say, “hey, look at blah blah blah blah, I heard you’re hiring, try blah blah blah blah.” So, perhaps in a strategically ambiguous move, one accepts that list of the “first five names from the studio” in order to appear to accept help. However, what Cherise modeled was moving quickly to a mode of racialized resistance by refusing to follow traditional hiring scripts.
Another mode of racialized resistance comes about through fostering communities of Black television workers. Cherise noted that, now that she was in a more powerful, decision-making position, she also was able to forge a deeper connection to other African Americans in the industry. Also, notably, racial consciousness across the country has changed since 2014 with the advent of #BlackLivesMatter. As opposed to when she first moved to Hollywood, “I would say that the connection I have to my Black contemporaries is stronger now because we’ve woken up to” the importance of creating networks for Black folks. Cherise continued: “there’s a fierceness to help and applaud and keep the momentum going for us. Whereas before, when you first get here, you’re not thinking about it, you’re like ‘I have an audition, I want to get on the lot!’ You know? You’re just happy [to get any work].” Experiencing sustained rejection heightened Cherise’s consciousness that true success was not just her walking through the door, but holding it open for others. This came about with her own success, but also with the change in the political tide of the country.
Creating networks for women and people of color is so vital because the rewards of working on a show long-term (and not just in a single episode or two as the “diversity hire”) are tremendous, not just for community connections but for financial security. As Cherise explained about one very successful show she worked on, “when you have been on a show the duration of the show, that’s your children’s college money, that’s a house, that’s paying for your parents, that’s taking a vacation to Africa or Europe, there’s a lot more that can happen. And that’s why the parity is so important for us.” Such parity doesn’t happen accidentally: “it takes work … You can’t just say, okay, I’m going to hire [White male] Johnny” because Johnny is the one always being offered up as the expected candidate. To put it starkly: “there’s been such a monopoly [of White hires in Hollywood] because there’s so much money being made. And when there’s money, people keep other people out.” Exclusion is monetized, just as it’s racialized and gendered.
“Backhanded Compliments”: Resisting Postracial Racism
When the women did make it through the door to elite Hollywood spaces, as my Hollywood executives did, they experienced racism and sexism that felt hard to flush out because it was coded, postracial, and what is now more popularly deemed microagressions. For example, Valerie described being given the, in her words, “backhanded compliment” of someone saying “I do not see race, [or see you as a] Black woman, you’re just [Valerie].” To this sentiment, Valerie responded, “I don’t think it’s credible frankly for somebody to look at me and say [that].” She explained, “I’m okay with people seeing race,” as to her seeing race was not a negative. Furthermore, she argued, “I don’t think Black people are walking around and saying that they don’t see race … [But] I think that White people think it’s a source of comfort to us if they tell us that they don’t see race and I think it’s just quite the opposite … the reality is that we … don’t live in a colorblind society and I don’t even think that should ever be the goal, because diversity, how can you celebrate diversity if you deny that there’s, there are differences?” What Valerie illuminated here is the hypocrisy of the commonly stated adage “celebrate diversity” that emerges from Hollywood studios, universities, and other institutions across the country. Her intervention—a consciously racialized one—was to point out this hypocrisy in a markedly un-postracial manner.
Cherise enacted a similar positionality when she described how the racialized sexism she received was often one of tokenization, or having to speak for her entire race. For example, “I’ve had experiences this way probably on every room I’ve been in, where someone turns to you and they say, “well, would Black people do that? What do you think? Would Black people do that?” Cherise’s response was often one of humor, as she recalled remarking, “You know, I have to go to the meeting and ask them, ’cause I only know a hundred Black people. I don’t know all of the Black people.” But even when she responded with humor, she girded herself for the response, “oh my god, she’s Black, here she goes again.” In addition to humor, Cherise said one of her approaches was simply to not waste her time educating her White colleagues about their ignorance: “I’m not going to be the arbiter of Black thought for my staff.”
