Page 479 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Representat ons of Race

at least consider the grievances at hand. The NAACP has succeeded in serv-
ing as a materialized voice shouting into the halls of executive and production
offices. Consciousness-raising can help to increase audiences’ awareness about,
and hopefully their desire for, more complex characters of color in film and tele-
vision. Media culture is contradictory: on one hand it is hegemonic; on the other
hand, because hegemony is a social existence that people are not coerced into
but consent to, it is contestable. Media culture needs to be contested.

how is DivErsiTy DEFinED? why is DivErsiTy
in ThE mEDia vaLuaBLE?

Professor George Gerbner, who conducted research on television representa-
tions of gender roles, racial characters, class, and occupational categories for over
three decades, states in the Media Education Foundation’s video The Electronic
Storyteller that “To be invisible in visual culture is to not have power in society.”
In studying the topic of race and representation in the media, there is produc-
tion and business on one hand, and reception and culture on the other, although
the two realms are clearly connected. Diversity is housed in many fields: diver-
sity is a cultural issue, an issue of politics; it is an issue in the marketplace (in
systems of business); diversity is also a moral issue, a moral imperative for some.
What makes approaching the goal or notion of “achieving diversity” challenging
is the that people working on it are coming from different worlds, or different
worldviews.
The question of how to define diversity in terms of representation remains
open; for example, it has yet to be determined what the standard is that marks
an adequate number or fair representation of racial characters. Must it be pro-
portionate to the percentage of African Americans, or Latinos, or Asian Ameri-
cans, and so on, in U.S. society? This leads us back to the quantity-versus-quality
question, and perhaps there ought to be goals other than sheer/mere numbers.
In terms of employment, the question remains: at what point will we know we
have arrived at an equitable distribution of opportunity in the industry? More-
over, it is not easy to tangibly or materially monitor and secure that a process of
production is diverse (Robinson 1996).
Beyond the numbers, ensuring a diversity of ideas—on screen, behind the
screen, and ultimately, in front of the screen out there in “the real world”—is the
goal of increasing diversity and improving the representation of race in Holly-
wood. Working towards diversity is part of a process of social change through
media culture and media consumption. Viewers make up a consumer group as
well as a social body and a political and ideological constituency—we are all
viewer-citizens who are actively (though sometimes unconsciously) engaged
in cultural production and in the generating of social values. Diversity in the
representation of race and race relations on television and in film is important
because such images and stories can limit or expand our expectations, about
others as well as about ourselves.
Are racial depictions in American television and film getting better? In gen-
eral, yes, though there are still moments of egregious and racist representations