JUSTICE, HOLLYWOOD STYLE
The entertainment industry and the warped logic of affirmative action
Hollywood is exceptional at creating inspiring stories of underdogs overcoming the odds to triumph against the forces of evil. When trying to manufacture stories in the real world, however, those skills are less adept.
After the 2016 Oscar nominations were announced , a volcano of righteous indignation erupted from from those in Hollywood and those that dream of being Hollywood-adjacent. The alleged crime? Unabashed institutional racism in the form of monochromatic laudation. Aligning behind the social media banner #OscarSoWhite, a torch-wielding mob of limousine liberals registered their disgust with the fact that, for the second year in a row, none of the major acting categories in the Academy Award race included a single nomination for a “person of color”.
(NOTE: The “color” in the phrase “person of color” is black. The Hollywood diversity machine doesn’t get too fired up about perceived affronts to the brown, yellow or red communities, but that’s another story.)
This past weekend, it was time for Hollywood’s A-listers to settle the score. At the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards on Saturday night, with the distribution of each statuette it became more and more apparent that whatever racial offenses had been committed by the elitist Academy were being answered by the justice-loving members of the much more egalitarian Guild.
When the dust settled, every individual SAG Award category that included a black nominee was won by the black nominee.
The L.A. Times heralded the results as a triumph of diversity (“Take That, Academy!” screamed an effusive headline), but in many ways the whole episode, including and especially the post hoc praise, was a sad commentary on the warped way that liberals perceive race and racial justice.
More questions than answers
To a certain type of onlooker, podium after podium of black award winners represents a win — a hammer-blow being stricken on behalf of the downtrodden against a machine that had been exposed as hellbent on keeping them down. But when viewed through a different lens, the results reveal the insidious nature of affirmative action, quotas and similar racial “remedies”.
It is entirely possible, maybe even probable, that each of the black actors who won on Saturday was deserving of the win based solely on the merit of his or her performance. But it’s also possible that her or she won because the voters wanted to send a message about diversity and cast their vote for the black nominee as a way of sending that message; in other words, that he or she won because he or she is black.
Of course that is the exact opposite of the message that the diversity warriors want to send — after all, treating people differently because of the color of their skin is the very evil they were trying to remedy — but by importing race into their decision-making process they also introduce uncertainty. They transform what would otherwise be a simple, merit-based system into one hobbled by a reasonable suspicion that someone had their thumb on the scale.
Did Idris Elba deserve to win? Did Viola Davis? Did Queen Latifah? Or did they just win because they are black? These are all great actors and it is entirely possible that they would have won in a color-blind contest. But they have all been done a great disservice by these well-meaning but childish and petulant race-warriors: their wonderful, nuanced, moving and powerful acting performances have been reduced to a line on the color bar. They are pregnant with the assumption of illegitimacy, warranted or not.
The one and only
This possibility that blackness was a factor in the voting is amplified by the fact that each of the black SAG Award winners was the only black nominee in his/her category. Guild voters who were awash in news stories about how the Oscars had failed to nominate a single black actor, and who were inclined to use their SAG vote as a way to rectify that perceived injustice, were not deciding between a slate of diverse actors and determining which was was most deserving, they were picking from a ballot that read: white guy, white guy, white guy, white guy, black guy.
Absent an artificially imposed racial component, the winner of each SAG category would be considered meritoriously deserving. Once the ‘racial justice’ factor is introduced, though, it becomes impossible to tell whether the winner deserved the award or not.
Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t racial to begin with
Another detail that might temper the euphoria of those reveling in the SAG-induced #OscarSoWhite comeuppance is the fact that most of the black SAG winners received their awards for television roles, not movie roles. Looking only at the categories that overlap between the Oscars (which are exclusively focused on movies) and the SAG’s (which issue awards for TV and movies), the slate of SAG nominees becomes markedly less diverse.
Of the 20 nominees in the SAG’s four individual movie categories, there was a solitary black nominee — Idris Elba, Best Supporting Actor winner for Beast of No Nation.
If you were particularly focused on race, you might use this information to conclude that the Screen Actors Guild is just as racist as the Academy and rush out to coin your own hashtag to properly document your disgust.
If, on the other hand, you are the kind of person who doesn’t look at the world as an all-consuming race war, you might conclude, somewhat nonchalantly, that best acting performances to grace the silver screen in 2015 happened to be offered by white guys.
After that fleeting and wholly unimportant realization, you would probably go back to your life, which is undoubtedly far away from Hollywood.
