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To What Extent Are Anti-racist Practices Effective?
Essay for the module `Concepts and Arguments in Sociology`
Date : 02/03/2022
To what extent are anti-racist practices effective?
Anti-racist practices, like racism itself, can take many different forms. Acts of resistance must take place across a broad spectrum of social and political processes to address the insidious nature of racism. With this in mind, this paper will focus on a specific form of resistance: anti-racist cultural practice. By this I mean discursive artefacts produced to challenging harmful stereotypes of racial and ethnic minorities. There is not one racism, but many racisms depending on the specific historical contingencies of an area (Hall, 1986). I will focus on anti-black racism in the United States. The cultural artefact I will interrogate is the recently released film Black Panther (2018) (BP), the first black superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie has been hailed as an anti-racist triumph because it destroys stereotypical depictions of blackness, instead showing it in the light of power, royalty, and resilience. Being a huge commercial success, grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide, it is expected to make way for even more black narratives and creatives in the mainstream. Given its resounding success it is tempting to celebrate it uncritically. In this paper I evaluate the extent to which BP is effective as an anti-racist cultural practice. I begin by clarifying the concept of racialisation before explaining why the politics of representation is a productive site to study anti-racism. I then explain the idea of cultural hegemony , a framework of thinking that is key to my analysis. Then, I explore how BP s images of blackness reconfigure harmful discursive association so as to denaturalise the ideological basis of racism. Next, I argue that the effectiveness of these representations predominantly derives from their emergence from the mainstream cannon of media. I then extend this argument to assert that previous seminal steps in mainstream black representation needed to pave the way for BP to come into existence. Next, I analyse why BP had little effect on Chinese audiences, arguing that a specific set of discursive tools is required to perceive it as an anti-racist practice. I then explore how BP liberalises images of black struggle to promote an anti-revolutionary type of anti-racism that functions to maintain racial inequality. Next, I explore how the image of revolution is capitalised upon and utilised to further fortify current structural conditions that disadvantage black people. I end by shedding light on the micro-level black struggles that both amplified the anti-racist effects of the film, and provided the initial force to make mainstream media create it in the first place. Overall, I argue that BP is effective to the extent that it is a reformative step within a hegemonic framework that fundamentally seeks to maintain the status quo of racial inequality. It is not effective if anti-racism is viewed as a radical reconstruction of the structural conditions that underly racism. Throughout the paper I explore how it is impossible for a cultural practice to be intrinsically anti-racist. BP s effectiveness is not self-contained, but contingent on other social forces, both past and present, at local and institutional levels.
The politics of representation offers a productive site to understand the multivalent and dynamic character of racism and the effectiveness of cultural practices that seek to dismantle it. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, racism was viewed as individual-level ideas of racial hierarchy and overtly offensive acts (Clair Denis, 2015). The post-Civil Rights Act 1964 persistence of racial inequality, after the apparent decline of overt discrimination, forced scholars to develop a concept of racism that accounted for this paradox (.ibid). This sparked the development of new conceptualisations that understand racism as individual and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality in diffuse and often subtle ways (pg.857). The inert view centred around the individual has been replaced by one that acknowledges the insidious propensity of racism to weave itself into various social and political processes. Anti-racism, therefore, must be practiced as a broad process of resistance that is as multivalent as racism itself. This shift to a processual understanding of racism in turn revived interest in racialisation , being the process of constructing racial meaning, including the creation of racial categories and the signification of these categories in relation to people, objects, and ideas (pg.860). The progressive or regressive meaning of a racial signifier is not contained within a particular representation, but derives from its transient discursive articulation with other elements in a signifying field (Stuart Hall: Race - the Floating Signifier, 1997). Which elements it is articulated with is the product of battles of classification between forces that seek to articulate racial meanings according to their particular interests (.ibid). Studying the power dynamics involved in the production of a cultural artefact offers a key rubric to understand how racism is articulated both within and by these processes, and how anti-racism can tackle it.
Viewing racism through the lens of hegemony allows us to unpick how race is negotiated between dominant and subordinate groups through cultural practices. It lets us transcend the binary of either progressive or regressive practice, instead highlighting how cultural forms and practices are always contradictory (Hall, 2016, pg.188). The underlying premise of hegemony is that those in power seek to maintain it, not through coercion but by securing the consent of subordinate groups by partially incorporating their interests to meet their minimal needs (Artz Murphy, 2000). The biggest threat to the dominant group is a counter-hegemonic power: an alliance that separates from and dismantles the prevailing hegemony and rearranges current social conditions (.ibid). Applied to the racialised society of the United States, this would suggest that those in positions of power, disproportionately occupied by white people, seek to maintain the current state of inequity that falls in their favour. This entails privileging ideologies that reinforce the status quo, even if they may partially incorporate the preferred meanings of less powerful ethnic and racial minorities. The cultural hegemony in the US involves dominant mainstream media institutions appropriating African-American narratives strategically in order to maintain their domination (.ibid). Power struggles for subordinate interests within the hegemonic relationship take place through a War of Positions (Gramsci, 1976). This is the reformative process where incremental shifts in dominant/subordinate power dynamics take place through successive steps in which the groups re-negotiate the hegemonic relationship (Hall, 2016). Here, the dominant culture may concede some of its positive representations of the status quo for representations that disrupt stereotypical constructions of racial meaning (.ibid). The resulting cultural product incorporates subordinate identities and narratives within the preferred meanings of the dominant white culture. This means that it is impossible for a cultural practice to be exclusively anti-racist if it emerges from within a structure that is fundamentally geared - even if not intentionally so - to maintaining the current state of inequity for the benefit of white people at its highest levels.