Cherise has, however, had to respond with more than humor or ignoring ignorant responses when the racialized sexism she encountered was far from coded and polite. For example, she described how, “I’ve been in rooms where the n-word has been thrown out as a joke, and a lot of people have experienced this, some form of the n-word coming out, and where conversations have to be had, and where it’s left rooms shocked like ‘oh my gosh’ and then you have to sort of deal with it.” As she took her position as a role model seriously, Cherise explained that she dealt with such explicit racism head-on not only for herself but for her staff as “when you get up higher, you are higher-leveled, and other younger writers are looking up to you.” In addition to workspaces like writers’ rooms, she has also experienced such racist “jokes” from her colleagues in social spaces: “I’ve gone to the Christmas party where someone’s drunk and they go, ‘oh my god, here’s our diversity hire!” Cherise continued, “I’ve written 35 scripts for television, and I’m an executive producer, a co-executive producer, and someone says that to me. And I have to think about how, in my Christmas dress, next to my husband, to check the person and still not be Angela Davis, you know what I mean?” The stereotype of the Angry Black Woman follows her around even—or perhaps especially—when she herself is the victim of racism and, yet, unlike the celebrities dogged with this stereotype, as I examine in part one of this book, she described how she regularly responded in a forthright manner, naming and addressing the racism and sexism.
Yolanda also took a forthright tact. She described her experiences of racialized sexism as ones that functioned as singular assumptions about Blackness. For example, Yolanda explained, “I was on one show [when] someone just turned to me and said—okay this used to get me—‘she doesn’t sound Black.’ Like, referring to an actor. We were sitting in a casting session.” Yolanda immediately decoded that “what they meant was the actor sounds too educated. I always thought that was offensive because I’m like, okay, so being Black is the equivalent to sounding uneducated?” Yolanda experienced frustration with coded, postracial racism that was also classed. She wanted to tell the person: “Just say what you’re trying to say. Which is: well, we want someone who is going to play an individual from a poor neighborhood.” Yolanda told me that she wanted to explain to her White colleagues that “they just categorized everybody, and [they made the assumption that] suddenly if you don’t sound, you know, ‘ghetto,’ then you’re not Black.” Instead, her response to such a statement, she recalled, was more strategically ambiguous. She recalled saying, “you guys, White people can have a Southern accent, or a surfer accent, all these different ways that they talk, and they’re all White. You never doubt that they’re White, you know? But, like, Black people, the minute they sound educated, they’re sounding White. Why do you think that?” Yolanda used a classic approach of interrupting microaggressions by throwing a racist statement back in the face of the speaker and politely posing a series of questioning about the assumptions. However, Yolanda noted that this postracially resistant approach—one of strategic ambiguity that cautiously did not name racism—didn’t work on her White writing colleagues: “Like some people would say, ‘yeah, but you know what we mean.’ You know, some people would go, ‘Yeah I hear you, I hear you’ … But they would always still use the words, ‘he doesn’t sound Black.’ They would still say that. So it kind of went in one ear and out the other.” While strategic ambiguity might be one type of response to racism, Yolanda’s story illustrates that it did not always provide the opportunity for an anti-racist intervention. Moreover, Yolanda’s postracially resistant response was too subtle for her colleagues to understand the weight of their racist comments and then take the next step: change their behavior.
“Why Does She Have to Be the Sassy Black Girl?”: Interventions through Education
All of the women found their own ways of intervening in racialized sexism. One particular moment stood out for Valerie. She noted that “I have in the past given the note back about [the only Black female character on one show on which she worked], ‘why does she have to be the sassy Black girl?’” Valerie balked at how this particular character often became a racialized caricature when the writers insisted that, in this diverse cast show, “she’s the one that speaks the Black vernacular.” Valerie always found herself saying, “why is that?” Valerie remembered one moment when the writers had the character saying, “‘bed time is for suckers,’ like s-u-c-k-a-s.” Even though Valerie’s executive job on this show was to comment on, “oh that’s defamatory, can’t say this, can’t say that,” when she saw this line in the script, she felt compelled to push back. She noted, “I just had to make a comment on this because it’s just like a flood gate opened up” where she wanted to tell the writers, “you know this sounds like Aunt Esther?,” the comedian LaWanda Page who co-starred in the 1970s-era sitcom Sanford and Son. Instead of pointing out this similarity right away, Valerie wrote a note that included a statement, “I just can’t imagine one of the Obama girls saying something like this.” Valerie’s subtlety—her strategically ambiguous approach—did not register with the writers as “the person that got the notes wrote me back, ‘not sure what the Obama reference is about on page 24? Did we mention the Obama girls in the script and I missed it …?’”
