“Representation Matters” is a tired phrase.
You know when you say a word so many times it doesn’t sound real?
It’s a phenomenon coined as semantic satiation.
Definition: A psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
I’ve started to notice this with phrases, too, and it’s an observation that concerns me.
Climate change, white privilege, toxic masculinity. I think these phrases have leaned out. The fat has sloughed off. It’s not affecting people in the same way as before. In fact, I’ve seen it make people roll their eyes.
Sometimes, language is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
But what’s the solution? Should there be a rule in the sphere of social justice and human rights issues that phraseology in the spirit of bringing awareness should have a 10-year review?
The only solution I see in sight is discourse. But not the kind that preaches—the kind that is creative as sh*t.
Like in the movies. ;)
“Representation Matters” — but why?
A sphere I’ve always been impacted by is entertainment. I’m an actor. I’m also in a cohort of actors who are underrepresented, and I might add, were poorly represented for the past 2 decades.
In the past 5 years, there’s been a shift in entertainment to source stories from communities we don’t often see on television in a meaningful humanizing way. There’s been a push for agents and managers to sign more LGBTQ, non-white, and disabled actors. And that shift has not occurred without the ire of white actors. I’ve experienced first-hand the backhanded comments about how beleaguered white actors are by this newfound *slight* increase in competition.
For the first time in entertainment history, people are color are winning more representation and better, dynamic, sexy, and interesting roles, but against an increasingly disgruntled majority population of white actors—the phrase “Representation Matters” isn’t working.
Te-Nehisi Coates wrote this profound line in his book Between the World and Me.
“But all our phrasing — race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy — serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
Representation isn’t just the desire to see someone like you on TV. It’s a more intangible feeling that I can only articulate as this: The ability for stories to exceed the limits of your imagination in a way that is as inspiring as it is validating.
When you see people like you accomplishing big sh*t, being larger than life, and pushing the bounds of what’s possible, it’s incredibly powerful. It’s a feeling that, if you’ve experienced most of your life, you end up taking for granted. And it’s one that many children (including myself) particularly in the United States, haven’t gotten to experience.
For a long time, a medium so powerful that it sparked wars and changed hearts, was limited to a specific group of people. For a long time diversity of appearance, speech, experience, class, and family structure was afforded to a specific group of people.
From birth till 7 years old, I thought I could be anything. My brownness was a beautiful, wonderful asset, and ethereal experience. Somewhere along the way the glass shattered, and TV told me the opposite; we lacked finesse, appeal, and magnetism. We were slaves to our parent’s opinions, and our main social stressors were straight A’s and arranged marriages. But I knew we were so much more, that I was so much more. It took years, but I regained my childhood imagination.
I can’t wait to see the entirety of our lives colored with every kind of paintbrush, pen, and pencil and I can’t wait until my children live in a media landscape where the glass doesn’t have to shatter, and their imagination only expands with every passing year.