While the images and narratives of BP may well challenge stereotypical visualisations of blackness, its effectiveness as a cultural practice stems from the fact that these are representations shown in mainstream culture by dominant institutions that have historically marginalised black creatives and narratives. The images of black excellence, intelligence, and womanhood challenge discursive articulations that maintain the status quo. Black actors in Hollywood are routinely typecast into roles that reproduce stereotypes of blackness that go on to limit the aspirations of black people in the real world. They are often associated with images of violence, poverty, and indolence. Whilst 35% of gang members in real life come from black demographics, in films 64% of gang members are played by black actors. Black people are often cast as characters that are peripheral to the plot. Only 8 of the top films of 2014 featured black lead or co-lead actors (Smith, et al., 2014). In BP, a diversity of black identities are presented on-screen. Through the character of Black Panther (T Challa), black masculinity is disentangled from images of crime and barbarism and is instead associated with narratives of royalty, skill, and most importantly, power. He is the king of the Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced and powerful African country. Throughout the film he displays his strength and astuteness in confronting threats to his country. By re-articulating blackness in this way, the makers of BP confront images of blackness that perpetuate their discrimination. This destroys [the] naturalness and normality (Stuart Hall: Representation the Media, 1997) of harmful stereotypes and re-configures the common sense perceptions of black people in the real world (Hall, 1986). Stereotypes of black women as confrontational or as fetishised objects of the white male gaze are destabilised by their representations in BP as inventive, resourceful, and ethically determined . T Challa s sister, Shuri, is spearheading Wakanda s technological innovation. Okoye is the head of Wakanda s armed forces and leader of the Dora Milaje, the elite female bodyguards of the king. Images of black characters with depth and nuance are often limited to men, so the intersectional representation of blackness ensures that BP s efforts to denaturalise stereotypes are not gender-biased. BP s representations of blackness are effective because they destabilise stereotypes formed by racist regimes of classification. These images enable black audiences to identify with the characters and visualise themselves in similar positions of power which is able to constitute [them] as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable [them] to discover who [they] are (Hall, 1989, pg.80). BP s images of blackness reconfigure stereotypical discursive associations to both unhinge the ideological premise of racist behaviour, and enable black viewers to reimagine their blackness in a new inspiring light.
While the images in BP are clearly effective as counter-stereotypical representations of their own accord, they were only deemed groundbreaking because they emerged from the mainstream cannon of media. Much of its effectiveness derives from the fact that it is a sign of change within an industry that historically marginalises black narratives. Transformative representations of blackness in cinema have been produced by black creatives for centuries. While films like Medicine For Melancholy (2008), Black Girl (1966), and Pariah (2011) also contest racist stereotypes, they have not been credited as groundbreaking and revolutionary in the way that BP has. Whereas these are all indie films, outside of mainstream culture, BP is a highly successful product of Hollywood. BP is considered a triumph because it emerges as an unapologetically black production from a notoriously white space and is incredibly successful in doing it. After decades of films dominated by white lead characters and narratives, BP is the first black superhero to have his own movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), owned by Disney. In her study of the persistence of racial inequality in Hollywood, Erigha (2017) finds that between 2000 to 2011, out of 15 major Hollywood studios, Disney had the smallest proportion of African-American directors, accounting for less than 4% of the movies produced. The very same corporation invested $200 million into the production of BP, a movie with a black director, Ryan Coogler. It also has a black executive producer, black costume and production designers, black writers, and an almost exclusively black cast. The commercial success of the film shows that black productions spotlighting black identities can have mainstream success. It is the highest-grossing solo superhero film ever and is currently the tenth highest grossing movie of all time. BP is considered a seminal step for black representation precisely because it is indicative of a change within an industry that puts a premium on white voices and narratives. It is a strategic advance by African-Americans creatives, like Coogler, in the War of Positions within dominant white culture. Given its incredible commercial success, it is likely to incentivise Disney to invest in more black narratives. In other words, BP s significance as a positive representation of blackness resides not in those representations themselves, but because those representations are part of a reformative manoeuvre within mainstream culture which is predominantly a white space for white narratives.
If we argue that BP is a reformative anti-racist step within the popular cannon of visual representations, then we must, by extension, credit the previous advances in mainstream black representation that paved the way for this step to been taken. Coogler s two previous movies, Fruitvale Station (2013), about police brutality against African-Americans, and Creed (2015), about the journey of a young black boxer, were both critical and commercial hits, building his credentials to become the director of a blockbuster like BP. Boseman, the actor behind BP, says that [BP] is one of many things that have happened over the past few years. This moment has been building. Indeed, mainstream movies like Selma (2014), Hidden Figures (2016), and Get Out (2017), all starring black leads and all unapologetically grounded in black narratives, has potentially shown Hollywood that black narratives are profitable, persuading producers to invest in a film like BP. To credit BP as a reformative anti-racist cultural practice within a predominantly white industry is also to credit the previous seminal films that made it a commercial possibility. Change within a hegemonic formation does not take place as a single decisive blow, but as a process of adjustment. The atemporal view of BP as isolated from the genealogy of black mainstream films elides decades of persistence and struggle by black creatives within Hollywood. The anti-racist effectiveness of a cultural practice is not intrinsic to the practice itself but emerges from the accumulation of past achievements.