When Valerie’s attempt at subtlety failed, she said that while “a part of me was, like, ‘don’t respond any further,’” she was resigned to the fact that, “now I’m gonna have to break it down … really?” She sent over:
a clip of Aunt Esther saying, you know, ‘I’m gonna get … you sucka,’ whatever … I’m like, this is just her getting back to an era in which Black sitcom television writing and the sassy Black girl and you know why is it that [this character doesn’t] … speak like this but yet periodically there are things that come out of her mouth that sound like the 70’s sitcom. And no, I don’t imagine that President Obama’s daughters ever had heard the word “‘sucka” uttered in their household nor would they ever repeat it to another adult. It’s not even the words of a child. It’s not even like a slang term that the kids these days would say … It is adults who grew up in that era, who grew up watching Willis and Different Strokes, and … and you know all those 70’s sitcoms and have decided today, that those words should come out of this child’s mouth because she’s Black.
This moment of educating her colleagues got them to understand their use of racist dialogue, but, more importantly, prompted them to change the script as, in Valerie’s words, “they were just like [uses a little voice], ‘okay, okay we’ll change it.’” Valerie’s approach was not a subtle, postracially resistant, strategically ambiguous one. It was an exhaustingly thorough, research-driven presentation that could leave the person making such an intervention with emotional exhaustion, or what psychologist William Smith deems “racial battle fatigue.”32
For Valerie, this anti-racist intervention was worth all of the effort. After sharing this story, Valerie noted: “I feel like, in the position that I’m in, there are a few moments where you do have the opportunity to, to speak up and say something that will enlighten people who probably don’t even … like, they’re thinking it’s funny and they’re not imaging sort of how, what that term, like me sitting home at … five, like, with children and hearing a little Black girl on the television saying that, like … what, what that brings to mind.” In other words, Valerie noted that the writers weren’t thinking about audiences of color. While Valerie remarked that she must choose her battles, she was constantly frustrated by the fact that White “people just really don’t know” about the impact of their images on perpetuating racism and sexism.
Valerie’s intervention was a significant one to her, because, as she said, speaking up made her feel like “well, at least today, in this moment, I made a difference.” She continued, “and that’s all you can do, when there’s no critical mass of Black people, or Black women, whatever the industry is. You have these moments.” Such moments of education are “how you make the case of diversity other than the fact that you know it’s good business and all that sort of thing, and the right thing to do and all of that but that, you know, it helps to make the programming, the content, the environment, like richer when there are more voices at the table.” Notably, Valerie used the plural “voices”—advocating for more than one—as opposed to a singular “voice” at the table. Finally, speaking up “educates people who may not have thought about certain perspectives and everyone can feel more included in the process and the end-product is richer for it.”
Valerie described an intervention such as this as “my little Black moment where I speak up on something.” To Valerie, a “Black moment” meant refusing to remain silent in the face of racism. She noted that “if they shoot it down, I, you know I always think of what [an older Black male mentor], you know, used to say …: when you speak up and by so doing you may alienate people, you may end up losing at the end of the day, but you, it’s a triumph, because you spoke out against an injustice and you tried to make a difference.” Despite dealing with the seeming intractability of structural inequality, moments of speaking up “are the things that sort of bolster your self-esteem and allow you to, you know, sort of reconcile the conflicts sometimes of being in situations where you’re like, ‘am I helping or hurting the cause?’” Valerie lived by the moral code where, “when you stay silent in a moment where you know, you need to say something that even people have less respect for you for not saying something.” She explained, “you don’t necessarily want people to look around the room and say, ‘hey you’re Black, what do you think?,’ but at the same time when something clearly comes up that’s, that’s … you could say something and you know, you’re not gonna get fired for it [laughs] you know, why not? Why not do it?” In other words, while postracial resistance through strategic ambiguity might have been Valerie’s first response, when that didn’t work, she spoke up, educated people on their racism and sexism, and changed a representation before it arrived on screen.
