White Balance

How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights

Justin Gomer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655819
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

The racial ideology of colorblindness has a long history. In 1963, Martin Luther King famously stated, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, in the decades after the civil rights movement, the ideology of colorblindness co-opted the language of the civil rights era in order to reinvent white supremacy, fuel the rise of neoliberalism, and dismantle the civil rights movement's legal victories without offending political decorum. Yet, the spread of colorblindness could not merely happen through political speeches, newspapers, or books. The key, Justin Gomer contends, was film--as race-conscious language was expelled from public discourse, Hollywood provided the visual medium necessary to dramatize an anti–civil rights agenda over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In blockbusters like Dirty Harry, Rocky, and Dangerous Minds, filmmakers capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement, shoring up a powerful, bipartisan ideology that would be wielded against race-conscious policy, the memory of black freedom struggles, and core aspects of the liberal state itself.

1 The Law Is Crazy!

Antistatism and the Emergence of Colorblindness in the Early 1970s

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, nearly a decade after the Brown decision, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the seminal address of the civil rights movement. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, told of his dream of a world in which “all men are created equal” and his dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”¹ Although King’s speech and the efforts of civil rights lawyers drew on the goal of a colorblind nation, they did so in an effort to topple state-sponsored white supremacy. The political motivations behind the use of colorblind rhetoric fundamentally changed in the period after the modern civil rights movement.

It would take more than a decade after King stepped off the dais in the nation’s capital before the racial project of colorblindness, which would cherry-pick and distort the post-racial rhetoric of the civil rights movement to mobilize against its very gains, cohered. In the decade or so between King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the emergence of the racial project of colorblindness, many radical political leaders, judges on the nation’s highest court, and ordinary Americans scoffed at the notion of a colorblind society. Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture)—Black Power leader and head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—had grown critical of the colorblind politics of the civil rights era that lingered as the decade ended. As he and Charles V. Hamilton note in their renowned Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, “While color blindness may be a sound goal ultimately, we must recognize that race is an overwhelming fact of life in this historical period. There is no black man in this country who can live ‘simply as a man.’ ”² As late as October 1971, the Supreme Court refused to consider challenges to Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan, a program begun in 1969 requiring contractors to hire a certain percentage of nonwhite workers for federally financed building projects, on the grounds that it “violated the concept of a color-blind constitution.”³ Further, many of those who agreed with colorblindness in theory defended affirmative action policies like the Philadelphia Plan as necessary to produce a colorblind future.⁴

Those, on the other hand, who did espouse colorblind rhetoric did so to advance an array of positions across the political spectrum. Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algiers in 1969, criticized the black nationalist politics of Kwame Ture in an open letter, stating that suffering is “colorblind” and that suffering people needed a unity based on revolutionary principles rather than skin color.⁵ This statement in no way meant Cleaver was an advocate of a colorblind approach to the pursuit of racial justice. Nevertheless, his willingness to invoke the term “colorblind” in 1969 reveals that in the late 1960s, colorblind discourse had not yet coalesced, and colorblind rhetoric had yet to become the rhetorical cudgel of white backlash politics. On the other end of the political spectrum, one year after Cleaver’s letter, southern lawyers on the right mobilized the Brown decision’s language of colorblindness to try to undo court-ordered busing mandates, which were ordered in over half of the nation’s one hundred largest school districts and would draw considerable outrage by the mid-1970s.⁶ And somewhere in the middle, in January 1971, South Carolina governor John C. West, a moderate Democrat, promised racial minorities “no special status other than full-fledged responsibility in a government that is totally color-blind.”⁷ There was, in other words, significant ideological diversity in the deployment of colorblind rhetoric in the early 1970s.