For BP to be effective as an anti-racist cultural practice not only does it require a context in the sense of previous reforms in popular culture, it also requires a discursive context in the sense of a complementary set of semantic tools in the minds of the viewers to allow them to interpret the film as an anti-racist practice. While in the US, gradual advances in progressive representations of blackness in popular culture have endowed audiences with the codes of perception to understand BP as an anti-racist movie, in China, where similar advances have not been made, many viewers struggled to see the significance of the film. For many Chinese viewers, cultural touchstones that immediately registered with American audiences were lost in translation . While on Rotten Tomatoes, an American review aggregation website, the film scored 97%, on the Chinese equivalent, Douban, it only scored 6.7/10: clearly the film resonated less with Chinese audiences. One critic said that all the major characters are black, a lot of the scenes are black, the car-chasing scene is black the blackness has really made me drowsy. The groundbreaking re-imaginations of blackness failed to have an effect on Chinese audiences because dominant Chinese pop culture has not provided them with the discursive tools to decode the film as a positive anti-racist practice. According to Stuart Hall (1973), a visual representation does not have pre-existing meaning. While the creators of a cultural product may encode a representation with specific meanings, the audience must use their own frames of understanding to decode it as a meaningful discourse (.ibid). It is the dominant cultural order that provides these common-sense mental maps to decode a representation (.ibid). While dominant mainstream media in the US has gradually incorporated black narratives, as discussed above, Chinese popular culture has historically rejected black culture. Law (2012) tracks the aggressive state-controlled promotion of Han culture since the communist party came to power, leading to the vilification of cultures of minority ethnic groups, including those of black people outside of its borders. In contemporary China, there is a limited exposure to diversity and mainstream media often depicts black people in blatantly racist ways: as impure, uncivilised, and incompetent. With a dominant cultural regime that propagates these classifications of blackness, it is not surprising that Chinese viewers of BP were unable perceive blackness on the same terms as Coogler intended. So not only are previous anti-racist developments within popular culture necessary in the sense that they paved the way for the creation of BP, these advances also endowed future audiences with the discursive tools to effectively decode it as a progressive display of blackness. There is nothing intrinsically anti-racist in the representations BP: they must be accompanied by a complementary discursive code to perceive it as such. It also highlights that there is not one racism to which an anti-racist practice can be administered. Racism operates in a particular historical formation (Hall, 1986). Anti-racism, like racism, must be understood as operating in these complex social and political flows of a given context. For anti-racist practice to be effective, it must be designed for the specific hegemonic context it is deployed in.
Being an anti-racist practice that seeks change within a hegemonic formation, BP perpetuates a counter-revolutionary type of anti-racism that amalgamates the interests of African-American viewers with narratives more palatable to white viewers. While BP may promote positive images of blackness, it fails as a radical anti-racist film because it discourages the reconfiguring of structural conditions that underly racial inequality. This is most evident in the portrayal of the character Killmonger. Killmonger is T Challa s long lost American-born cousin. Being a child of the systematic oppression faced by African-Americans, he embodies the rage the oppressed African diaspora. Because of this, he has grown embittered by Wakanda s insularity and reluctance to use their resources to combat oppression faced by black people around the world. While T Challa wants to protect the integrity of Wakanda, even if it means ignoring the African diaspora, Killmonger seeks to take over Wakanda and send its resources to black people all over the world for them to fight their oppressors. Killmonger is the villain of the narrative. T Challa defeats him, but honours Killmonger s plight by opening up Wakanda s borders and sending resources to black communities so that they may empower themselves within the existing system. The message to viewers is clear: don t fight racist oppression by radically changing real social conditions and structure but gradually alter it from within through self-improvement.
This epitomises how BP caters to African-American interests while still promoting narratives that work to maintain the status quo of white domination and black subordination. While the diverse representations of blackness resonate with African-American aspirations to see their identities in the spotlight, through the portrayal of Killmonger, BP liberalises black resistance for white comfort. Killmonger epitomises counter-hegemonic struggle: to organise the subordinate group and its allies into a political force (Artz Murphy, 2000, pg.144). By denouncing Killonger s black internationalist struggle, BP s narrative promotes a counter-revolutionary message that leaves the prevailing white hegemony intact. For Stuart Hall, the ability to change connections between meaning and practice gives human actors the potential for changing their social conditions. In this regard, BP s representation of blackness is progressive. But what ultimately fulfils its transformative potential is the linkage between an articulated discourse and social forces capable of negotiating a different hegemony. (Hall, 1986, cited in Artz Murph, 2000, pg.67) By vilifying Killmonger s desire for black internationalism, this linkage is denied. As a result, the potential to actually change social conditions that perpetuate racial inequality is lost. Being the product of both dominant white and subordinate black interests, it is impossible for BP to be exclusively anti-racist. Underlying the progressive representations is a system of preferred meanings that works to maintain the status quo. So BP is anti-racist to the extent that anti-racism is defined as an intra-hegemonic process. If it is defined as the fundamental changing of social conditions to alleviate racial inequality, then it fails.
Even though BP proposes a reformative process as anti-racism, it presents and capitalises upon the image of revolution. This further fortifies the status quo of racial inequity by masquerading reform as real change. The name of the movie BP rekindles images of the BP Party for Self Defence, the political organisation aiming to empower black communities. The trailer of the film features Gil Scott-Heron s iconic poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised , which calls for revolutionary change against all oppressive structures. The opening sequence of the film took place in 1992, the year of the Rodney King riots. By using the visual language of revolution, real radical traditions and practices are trivialised. The distinction between black art that touches on revolutionary themes, and the actual work required for revolution is lost. If viewers conflate the purchasing of a ticket for BP with genuine anti-racist resistance, then radical social change becomes even less of a possibility because it becomes sterilised in the popular imagination. So the status quo social formation is fortified not simply by the discouraging of revolutionary change through its narrative, but the communicating of this under the guise radical anti-racist practice. Perhaps this utilisation of revolutionary themes also signals the return of Blaxploitation. This was a subgenre of film during the 1970s that centred radical black narratives and voices, but was criticised of doing so for the profit of white producers that sought to capitalise upon its radical themes (Artz Murphy, 2000). Indeed, those profiting most off BP s success are unlikely to be the black communities from which the narratives emerged, but companies like Disney and Marvel that underrepresent black people in their major studios (Erigha, 2014). The social conditions of white domination and black disempowerment are both amplified and protected by the display of the visual language of revolution.
While BP co-opts the theme of struggle against oppression, we cannot ignore that local black struggles are contesting these devices of hegemonic control. A petition called #BreakBreadMarvel , was set up to address this dynamic of exploitation. It demands that 25% of the profits from the film be invested in black communities. So far the petition has amassed over ten thousand signatures. It criticises Marvel for targeting black dollars and questions "what exactly will the black community gain, aside from another symbolic victory? This reminds us that in our discussion of the macro-level racialised dynamics between dominant and alternative interests, we cannot elide the micro-level social forces that act to destabilise them. While the images of revolution may hamper BP s effectiveness as a cultural practice by masking real social change, local black struggles seek to mitigate this effect by confronting the multinational corporations that are at the helm.
