In advance of this weekend’s Academy Awards broadcast, a group of scholars, students, and working professionals assembled at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania for a panel discussion on Media, Race, and the Oscars Controversy after the Academy failed to include any people of color in its acting category nominations.
Organized by the Annenberg School for Communication, the Center for Global Communication Studies, the School of Social Policy & Practice, and CAMRA, the panel consisted of John Jackson, Dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice; Maori Holmes, Director of Academic and Public Partnerships at the ICA and of the BlackStar Film Festival; and Khadijah White, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. It was moderated by Mariam Durrani, a Ph.D student in Anthropology and Educational Linguistics at Penn.
Holmes, Jackson, and White take the audience on a far-ranging conversation that broadly diagnoses the all-white nominations issue as a symptom of an industry that with each passing and day and each new story, is seeming more infected by the an institutional racism that runs deeper than it wants to admit, and touches far more institutions than just Hollywood. “The Academy’s so white. Museums are so white. Fashion’s so white,” Holmes says, in reference to the prevalence of the #OscarsSoWhite and its limitations. “We could keep going.”
“It’s one particular instantiation of what is, I think, a very complicated understanding of what it is we have to negotiate as human beings every single day,” Jackson adds. “So for me, the big thing was making sure people understood that this was worth discussing. This is a really important space to interrogate who we are as a community, what we understand and value about ourselves and our representations, and how we think about ways of making sure every single crevice of our social world is as inclusive as it should be.”
“Not only is it significant culturally, but I think it’s significant materially, right?” White asks, reminding us of the stakes at hand and pointing to a broader, problematic race-blind notion of earning success. “As Matt Damon said, it comes down to meritocracy. It comes down to who deserves to do it. And what he’s saying right there is, ‘We want the best. And the best are white.’”
We won’t spoil any more of the talk, which is embedded below and available on the MusiQology SoundCloud, but it is worth a listen in advance of the awards, which air this Sunday.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/248793972″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] [Please note that the audio has been edited for clarity in some spots.]John Vilanova is MusiQology’s Managing Editor. Find him on Twitter @JohnVilanova.
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