However, there was also a growing contingent of whites who increasingly adopted the moderate language of South Carolina’s governor as they became sympathetic to the political agenda of what would become known as the “white backlash” of the 1970s. A July 1972 letter written to the editors of the New York Times by a man named David B. Simpson chastised “self-proclaimed ‘liberals’ ” like then presidential candidate George McGovern for their support of affirmative action programs. Simpson characterized affirmative action as “an absolute betrayal of the principle that our Constitution and our political process is, should be and is intended to be ‘color blind’ in the fullest sense.” Simpson went so far as to call McGovern a “racist” for his intention to appoint blacks to the Supreme Court.⁸ Although typically not as hostile as Simpson, numerous letters decrying affirmative action programs appeared in newspapers like the New York Times beginning in the late 1960s. One man wrote a letter in 1969 denouncing the “racial quota system” that was “coming into fashion.” After qualifying the letter by insisting that he has “tried to help eliminate racial discrimination,” he cited Justice John Marshall Harlan’s sole Plessy v. Ferguson dissent—which stated that the Constitution is “colorblind”—to argue that the so-called racial quota systems erected in the aftermath of the civil rights movement were no less unconstitutional than the Jim Crow laws that followed the Plessy decision.⁹ The man’s rhetorical commitment to civil rights and need to distinguish his opposition to policies benefiting blacks from prejudicial attitudes toward them illustrates an important development in the white backlash discourse in the post–civil rights era.¹⁰

The increasing investment in colorblindness in the early 1970s arose amid a widespread ethos of antistatism.¹¹ By “antistatism,” I refer to an acute skepticism of, or outright hostility to, government—a rampant belief in the 1970s that the government was not only incapable of alleviating social inequities but in fact to blame for the problems Americans faced. Broadly speaking, events in the 1960s, like civil rights activists’ push for federal legislation to dismantle Jim Crow segregation and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” demonstrated some faith among the American public in the government’s ability to address racial inequality. By the end of the 1970s, however, much of the country—black, white, conservative, liberal—not only distrusted the government’s capacity to promote racial progress but cited the government as the cause of heightened racial tension. I use “antistatism” to define this ethos of the decade, which extended far beyond the issue of race. Interestingly, this antistatist ethos, especially among conservatives, is often contradictory. On the one hand, it holds that the state must be as small as possible—and ever shrinking—in terms of regulating commerce and protecting the civil rights of individuals and the environment. On the other hand, it accepts that the state can be monstrously big when it comes to warfare, policing, and corporate subsidies. Nonetheless, in the early 1970s, black, white, left, right, center, liberal, conservative, radical, or otherwise believed that whatever their issues were, and no matter how contradictory they were to those of their political opponents, the government was somehow to blame. On the left, Black Power organizations crafted black nationalist politics to address the inadequacies of the civil rights movement and widespread police brutality and oppression at the hands of the state.¹² On the right, the issue of race continued to fuel white backlash against the welfare state.

As the 1970s dawned, the contradictory diagnoses of the government’s exploitative practices and inability to alleviate suffering mirrored the ideological diversity of colorblind rhetoric. When dealing with issues of race, activists, politicians, and suburban homemakers across the political spectrum often gave voice to their political agenda by linking colorblindness and antistatism. Some Black Power advocates linked the discourses to promote racial inclusivity in the battle for racial justice, while conservatives turned to colorblind language to defend their opposition to civil rights programs against charges of bigotry and to insist that government overreach was the sole motivator of their opposition.

In this political climate, film provided a pivotal arena in which to dramatize and make sense of the divergent discourses of colorblindness and antistatism. The early 1970s coincided with the era of “New Hollywood.”¹³ A series of antitrust rulings by the Supreme Court, combined with television’s increasing siphoning of movie audiences, brought the Hollywood studio system, which had made movies the country’s largest mass culture industry for nearly four decades, to its knees by the mid-1960s. By the 1970s, the film industry saw its average weekly box-office receipts sink to their lowest mark ever—$15.8 million in 1971, compared to a post–World War II high of $90 million.¹⁴ The dire economic conditions produced by the forced disintegration of the Hollywood studio system beginning after World War II made Hollywood studios far more willing to explore new subject matter and push the formal boundaries of the classical era in an effort to remain economically viable.