Local black efforts also facilitate the effectiveness of BP`s images of blackness that challenge stereotypical meanings. It is the coincidence of macro-level institutional adjustments and micro-level struggles that ensure the effectiveness of anti-racist representations of blackness. Fredrerick Joseph set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to send 300 children from Harlem to see the movie. The campaign went on to raise over $50,000. With the #BlackPantherChallenge he called on others to do the same for underprivileged black children in their own communities. Since then, over 600 similar GoFundMe campaigns have emerged, raising nearly $1million altogether. Clearly, people realised that the groundbreaking representations of black excellence would not fulfil their potential if racialised systems of privilege and disadvantage in society prevented these children from seeing it. For Stuart Hall, a cultural form does not guarantee resistance, they still require social and political practices to articulate them to particular political positions (Hall, 2016, pg.197). The #BlackPantherChallenge efforts of black communities ensured that BP was able to inspire the children who most needed it, allowing them to identify with and visualise themselves in positions of royalty and power. While macro-level social forces within the hegemonic relationship between dominant and subordinate interests may transform modes of racialisation in the popular cannon, it is these micro-level efforts that ensure the new visualisations of blackness fulfil their intended effect. To just credit media elites for these effects is to elide these local black struggles to navigate structures of oppression. The anti-racist effects of BP s images of blackness are not contained within cultural form itself. Because racism is woven through a multitude of social processes, an anti-racist practice must work in tandem with other practice, both at local and institutional levels, to maximise its effect.
Not only do local anti-racist practices of resistance fulfil the potential of mainstream cultural forms, they are also the fundamental force that pushes popular culture to produce them in the first place. Above all, it is the demands of subordinate groups that force hegemonic institutions to reform: they must secure the consent of subordinate groups to maintain hegemonic domination (Artz Murphy, 2000). For an adjustment to black demands in popular culture to take place, there must be black demands in the first place. It was the radical black movements of the 1970s against hegemonic institutions in universities and local governments that forced Hollywood to accommodate the tenor of black power with movies like The Mack (1973), Slaughter (1972), and Shaft (1971) (Artz Murphy, 2000). It is hard to imagine Warner Brothers, one of the biggest entertainment companies, investing in a movie like Cleopatra Jones (1973) if there was no contemporary that activism that asserted that black is beautiful . It was the enterprising spirit of black people in the face of racist structures that lead to the emergence of the black middle class (Artz Murphy, 2000). This lead to the mainstream release of shows like The Cosby Show (1984), Insecure (2016), and Black-ish (2014), to accommodate their interests. Black struggle was also the source of the creation of the BP comic book character in 1966. In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Jack Kirby, co-creator of the superhero, suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks : they were certainly aware that BP, the ultimate symbol of black power, would gain traction in the environment of civil unrest. Without these efforts by black people to fundamentally change the inequity of their social conditions, mainstream media would not need to adjust to their interests.
If BP is an intra-hegemonic reformative step by dominant forces to secure black consent, then we must credit the root of these reforms: the demands for change to which they must respond. Black Lives Matter, a movement initially formed to respond to police brutality, has brought issues surrounding systematic racism into the public consciousness. According to the co-founder of the movement, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter contributed cultural ammunition to help fuel a movie like BP . Its narrative of a struggle against racial oppression resonates with the cultural shifts brought about by Black Lives Matter. BP s display of powerful black femininity is a marketing response, argues Anyangwe, to black girl magic . This is a popular term coined to celebrate the achievements of black women despite the overlapping structures of discrimination they face. Powerful media institutions are forced to make adjustments in their practices to mitigate the dissonance between representations in popular culture and the expectations subordinate groups have of them. Without the aforementioned demands of black struggles, BP would not exist because Hollywood would not have needed to respond to any demands of change. If we argue that BP is effective as an anti-racist cultural practice to the extent that it is a reformative step within a hegemonic formation dominated by white interests, then we must attribute its effectiveness to the local black struggles which forced this step to be taken in the first place.
Ultimately, an anti-racist cultural practice is effective to the extent that it operates in tandem with various other struggles in sites of political and social antagonism located both at the macro-level of institutional adjustment and at the micro-level of local effort. Racism weaves itself through many political and social processes, so anti-racism must be practiced as an equally dynamic effort. To deploy a single practice of anti-racism in the hope eliminating racism is to ignore the fact that it is impossible for a cultural practice to be intrinsically anti-racist. Its effectiveness is both contingent on and limited by the context in which it operates. It can be tempting to see a film with such magnificent displays of black royalty, Afro-Futurism, and black womanhood as an unequivocal anti-racist practice. It is important, however, to interrogate the image . Can the purchasing of a product by Disney, a multinational corporation that historically marginalises black voices and narratives, really be considered an act of anti-racist resistance? Perhaps BP has planted the seeds of the construction of a truly radical anti-racist hegemonic force. It seems to follow Gramsci s (1971) criteria for resistance by subordinate groups: self identity and the sharing of interests with other subordinate groups. As shown by the #BlackPantherChallenge, the film has done well to bring African-American communities together around a sense of collective solidarity and empowerment. People formed viewing groups a went together as a pilgrimage of self-discovery. The film s success has inspired other ethnic minorities to call for transformative representations that will inspire their own communities and that will dismantle the stereotypes that they face . It is yet to be seen what will come of these effects. If, for now at least, we consider BP effective to the extent that it is a reform of the status quo, not a radical upheaval of it, then we must also accept that it amalgamates representations that seek to transform the state of racial inequality with meanings that seek to preserve it. We must also accept that for BP to remain effective as a reform, then it must be followed by more mainstream movies that destabilise the ideological premises of racism even further. It is up to BP 2 to continue this legacy.
