Awards Extra!
Special Issue 2018 Issue

What Hollywood Could Learn from Frederick Douglass

The great abolitionist believed in the power of images. Here’s why that lesson still matters.
Douglass believed deeply in the power of photographs to define the reality outside their frames.
SEE ME
Douglass believed deeply in the power of photographs to define the reality outside their frames.
Illustration by Barry Blitt.

This weekend, tens of millions of Americans, in Chicago, in Corpus Christi, in Columbus (Ohio and Georgia), and elsewhere will step into a room filled with strangers.

The lights will go down, and they’ll watch a movie.

It might be about aliens or robots, or robot aliens, or regular old Homo sapiens. Watching it, these tens of millions of Americans will feel awe and fear. They’ll laugh. They’ll cry. And without realizing it, they’ll spend a few hours contemplating what it means to be human.

Then the lights will come up. They will leave the room and return to their lives, changed—imperceptibly, dramatically, or somewhere in between—by what they just witnessed.

The world, meanwhile, will be much as they left it: a mess.

A warming climate. Escalating nuclear tensions with North Korea. The Trump administration. Those are big problems. But they reasonably recede in the face of more immediate concerns: Who will we be? Whom will we love? How will we protect them? How will we mourn? How will we survive in the face of it all?

If nothing else, the political rise of Donald Trump—in its full Obama-is-foreign-born, Mexicans-are-thugs-and-rapists, and pussy-grabbing shitholery (this is a highly abbreviated list)—has laid bare that, for at least two-thirds of Americans, the answers to those questions are far more complicated than generally acknowledged, even by members of other marginalized groups.

The numbers, meanwhile, speak loudly and clearly: An estimated one woman in six in America has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. Three in five have experienced gender-based harassment in the workplace. Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as their white fellow citizens. According to a Human Rights Campaign report, trans women of color are at least 4.3 times more likely to be murdered than the general population of women.

THE LIST OF PEOPLE WHO DIRECTED A FEATURE FILM IN 2013 AND 2014 IS ALMOST EXACTLY AS DIVERSE AS TRUMP’S CABINET.

And dramatic as those numbers are, they say nothing of myriad unquantifiable realities: the fear of police lights in your rearview mirror; the confusion when a job interview effectively ends before it begins, or doesn’t even materialize because of the name on the résumé; the panic when a county sheriff raises his voice because you asked permission to move your hand from the steering wheel to retrieve your wallet (as happened to me last December).

For most of my life, I’ve found ballast when faced with such realities by reading the work of those who have endured even worse. Frederick Douglass is someone I turn to increasingly often. (I’ll spare you the joke about his being recognized more and more.)

A fact about Douglass that I learned only recently: He was the most photographed American of the 19th century. Yes, a man born as a slave roughly 20 years before the first human was photographed went on to have his likeness captured more times than Abraham Lincoln.

This was no accident. According to Harvard professor Sarah Lewis, Douglass believed deeply in the power of photographs to define the reality outside their frames. And he wanted to present an alternative to the prevalent imagery of slaves as minstrels or as medical specimens to be examined.

The result of that belief is that almost everyone can conjure a mental image of Doug­lass’s portraits: the great abolitionist, his natural hair resplendent—sometimes parted, sometimes not, jet black in his early years, all white later on—wearing a pressed suit jacket and a starched collar, often looking directly at the camera, his expression boldly confrontational. An exhortation: See me.

If Douglass believed so deeply in the power of the single frame, one can only imagine the potential he would have seen in the motion picture, stories projected high and transmitted around the world with a single keystroke.

One can only imagine his joy at the nine-figure domestic box-office totals for Girls Trip and Get Out, both directed by black men. Or, given that he was one of the few men standing with the suffragettes at Seneca Falls in 1848, his pleasure in seeing the billion dollars shared by Star Wars: The Last Jedi—with its female producer and stars—and Wonder Woman, a rare superhero movie with a woman director and a woman in the starring role.

Tens of millions of Americans saw each of these films. Who knows how many will see them via legal post-theatrical formats and—let’s be honest—illegal downloads?

In a vacuum, their existence and success might seem to validate the perception of Hollywood as a beacon of equality and a bulwark defending women, people of color, and marginalized communities against a dark threat that hangs over the nation. A perception we further encourage with our tweets, our donations, our fund-raisers—and our Oscar nominations, where it may soon seem semi-normal for multiple non-white actors (or non-white-male directors) to make the cut in a single category.

But the perception doesn’t match the reality that 19.8 percent of the U.S. Congress is female, yet only 4 percent of the 100 highest-grossing films released each year from 2007 to 2016 were directed by women.

Or the reality that the list of people who directed a feature film sanctioned by the Directors Guild of America in 2013 and 2014 is almost exactly as diverse as Donald Trump’s Cabinet—which, thanks to Ben Carson, Elaine Chao, and Nikki Haley, is 12.5 percent nonwhite. This in a country where people of color account for 38.7 percent of the population, according to the last census estimate.

Studies by the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative of U.S.C. Annenberg (full disclosure: I recently joined the Initiative’s board) show that there has not been a year this decade when women accounted for more than one-third of the speaking roles in major Hollywood movies. In the films, TV series, and digital content distributed by 10 major media companies in 2014, just 28.3 percent of all speaking roles went to people of color. Speaking roles for L.G.B.T. characters? Just 2 percent.

In Oprah Winfrey’s—dare I call it presidential?—address accepting this year’s Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, she opened with a personal story. It was 1964, and she was “sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee, watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: ‘The winner is . . . Sidney Poitier.’ ” Winfrey went on to describe her vivid memory of the moment—his white tie, his black skin—and she admitted that even she (again, this is Oprah!) lacked the words to explain what that breakthrough meant to a little girl, “a kid watching from the cheap seats, as my mom came through the door bone-tired from cleaning other people’s houses.” She then conjured an image of the little girls at home that night, watching as Winfrey herself became the first black woman to receive the De­Mille Award. I, for one, thought of my nieces.

Much is rightly made of this effect: If you can see it—in life or in fiction—you can be it. Less is made of its corollary: If you see it enough, it’s going to affect how you see the world.

How surprised should we be that Roy Moore got 48 percent of the vote in Alabama when 13- to 20-year-old females are just as likely as 21- to 39-year-olds to be shown on screens in “sexy attire with some nudity, and referenced as attractive,” according to the U.S.C. study?

How surprised should we be that campaign-rally-goers chant “Build the wall!” when, in the rare event that Latino immigrants appear on television, half are shown engaging in criminal activity?

How surprised should we be that a man caught on tape bragging about grabbing pussy could be elected president when so many of the men filling our collective imaginations have done exactly that for so long?

Intentionally or not—and despite our greatest protestations to the contrary—we are, by excluding voices behind the camera and their stories in front of it, complicit in the political moment in which we find ourselves. I daresay that we dreamed it into existence.

By all means, Hollywood, let’s keep tweeting, donating, and fund-raising. But to really change the world, we need to change the way we work, and whom we hire to do the work. We all—myself included—can do better.