Cherise explained her similar approach thusly: “I have made it my business to be a really straight shooter, and when I see racial shit, when I see bullshit, I call [people] on it.” Cherise gave the example of illuminating racism: “I’ve been on shows where you hear from the network or the studio’s side where it’s been coded language of, ‘Oh, if we’re going to kill [a character] it has to be someone we care about and that normally involves blonde hair.” Cherise called out coded postracial racism—that White lives, and particularly White female ones (as “blonde” is a shorthand here for blonde woman) are more valuable than Black ones—by name. This was the same sentiment Yvonne described as the studio logic that “you got to give White people something to look at a little bit.” Another code Cherise unpacked as racist is “there’s too many [people of color]—it’s getting too Benetton-y. I’ve heard it.” What this meant to Cherise was not just that the cast was getting too diverse, but rather “the coded language of a fear of too much Blackness.” And Cherise responded: “when that occurs you have to fight back.” Cherise provided an example of what that fighting back looked like: “when I was on a show, I wanted to do a [Hurricane] Katrina episode, and during the Katrina episode, prior to that, there had been a bunch of episodes that had minorities. I got asked, could I do the Katrina episode and make the person White. And I was like, absolutely not.” In this example, Cherise noted, “I’ve never learned why it was happening, I was never told why it was happening, but I knew why it was happening.” In other words, Cherise didn’t need to be told that the only way that her show could make palatable what was racialized as a Black issue [Hurricane Katrina], was through the story of a White protagonist. She responded with a racially resistant “absolutely not.”
This silent and default centering of Whiteness at the heart of a show has made it difficult at times for Yolanda to advocate for storylines with Black characters. She explained: “one show I was on this [showrunner] never wanted to write stories for Black characters because, in his mind, the stories always had to do with their Blackness. As opposed to just them living their lives. And he shied away from it.” The result was, Yolanda explained, “he didn’t cast any Black people or they didn’t have anything to do. Whereas all the White people, they’re living their lives, they’re having affairs, they’re doing this and that, it has nothing to do with their color.” In other words, White characters are allowed simple humanity in the eyes of a White showrunner, while the only personality trait Black characters are allowed is their race.
Cherise was clear that negotiating through racism and sexism was always a part of the job as “on a daily level, I’ve experienced so much of it.” For example, she expounded, “I’ve experienced it with hiring someone and someone says, “well, why do you want to hire her, when there’s already you?” Cherise noted that she didn’t let comments such as these slide, as she remembered responding, “‘oh, so she and I are both Black, we have the same kind of skin, and we have the exact same experience because we all sort of fell from the Black tree.’ Like what?” Responding with incredulous questions was also a favorite strategy of Cherise’s. Her philosophy about responding to racialized sexism was: “I don’t let it fester. I snap right back.” Cherise also protected herself after a racist encounter: “When I see the rest of the stuff I just sort of cut that person out of my personal existence. I don’t try to figure them out because I can’t, you know.” This was an important point. Cherise didn’t feel the need to fix an individual’s racism; she felt the need to bring the racism to the light and protect herself from continuing to be hurt by the racist behavior.
At the same time, all of the women noted that responding to racism and racialized sexism could be difficult precisely because of their postracial coded nature. Yolanda explained: “You have to remember, too, a lot of times, is that the people who are writing these shows are fairly liberal and usually highly educated, like us. So even if they’re thinking something, they know enough not to say it.” What postracial racism can produce is a lack of ability to respond in anything but code, à la strategic ambiguity. Hollywood is known as a very White, but politically liberal space. For minoritized cultural workers and, as media studies scholar Yeidy Rivery argues, cultural critics, this presents an atmosphere that is “more challenging [as] … the locations in which political rule is aligned with the left but those in power have appropriated some dictatorial practices similar to those in right-wing regimes.”33 Studio systems, as described by the women, appear to have much in common with such dictatorial regimes.