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Anti-racist practices, like racism itself, can take many different forms. Acts of resistance must take place across a broad spectrum of social and political processes to address the insidious nature of racism. With this in mind, this paper will focus on a specific form of resistance: anti-racist cultural practice. By this I mean discursive artefacts produced to challenging harmful stereotypes of racial and ethnic minorities. There is not one racism, but many racisms depending on the specific historical contingencies of an area (Hall, 1986). I will focus on anti-black racism in the United States. The cultural artefact I will interrogate is the recently released film Black Panther (2018) (BP), the first black superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie has been hailed as an anti-racist triumph because it destroys stereotypical depictions of blackness, instead showing it in the light of power, royalty, and resilience. Being a huge commercial success, grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide, it is expected to make way for even more black narratives and creatives in the mainstream. Given its resounding success it is tempting to celebrate it uncritically. In this paper I evaluate the extent to which BP is effective as an anti-racist cultural practice. I begin by clarifying the concept of racialisation before explaining why the politics of representation is a productive site to study anti-racism. I then explain the idea of cultural hegemony , a framework of thinking that is key to my analysis. Then, I explore how BP s images of blackness reconfigure harmful discursive association so as to denaturalise the ideological basis of racism. Next, I argue that the effectiveness of these representations predominantly derives from their emergence from the mainstream cannon of media. I then extend this argument to assert that previous seminal steps in mainstream black representation needed to pave the way for BP to come into existence. Next, I analyse why BP had little effect on Chinese audiences, arguing that a specific set of discursive tools is required to perceive it as an anti-racist practice. I then explore how BP liberalises images of black struggle to promote an anti-revolutionary type of anti-racism that functions to maintain racial inequality. Next, I explore how the image of revolution is capitalised upon and utilised to further fortify current structural conditions that disadvantage black people. I end by shedding light on the micro-level black struggles that both amplified the anti-racist effects of the film, and provided the initial force to make mainstream media create it in the first place. Overall, I argue that BP is effective to the extent that it is a reformative step within a hegemonic framework that fundamentally seeks to maintain the status quo of racial inequality. It is not effective if anti-racism is viewed as a radical reconstruction of the structural conditions that underly racism. Throughout the paper I explore how it is impossible for a cultural practice to be intrinsically anti-racist. BP s effectiveness is not self-contained, but contingent on other social forces, both past and present, at local and institutional levels.
The politics of representation offers a productive site to understand the multivalent and dynamic character of racism and the effectiveness of cultural practices that seek to dismantle it. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, racism was viewed as individual-level ideas of racial hierarchy and overtly offensive acts (Clair Denis, 2015). The post-Civil Rights Act 1964 persistence of racial inequality, after the apparent decline of overt discrimination, forced scholars to develop a concept of racism that accounted for this paradox (.ibid). This sparked the development of new conceptualisations that understand racism as individual and group-level processes and structures that are implicated in the reproduction of racial inequality in diffuse and often subtle ways (pg.857). The inert view centred around the individual has been replaced by one that acknowledges the insidious propensity of racism to weave itself into various social and political processes. Anti-racism, therefore, must be practiced as a broad process of resistance that is as multivalent as racism itself. This shift to a processual understanding of racism in turn revived interest in racialisation , being the process of constructing racial meaning, including the creation of racial categories and the signification of these categories in relation to people, objects, and ideas (pg.860). The progressive or regressive meaning of a racial signifier is not contained within a particular representation, but derives from its transient discursive articulation with other elements in a signifying field (Stuart Hall: Race - the Floating Signifier, 1997). Which elements it is articulated with is the product of battles of classification between forces that seek to articulate racial meanings according to their particular interests (.ibid). Studying the power dynamics involved in the production of a cultural artefact offers a key rubric to understand how racism is articulated both within and by these processes, and how anti-racism can tackle it.
Viewing racism through the lens of hegemony allows us to unpick how race is negotiated between dominant and subordinate groups through cultural practices. It lets us transcend the binary of either progressive or regressive practice, instead highlighting how cultural forms and practices are always contradictory (Hall, 2016, pg.188). The underlying premise of hegemony is that those in power seek to maintain it, not through coercion but by securing the consent of subordinate groups by partially incorporating their interests to meet their minimal needs (Artz Murphy, 2000). The biggest threat to the dominant group is a counter-hegemonic power: an alliance that separates from and dismantles the prevailing hegemony and rearranges current social conditions (.ibid). Applied to the racialised society of the United States, this would suggest that those in positions of power, disproportionately occupied by white people, seek to maintain the current state of inequity that falls in their favour. This entails privileging ideologies that reinforce the status quo, even if they may partially incorporate the preferred meanings of less powerful ethnic and racial minorities. The cultural hegemony in the US involves dominant mainstream media institutions appropriating African-American narratives strategically in order to maintain their domination (.ibid). Power struggles for subordinate interests within the hegemonic relationship take place through a War of Positions (Gramsci, 1976). This is the reformative process where incremental shifts in dominant/subordinate power dynamics take place through successive steps in which the groups re-negotiate the hegemonic relationship (Hall, 2016). Here, the dominant culture may concede some of its positive representations of the status quo for representations that disrupt stereotypical constructions of racial meaning (.ibid). The resulting cultural product incorporates subordinate identities and narratives within the preferred meanings of the dominant white culture. This means that it is impossible for a cultural practice to be exclusively anti-racist if it emerges from within a structure that is fundamentally geared - even if not intentionally so - to maintaining the current state of inequity for the benefit of white people at its highest levels.