The economic strife of the movie business created the conditions for the emergence of an “American Film Renaissance.” As Peter Biskind writes, led by a new generation of American filmmakers that included Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman, “New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art.”¹⁵ On the other hand, dwindling profits made Hollywood producers desperate and therefore more willing to explore controversial material—as long as it brought audiences into theaters. Race was one such subject. The historical timing of the more or less concurrent collapse of the Hollywood studio system and Jim Crow enabled film to shape racial discourse in an unprecedented fashion in the post–civil rights era. As Derek Nystrom argues, while New Hollywood is typically understood as a renaissance of American art cinema, the movement was in fact rooted in exploitation films.¹⁶ The enormous amount of exploitation films, B movies, and avant-garde cinema created new opportunities for African Americans, who constituted a disproportionately large share of movie audiences, to appear both in front of and behind the camera. Most importantly, the economic uncertainty of the business in the late 1960s and early 1970s enabled filmmakers to make films that explored the nascent discourses of colorblindness and antistatism, which audiences themselves were trying to make sense of.

This chapter examines the intersection of colorblindness and antistatism in New Hollywood exploitation films of the early 1970s. Focusing on Dirty Harry (1971) and Coffy (1973), I argue not only that the disintegration of the Hollywood studio system offered greater opportunities for the production of films dealing explicitly with race but also that the success of New Hollywood relied in part on its ability to function as a laboratory for the development of colorblind ideology. The economic distress in which the movie industry found itself pushed it to produce films that would appeal to different communities in order to avoid bankruptcy. On the one hand, this led to the emergence of genres like blaxploitation; on the other hand, appealing to the increasingly mainstream white backlash politics of the 1970s through the rhetoric of colorblindness became a reliable revenue stream for Hollywood. While scholars appropriately credit the film industry’s resurgence in the mid-1970s largely to the rise of the blockbuster, one cannot ignore that a substantial amount of Hollywood’s profits derived from movies dealing explicitly with race.¹⁷ These films helped shape the logic of colorblindness, forming the necessary cultural cohesion for the ideology long before its social or legal one.

Most importantly, this chapter charts the emergence of what I call Hollywood’s “colorblind aesthetics.” Both Coffy and Dirty Harry make deliberate efforts to appeal, rhetorically, to colorblind sentiment. Yet both films are visually saturated with race. The racialized bodies on screen subvert any shallow appeals to post-raciality. This is not a failure on these films’ part, as it is precisely how colorblindness functions. This dynamic, in which race-conscious rhetoric is scrubbed from the script, while racialized bodies abound on the screen, is the central component of Hollywood’s colorblind aesthetics and is the modus operandi of colorblind ideology.

What follows are close examinations of Dirty Harry and Coffy—two films from the early 1970s. While others have written about the right wing, racist, and sexist politics of Dirty Harry, I am interested in the film’s yoking of antistatism and colorblindness.¹⁸ The vast literature on blaxploitation has yet to consider a film like Coffy in this context.¹⁹ Together, these films, similar in genre but marketed to vastly different audiences, reveal the disparate ends colorblind rhetoric served in the first half of the 1970s. Both appealed to emerging colorblind sentiments and helped shape the antistatist ethos of the early decade while reinforcing popular and dehumanizing notions of blackness. That ethos was a fundamental precondition for the emergence of colorblindness; it provided the necessary foundation on which colorblindness would gain traction in the ensuing years. Positioning the ideology as a neoliberal solution to the problems of the invasive liberal welfare state on-screen in the early 1970s was a pivotal step in the emergence of the racial project of colorblindness. While the discourse lacks the coherence it would develop in the latter half of the decade, the divergent deployments of colorblindness on and off the silver screen illustrate the appeal of colorblindness long before the issues of affirmative action and busing fully moved to the forefront of American politics.

“Harry Hates Everybody”

Released in December 1971, Dirty Harry follows a rogue San Francisco Police Department inspector named Harry...