Coded racism and sexism meant that one rarely if ever received confirmation that rejection was on the basis of race and gender. For Yvonne, even though she knew when studios were passing on her materials because they were too Black-woman-specific, she was not told that in a forthright manner. Instead, the studio “never give[s] you real reasons.” They might say instead, “We really liked it but we have something like it.” Or perhaps they might say, “we’re just not sure.” For Yvonne, while the language is “really vague,” she was also used to the studios beaming right back to her, “but we love Yvonne. We want to be in the Yvonne business.” Yvonne sees this particularly if she is trying to shop a show with “a Black female lead. If you had a Black male, for whatever [reason, it’s easier]. I think White guys think they are looking at football players. I mean, look how incredibly happy are they with [former football player and current morning television host] Michael Strahan? Crazy!” What this created for Yvonne was a scenario where strategic ambiguity reigned as the most popular resistant strategy as other Black writers were “not pushing back. We need to get that job and pay our mortgage. I mean, we’re just not.” Yvonne’s response to a studio’s attempt to switch a Black lead with a White one was to say simply, “‘I think you’re mistaken,’ and then I’m done.” She chose not to fight that battle as “there’s nothing” she could do to change a studio executive’s mind once it was made up.
When not outright rejection, racism and sexism looked like a subtler refusal that remained coded. For example, Cherise noted, “I’ve seen crews turn on directors or not give a director respect and I’ve seen the signs of people sort of undermining somebody that could be a White woman or a person of color that is directing for the first time on a show and they do not do the same thing when there’s a White male.” The motivation for the crew’s lack of respect was the “assumption that this person got here doing less,” even though Cherise argued, “nine times out of ten, this person got here doing more.” What postracial racism also looked like—stunningly similar to explicitly stated racism—was a lack of equal opportunities.
Yvonne noted that, for African American women actresses, in particular, “the opportunities are just so ridiculously small.” And postracial racism in the form, ironically, of diversity rhetoric has had something to do with it. According to Yvonne, instead of wanting to cast a Black actress, “now it has become women of color.” To fulfil networks’ narrow check-off boxes of diversity, “if you’re Latina, that’s Black. If you’re Indian, if you’re Mindy Kaling, that’s Black.” As opposed to Black women, other women of color are “White-friendly with long hair and not Black. So that is your diversity, it’s called women of color. It used to be that Black was the women of color. [Now] it’s … [Latina actress] Sofia Vergara, who is the highest paid woman on television. That’s your diversity highlight [laughs]. I mean! Really. But she’s attractive to White men, Black men.”
In contrast, “Black women, we do not have that standard of beauty or that standard of acceptance or whatever you want to call it. If Halle Berry can’t crack that [then no Black woman can].” What this means in terms of greenlighting new shows, Yvonne noted, is that “everybody is looking for diversity as opposed to the Black show.” Valerie agreed that casting Black women wasn’t the networks’ priority as “the number one focus of right now across the board is how do we get more of Latino-themed programing on the airways, because everybody is dialed in to the fact that, you know, Latinos are the super-majority and that everybody wants to have programming that speaks to that demographic and you see and hear about it.” The multicultural universe, according to Yvonne and Valerie, has not meant greater diversity overall, or fewer White representations, just fewer Black ones. Such White supremacist logic fomented a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality, pitting groups of color against each other, and yet not significantly increasing the presence of any groups of color either in front of or behind the screens.
“Social Isolation”: It’s Lonely Being the Only
One of the most challenging effects of postracial racism that the women discussed was the isolation. As Cherise put it, “It’s been very lonely because I think when you move out here, you believe the race stuff won’t happen to you so you don’t have to deal with it.” What this meant was that one wasn’t naming racism and sexism as they were happening, and one wasn’t creating resistant communities to counter racist and sexist discourses. But eventually, Cherise explained, “time goes on and you go, ‘oh my god, this is what my parents were talking about; oh my god this is what they meant by ‘you have to work twice as hard’,’ and then you go, ‘oh, you actually have to work four times as hard.’” Such a realization can be devastating, Cherise noted, because, after struggling for so long, “you look up and realize you’ve worked yourself to death and some of your [White] contemporaries just have so much more and they did less.” Having remarkable creative products or impressive collegial behavior was also no guarantee to success, as “half the stuff that you see occur, you don’t necessarily see; you know that if you were Black and you did it, it would never fly.”