While the images and narratives of BP may well challenge stereotypical visualisations of blackness, its effectiveness as a cultural practice stems from the fact that these are representations shown in mainstream culture by dominant institutions that have historically marginalised black creatives and narratives. The images of black excellence, intelligence, and womanhood challenge discursive articulations that maintain the status quo. Black actors in Hollywood are routinely typecast into roles that reproduce stereotypes of blackness that go on to limit the aspirations of black people in the real world. They are often associated with images of violence, poverty, and indolence. Whilst 35% of gang members in real life come from black demographics, in films 64% of gang members are played by black actors. Black people are often cast as characters that are peripheral to the plot. Only 8 of the top films of 2014 featured black lead or co-lead actors (Smith, et al., 2014). In BP, a diversity of black identities are presented on-screen. Through the character of Black Panther (T Challa), black masculinity is disentangled from images of crime and barbarism and is instead associated with narratives of royalty, skill, and most importantly, power. He is the king of the Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced and powerful African country. Throughout the film he displays his strength and astuteness in confronting threats to his country. By re-articulating blackness in this way, the makers of BP confront images of blackness that perpetuate their discrimination. This destroys [the] naturalness and normality (Stuart Hall: Representation the Media, 1997) of harmful stereotypes and re-configures the common sense perceptions of black people in the real world (Hall, 1986). Stereotypes of black women as confrontational or as fetishised objects of the white male gaze are destabilised by their representations in BP as inventive, resourceful, and ethically determined . T Challa s sister, Shuri, is spearheading Wakanda s technological innovation. Okoye is the head of Wakanda s armed forces and leader of the Dora Milaje, the elite female bodyguards of the king. Images of black characters with depth and nuance are often limited to men, so the intersectional representation of blackness ensures that BP s efforts to denaturalise stereotypes are not gender-biased. BP s representations of blackness are effective because they destabilise stereotypes formed by racist regimes of classification. These images enable black audiences to identify with the characters and visualise themselves in similar positions of power which is able to constitute [them] as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable [them] to discover who [they] are (Hall, 1989, pg.80). BP s images of blackness reconfigure stereotypical discursive associations to both unhinge the ideological premise of racist behaviour, and enable black viewers to reimagine their blackness in a new inspiring light.
While the images in BP are clearly effective as counter-stereotypical representations of their own accord, they were only deemed groundbreaking because they emerged from the mainstream cannon of media. Much of its effectiveness derives from the fact that it is a sign of change within an industry that historically marginalises black narratives. Transformative representations of blackness in cinema have been produced by black creatives for centuries. While films like Medicine For Melancholy (2008), Black Girl (1966), and Pariah (2011) also contest racist stereotypes, they have not been credited as groundbreaking and revolutionary in the way that BP has. Whereas these are all indie films, outside of mainstream culture, BP is a highly successful product of Hollywood. BP is considered a triumph because it emerges as an unapologetically black production from a notoriously white space and is incredibly successful in doing it. After decades of films dominated by white lead characters and narratives, BP is the first black superhero to have his own movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), owned by Disney. In her study of the persistence of racial inequality in Hollywood, Erigha (2017) finds that between 2000 to 2011, out of 15 major Hollywood studios, Disney had the smallest proportion of African-American directors, accounting for less than 4% of the movies produced. The very same corporation invested $200 million into the production of BP, a movie with a black director, Ryan Coogler. It also has a black executive producer, black costume and production designers, black writers, and an almost exclusively black cast. The commercial success of the film shows that black productions spotlighting black identities can have mainstream success. It is the highest-grossing solo superhero film ever and is currently the tenth highest grossing movie of all time. BP is considered a seminal step for black representation precisely because it is indicative of a change within an industry that puts a premium on white voices and narratives. It is a strategic advance by African-Americans creatives, like Coogler, in the War of Positions within dominant white culture. Given its incredible commercial success, it is likely to incentivise Disney to invest in more black narratives. In other words, BP s significance as a positive representation of blackness resides not in those representations themselves, but because those representations are part of a reformative manoeuvre within mainstream culture which is predominantly a white space for white narratives.
If we argue that BP is a reformative anti-racist step within the popular cannon of visual representations, then we must, by extension, credit the previous advances in mainstream black representation that paved the way for this step to been taken. Coogler s two previous movies, Fruitvale Station (2013), about police brutality against African-Americans, and Creed (2015), about the journey of a young black boxer, were both critical and commercial hits, building his credentials to become the director of a blockbuster like BP. Boseman, the actor behind BP, says that [BP] is one of many things that have happened over the past few years. This moment has been building. Indeed, mainstream movies like Selma (2014), Hidden Figures (2016), and Get Out (2017), all starring black leads and all unapologetically grounded in black narratives, has potentially shown Hollywood that black narratives are profitable, persuading producers to invest in a film like BP. To credit BP as a reformative anti-racist cultural practice within a predominantly white industry is also to credit the previous seminal films that made it a commercial possibility. Change within a hegemonic formation does not take place as a single decisive blow, but as a process of adjustment. The atemporal view of BP as isolated from the genealogy of black mainstream films elides decades of persistence and struggle by black creatives within Hollywood. The anti-racist effectiveness of a cultural practice is not intrinsic to the practice itself but emerges from the accumulation of past achievements.
For BP to be effective as an anti-racist cultural practice not only does it require a context in the sense of previous reforms in popular culture, it also requires a discursive context in the sense of a complementary set of semantic tools in the minds of the viewers to allow them to interpret the film as an anti-racist practice. While in the US, gradual advances in progressive representations of blackness in popular culture have endowed audiences with the codes of perception to understand BP as an anti-racist movie, in China, where similar advances have not been made, many viewers struggled to see the significance of the film. For many Chinese viewers, cultural touchstones that immediately registered with American audiences were lost in translation . While on Rotten Tomatoes, an American review aggregation website, the film scored 97%, on the Chinese equivalent, Douban, it only scored 6.7/10: clearly the film resonated less with Chinese audiences. One critic said that all the major characters are black, a lot of the scenes are black, the car-chasing scene is black the blackness has really made me drowsy. The groundbreaking re-imaginations of blackness failed to have an effect on Chinese audiences because dominant Chinese pop culture has not provided them with the discursive tools to decode the film as a positive anti-racist practice. According to Stuart Hall (1973), a visual representation does not have pre-existing meaning. While the creators of a cultural product may encode a representation with specific meanings, the audience must use their own frames of understanding to decode it as a meaningful discourse (.ibid). It is the dominant cultural order that provides these common-sense mental maps to decode a representation (.ibid). While dominant mainstream media in the US has gradually incorporated black narratives, as discussed above, Chinese popular culture has historically rejected black culture. Law (2012) tracks the aggressive state-controlled promotion of Han culture since the communist party came to power, leading to the vilification of cultures of minority ethnic groups, including those of black people outside of its borders. In contemporary China, there is a limited exposure to diversity and mainstream media often depicts black people in blatantly racist ways: as impure, uncivilised, and incompetent. With a dominant cultural regime that propagates these classifications of blackness, it is not surprising that Chinese viewers of BP were unable perceive blackness on the same terms as Coogler intended. So not only are previous anti-racist developments within popular culture necessary in the sense that they paved the way for the creation of BP, these advances also endowed future audiences with the discursive tools to effectively decode it as a progressive display of blackness. There is nothing intrinsically anti-racist in the representations BP: they must be accompanied by a complementary discursive code to perceive it as such. It also highlights that there is not one racism to which an anti-racist practice can be administered. Racism operates in a particular historical formation (Hall, 1986). Anti-racism, like racism, must be understood as operating in these complex social and political flows of a given context. For anti-racist practice to be effective, it must be designed for the specific hegemonic context it is deployed in.
Being an anti-racist practice that seeks change within a hegemonic formation, BP perpetuates a counter-revolutionary type of anti-racism that amalgamates the interests of African-American viewers with narratives more palatable to white viewers. While BP may promote positive images of blackness, it fails as a radical anti-racist film because it discourages the reconfiguring of structural conditions that underly racial inequality. This is most evident in the portrayal of the character Killmonger. Killmonger is T Challa s long lost American-born cousin. Being a child of the systematic oppression faced by African-Americans, he embodies the rage the oppressed African diaspora. Because of this, he has grown embittered by Wakanda s insularity and reluctance to use their resources to combat oppression faced by black people around the world. While T Challa wants to protect the integrity of Wakanda, even if it means ignoring the African diaspora, Killmonger seeks to take over Wakanda and send its resources to black people all over the world for them to fight their oppressors. Killmonger is the villain of the narrative. T Challa defeats him, but honours Killmonger s plight by opening up Wakanda s borders and sending resources to black communities so that they may empower themselves within the existing system. The message to viewers is clear: don t fight racist oppression by radically changing real social conditions and structure but gradually alter it from within through self-improvement.
This epitomises how BP caters to African-American interests while still promoting narratives that work to maintain the status quo of white domination and black subordination. While the diverse representations of blackness resonate with African-American aspirations to see their identities in the spotlight, through the portrayal of Killmonger, BP liberalises black resistance for white comfort. Killmonger epitomises counter-hegemonic struggle: to organise the subordinate group and its allies into a political force (Artz Murphy, 2000, pg.144). By denouncing Killonger s black internationalist struggle, BP s narrative promotes a counter-revolutionary message that leaves the prevailing white hegemony intact. For Stuart Hall, the ability to change connections between meaning and practice gives human actors the potential for changing their social conditions. In this regard, BP s representation of blackness is progressive. But what ultimately fulfils its transformative potential is the linkage between an articulated discourse and social forces capable of negotiating a different hegemony. (Hall, 1986, cited in Artz Murph, 2000, pg.67) By vilifying Killmonger s desire for black internationalism, this linkage is denied. As a result, the potential to actually change social conditions that perpetuate racial inequality is lost. Being the product of both dominant white and subordinate black interests, it is impossible for BP to be exclusively anti-racist. Underlying the progressive representations is a system of preferred meanings that works to maintain the status quo. So BP is anti-racist to the extent that anti-racism is defined as an intra-hegemonic process. If it is defined as the fundamental changing of social conditions to alleviate racial inequality, then it fails.
Even though BP proposes a reformative process as anti-racism, it presents and capitalises upon the image of revolution. This further fortifies the status quo of racial inequity by masquerading reform as real change. The name of the movie BP rekindles images of the BP Party for Self Defence, the political organisation aiming to empower black communities. The trailer of the film features Gil Scott-Heron s iconic poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised , which calls for revolutionary change against all oppressive structures. The opening sequence of the film took place in 1992, the year of the Rodney King riots. By using the visual language of revolution, real radical traditions and practices are trivialised. The distinction between black art that touches on revolutionary themes, and the actual work required for revolution is lost. If viewers conflate the purchasing of a ticket for BP with genuine anti-racist resistance, then radical social change becomes even less of a possibility because it becomes sterilised in the popular imagination. So the status quo social formation is fortified not simply by the discouraging of revolutionary change through its narrative, but the communicating of this under the guise radical anti-racist practice. Perhaps this utilisation of revolutionary themes also signals the return of Blaxploitation. This was a subgenre of film during the 1970s that centred radical black narratives and voices, but was criticised of doing so for the profit of white producers that sought to capitalise upon its radical themes (Artz Murphy, 2000). Indeed, those profiting most off BP s success are unlikely to be the black communities from which the narratives emerged, but companies like Disney and Marvel that underrepresent black people in their major studios (Erigha, 2014). The social conditions of white domination and black disempowerment are both amplified and protected by the display of the visual language of revolution.
While BP co-opts the theme of struggle against oppression, we cannot ignore that local black struggles are contesting these devices of hegemonic control. A petition called #BreakBreadMarvel , was set up to address this dynamic of exploitation. It demands that 25% of the profits from the film be invested in black communities. So far the petition has amassed over ten thousand signatures. It criticises Marvel for targeting black dollars and questions "what exactly will the black community gain, aside from another symbolic victory? This reminds us that in our discussion of the macro-level racialised dynamics between dominant and alternative interests, we cannot elide the micro-level social forces that act to destabilise them. While the images of revolution may hamper BP s effectiveness as a cultural practice by masking real social change, local black struggles seek to mitigate this effect by confronting the multinational corporations that are at the helm.