Such struggles on the way to success were compounded by what Cherise described as “social isolation.” She noted, “when I say the lonely part, I just say it because there’s not enough of us to literally have camaraderie and you have to be so cautious talking about [racism] with White people because you don’t want to feel like you’re bringing up race all the time.” Despite climbing the ladder, Cherise said, loneliness “doesn’t stop, no matter how big you get.” She told a story where, “I went out with [a Black Hollywood executive] recently who is very, very, very powerful, and they said to me they don’t get invited to parties, they have to always re-introduce themselves when they’re out, and when they were saying this, that they don’t get invited to play tennis on the weekends, to drive out to Palm Springs, when they were saying this, I said, ‘that’s the sort of isolation, the social isolation that can happen.’ I said, ‘it’s a battle that everyone fights.” Cherise’s response to the social isolation was to “just keep doing, just doing the work.’”
Part of what fortified all of the women in the face of loneliness was the sense that they were making a difference. All of the women paid homage to mentors and groundbreakers of the past, and the one they all mentioned with great respect and pride was Yvette Lee Bowser, creator of Living Single and, according to journalist and critic Kristal Brent Zook, the “first African American woman to launch a successful prime-time series for network television.”34 In addition, without exception, every one of the women circled around to Shonda Rhimes at least once in their interviews. Towards the end of the interview, Cherise noted, “the last thing I’d say is that because of Shonda Rhimes, and because of how she has been able to open the door, just visually, and what she has been able to accomplish, I’d say [to aspiring TV writers] do not run away from your Blackness. Because that is your gift.”
Cherise explained that, “for so long, we were not allowed to write Black leads, we were not allowed to write African American shows. If you pitched to your agent a Black drama, they would say, ‘that would never sell.’ And they would say that won’t sell overseas.” The result of being constantly rejected was that, in Cherise’s words,
a lot of Black writers unconsciously push down the Blackness thinking, in order for us to make it, we have to show that we can write [White people] really well. And we’ve mastered the art of writing about the Irish cop because we had to do it in order to get jobs. But [long pause] … we now exist and we’re not going anywhere [long pause].… we now exist and if you want to write about the Irish cop, go for it! Go for it—but now the studios and the networks won’t laugh at you if you come in and you pitch a Black drama, a Black family drama. They won’t laugh at you, so don’t run from doing that because we need those stories told and we’ve got to—people fought so we could tell them, so don’t run away from telling them … I see it in younger writers, and they go, “I don’t know if I want to do that because it’s Black,” and they’re so worried about getting pigeon-holed but they don’t actually know the fight that occurred to finally have a diverse television landscape. So tell the stories. Just keep telling them.
For Cherise, Rhimes’ success showed the value in showcasing their own Black lives on television.
On the other hand, Yolanda opined that folks shouldn’t mistake Rhimes’ success for major shifts in the industry. She noted, “Shonda’s success is just an individual thing. And she’s just like a unicorn, I mean it’s just unbelievable and phenomenal. She owns ABC. It’s an amazing thing.” She was the only, the exception; the figure that becomes successful through strategic ambiguity. But then Yolanda countered her own position, making the clarification between behind and in front of the camera: “I think the biggest impact she’s had is in front of the camera, you know? I think now people, her shows and Empire, have changed the way people [trails off] … they’re all about money, that’s all they care about, so it’s not necessarily Black vs. White, it’s just this show, can we sell advertising dollars? And if people buy a show with all Black people, then we don’t give a shit.” As she talked, Yolanda explained, “this [2015–2016 television] season, especially after Empire, it was like everybody was trying to put a Black person on a TV show. As if it was new information that Black people wanted to see themselves on TV.” Yolanda was frustrated with this response, as it was “a product or a result of not having enough Black executives.” As a result, diversification is “just a slow, slow process.”
Where Yolanda calls Rhimes “a unicorn,” Yvonne calls her “lighting in a bottle.” She said this phrase again, repeating, “It’s fantastic and … I can’t explain it, I can’t explain it. It is lightning in a bottle.” Yvonne also noted a potential Shonda Rhimes trickle-down effect: “we’re proud and it also makes you go … it does this, for me, I think. We can do more than write your momma jokes or, you know, the stories about Black people in the ghetto. We’ve got a lot of stories to tell. And I think, you know, I think people go, oh look at that! Maybe I will take that meeting, maybe she has something different than my momma’s on crack.”