Local black efforts also facilitate the effectiveness of BP`s images of blackness that challenge stereotypical meanings. It is the coincidence of macro-level institutional adjustments and micro-level struggles that ensure the effectiveness of anti-racist representations of blackness. Fredrerick Joseph set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to send 300 children from Harlem to see the movie. The campaign went on to raise over $50,000. With the #BlackPantherChallenge he called on others to do the same for underprivileged black children in their own communities. Since then, over 600 similar GoFundMe campaigns have emerged, raising nearly $1million altogether. Clearly, people realised that the groundbreaking representations of black excellence would not fulfil their potential if racialised systems of privilege and disadvantage in society prevented these children from seeing it. For Stuart Hall, a cultural form does not guarantee resistance, they still require social and political practices to articulate them to particular political positions (Hall, 2016, pg.197). The #BlackPantherChallenge efforts of black communities ensured that BP was able to inspire the children who most needed it, allowing them to identify with and visualise themselves in positions of royalty and power. While macro-level social forces within the hegemonic relationship between dominant and subordinate interests may transform modes of racialisation in the popular cannon, it is these micro-level efforts that ensure the new visualisations of blackness fulfil their intended effect. To just credit media elites for these effects is to elide these local black struggles to navigate structures of oppression. The anti-racist effects of BP s images of blackness are not contained within cultural form itself. Because racism is woven through a multitude of social processes, an anti-racist practice must work in tandem with other practice, both at local and institutional levels, to maximise its effect.
Not only do local anti-racist practices of resistance fulfil the potential of mainstream cultural forms, they are also the fundamental force that pushes popular culture to produce them in the first place. Above all, it is the demands of subordinate groups that force hegemonic institutions to reform: they must secure the consent of subordinate groups to maintain hegemonic domination (Artz Murphy, 2000). For an adjustment to black demands in popular culture to take place, there must be black demands in the first place. It was the radical black movements of the 1970s against hegemonic institutions in universities and local governments that forced Hollywood to accommodate the tenor of black power with movies like The Mack (1973), Slaughter (1972), and Shaft (1971) (Artz Murphy, 2000). It is hard to imagine Warner Brothers, one of the biggest entertainment companies, investing in a movie like Cleopatra Jones (1973) if there was no contemporary that activism that asserted that black is beautiful . It was the enterprising spirit of black people in the face of racist structures that lead to the emergence of the black middle class (Artz Murphy, 2000). This lead to the mainstream release of shows like The Cosby Show (1984), Insecure (2016), and Black-ish (2014), to accommodate their interests. Black struggle was also the source of the creation of the BP comic book character in 1966. In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Jack Kirby, co-creator of the superhero, suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks : they were certainly aware that BP, the ultimate symbol of black power, would gain traction in the environment of civil unrest. Without these efforts by black people to fundamentally change the inequity of their social conditions, mainstream media would not need to adjust to their interests.
If BP is an intra-hegemonic reformative step by dominant forces to secure black consent, then we must credit the root of these reforms: the demands for change to which they must respond. Black Lives Matter, a movement initially formed to respond to police brutality, has brought issues surrounding systematic racism into the public consciousness. According to the co-founder of the movement, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter contributed cultural ammunition to help fuel a movie like BP . Its narrative of a struggle against racial oppression resonates with the cultural shifts brought about by Black Lives Matter. BP s display of powerful black femininity is a marketing response, argues Anyangwe, to black girl magic . This is a popular term coined to celebrate the achievements of black women despite the overlapping structures of discrimination they face. Powerful media institutions are forced to make adjustments in their practices to mitigate the dissonance between representations in popular culture and the expectations subordinate groups have of them. Without the aforementioned demands of black struggles, BP would not exist because Hollywood would not have needed to respond to any demands of change. If we argue that BP is effective as an anti-racist cultural practice to the extent that it is a reformative step within a hegemonic formation dominated by white interests, then we must attribute its effectiveness to the local black struggles which forced this step to be taken in the first place.
Ultimately, an anti-racist cultural practice is effective to the extent that it operates in tandem with various other struggles in sites of political and social antagonism located both at the macro-level of institutional adjustment and at the micro-level of local effort. Racism weaves itself through many political and social processes, so anti-racism must be practiced as an equally dynamic effort. To deploy a single practice of anti-racism in the hope eliminating racism is to ignore the fact that it is impossible for a cultural practice to be intrinsically anti-racist. Its effectiveness is both contingent on and limited by the context in which it operates. It can be tempting to see a film with such magnificent displays of black royalty, Afro-Futurism, and black womanhood as an unequivocal anti-racist practice. It is important, however, to interrogate the image . Can the purchasing of a product by Disney, a multinational corporation that historically marginalises black voices and narratives, really be considered an act of anti-racist resistance? Perhaps BP has planted the seeds of the construction of a truly radical anti-racist hegemonic force. It seems to follow Gramsci s (1971) criteria for resistance by subordinate groups: self identity and the sharing of interests with other subordinate groups. As shown by the #BlackPantherChallenge, the film has done well to bring African-American communities together around a sense of collective solidarity and empowerment. People formed viewing groups a went together as a pilgrimage of self-discovery. The film s success has inspired other ethnic minorities to call for transformative representations that will inspire their own communities and that will dismantle the stereotypes that they face . It is yet to be seen what will come of these effects. If, for now at least, we consider BP effective to the extent that it is a reform of the status quo, not a radical upheaval of it, then we must also accept that it amalgamates representations that seek to transform the state of racial inequality with meanings that seek to preserve it. We must also accept that for BP to remain effective as a reform, then it must be followed by more mainstream movies that destabilise the ideological premises of racism even further. It is up to BP 2 to continue this legacy.
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