Valerie noted that “Shonda Rhimes has blown up with her dramas because that’s just, being able to cross over, has been a huge challenge and then once on a sitcom, getting out of the sphere of the Black shows and being perceived as a writer who had, who can capture the voice of non-Black characters, I think has been the struggle, you know for the sitcom writers.” Valerie continued: “I think she’s masterful. I’ve said this ever since Grey’s Anatomy … we talk about what constitutes a Black show, is it an all-Black cast? Or is it who’s behind the camera?” Valerie voted that it was, indeed, who’s behind the camera, “because, you know, the imagery, that we’ve been so critical of from the 70’s sitcoms, the way Blacks were portrayed in those shows, you know, who was behind putting those images for … right? So it wasn’t Black, you say, you say those are Black shows because they had a Black cast but yet the stereotypes that we’re reinforcing.”
In contrast, Valerie asserted, with “Grey’s Anatomy, I think Shonda Rhimes was so masterful because, she had a, you know, the protagonist was a White character but yet the cast was so multicultural.” Valerie described Rhimes’ approach as “it’s like you’re sneaking in the fact that your three leads were Black … And so it’s the point where she gets to Scandal people aren’t even receiving that as a Black show and you get to How to get Away with Murder and if you see the trailer you’ve got Viola Davis marries the White guy, saying you slept with that White whore … you know and nobody is saying oh my God it’s racist … what is Shonda Rhimes doing?” To Valerie, Rhimes’ strategically ambiguous approach was to “sneak [race] in there … [so] people don’t even realize that you can talk about these issues.” This was an impressive magic trick to Valerie, but not necessarily one she wanted to emulate.35
Conclusion: “You Can Never Be Sure What’s Happening”
The approach I take in this chapter, one of making inroads into the emerging field of media industry studies, can, in the words of Douglas Kellner, “help individuals become aware of the connections between media and forces of domination and resistance, and can help make audiences more critical and informed consumers and producers of their culture.”36 In addition, introducing “the question of ideologies present in media texts,” Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz note, “brings us quickly to debates about the autonomy or agency of the people who work in the media industries.” In other words, are “talented individuals expressing their creative visions for clear political and ideological ends, or are they merely cogs in corporate machines trying to satiate the masses by producing texts full of ideological messages that maintain the interests of those in power?” Summarizing the debates in media industry studies, Havens and Lotz note: “by the time creative workers in most industries achieve a degree of autonomy, they have already internalized the worldviews of the corporations they work for.”37 Given the opportunity I imagine that the television executives and my audience group would commiserate about the racist and sexist structures in their lives, and share strategies for flouting strategic ambiguity in order to perform postracial resistance.
I want to end here with an illustrative story from Yolanda. Echoing Oprah Winfrey in chapter 2, she noted that racialized sexism managed to bubble up just about every day—but in hard-to-pin-down ways. She explained, “the tough thing, racism—here’s the thing: you can never be sure that’s what’s happening. That’s the tough thing with racism or sexism in this business. ’Cause of course no one is going to say that.” At the same time, Yolanda noted, “I did have an experience on one show, where I was the only woman on the show, and I was the only person to not get more than one script. I approached the EP [executive producer], and I was like, ‘Why? You know all the guys got two, sometimes three scripts.’ He wrote it off as, ‘well, it’s only because we had a truncated season, we didn’t get a full season ordered; next season you’ll get more.’” Yolanda patiently waited until the next season but discovered then, “the next season wasn’t much better. I got two [scripts], but the second one I had to split. Whereas no one else had to do that. Even the White guys who were lower [in experience and job title] than me.” It’s moments like this that caused Yolanda to stop questioning herself and know that racism and sexism were to blame for her being shut out of opportunities. After going through every possibility for an alternate explanation she acknowledged, “so I was like … okay … I can’t think of any other reason.” This was a moment where she did not have the power to resist. And yet she squirreled this experience away and kept going. In continuing to write, to produce, to create, she met success, and moved from postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity to a racialized resistance that facilitated not just her success, but the success of large groups of other women and people of color in Hollywood.