By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, January 29, 2016
One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is
the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the
murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of
his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya,
reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.
Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that
Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective
advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his
celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of
the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee
had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the
peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t
get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year,
either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at
least a half a million people died.
Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.
The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends
entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of
political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around,
and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top
honors at the Academy Awards.
Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith
and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this
year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the
ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black
rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year
produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself,
scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a
movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at
the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having
enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”
Qu’ils mangent de
la brioche — with insufficient frosting? What are we, brutes?
There have been endless interviews about this artificial
controversy, meaning endless opportunities for Hollywood’s best to remind the
world that actors don’t usually do well when someone else isn’t writing their
dialogue. Inevitably, there came the subsequent theatrical public apologies.
Members of the academy have made their spontaneous apologies without being
asked. Julie Delpy, a French actress, remarked that critics can be especially
hard on women, and added, “I sometimes wish I were African American, because
people don’t bash them afterward.” Hoo, boy. This was accompanied by a whole
Yoko Ono album’s worth of angst and wailing, climaxing in a groveling apology
in which she begged forgiveness for not showing proper deference to “someone
else’s struggle.” You can complain about women’s treatment in Hollywood — Emma
Watson seems to be dedicating her post–Harry Potter career to that — so long as
you do not put any stress on the victimhood hierarchy within the
Moviestar-American community. Charlotte Rampling said that maybe none of this
year’s black actors really deserved to make the final cut: angst, wailing,
groveling public apology. The academy’s president issued a blanket apology.
The Academy Awards are the most prestigious celebration
of talent on earth. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. If you doubt that, ask
yourself which of these men does not have a Nobel prize in physics: Takaaki
Kajita, Arthur B. McDonald, or Adam G. Riess. Trick question: They’ve all won
the Nobel prize for physics, but you probably didn’t know that — almost nobody
does. The Academy Awards aren’t exactly meretricious — Hollywood has many
lamentable tendencies, but it does produce some works of lasting merit — but
they are fixed in a celebrity culture with rituals (“Who are you wearing
tonight?”) that are something close to the definition of shallow, literally
skin-deep on occasion.
The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated
into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and
sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white — and
who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro
González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an
Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa;
Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish
and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo
del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan.
The problem for the proponents of minor diversity,
meaning black and Latino Americans, is the emergence of major diversity in
Hollywood, which is a fully global enterprise. African Americans may constitute
12 percent of the U.S. population, but Academy Award nominees are drawn from
the population of the entire world, of which African Americans constitute
something less than a rounding error. If we were to assume a random
distribution of Academy Award nominations, then we would expect to find no
African American nominees in many years, just as we would expect to find no
Ukrainians or Comorians in many years. If African-American actors, writers, and
directors are nominated in numbers lower than their presence in the industry
would suggest, it reflects the fact that black Americans, like white Americans,
are wildly overrepresented in Hollywood. But that fact is changing. No one will
admit to being annoyed by it, but more global diversity in Hollywood will mean
less local diversity, which is a problem if you want to define “diversity” in
such a way as to include two ethnic groups instead of . . . well, there are 213
different ethnic groups identified in the New Zealand census alone. There are
many more ethnicities on earth than nation-states.
The convolution of thinking necessary to maintain
#OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the
offense, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes
Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart. But Hollywood has in fact
been pressing in precisely the opposite direction, insisting that Latin
Americans must not be considered white. There is at the very moment an outcry
over the fact that Charlie Hunnam, the star of the hit television series Sons of Anarchy, has been cast in the
lead role in a film about the Mexican-American drug baron Edgar Valdez
Villarreal. Mr. Hunnam is a fair, blond-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, whereas
Mr. Valdez is a fair, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mexican American. Mr. Valdez is
in fact such a pale specimen that his nom de narco was “La Barbie,” after the
doll. We should all be so lucky as to have Mr. Hunnam cast in our life’s
stories, but the objection here isn’t that Mr. Hunnam is implausibly handsome
but that his presence in the role is ethnically outrageous.
Which is to say: Latinos are white when it suits
activists’ complaints, but it is outrageous to cast a white actor in the role.
Which brings us back to Mr. Gandhi, who was played by Ben
Kingsley in Richard Attenborough’s hagiographic film biography. Mr. Gandhi was
Gujurati. Mr. Kingsley’s father was a Kenyan of Gujurati descent, and his
mother was a British woman born out of wedlock back when that meant something,
whose ethnic background is unknown. (She may have been of Jewish ancestry and
uneager to speak about that.) Unlike Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, Kingsley is
generally greeted by nice American liberals as Sir Ben Kingsley rather than
mocked with his given name, Krishna Bhanji. Kingsley is a light-skinned man who
was heavily made up for the role of Gandhi — “brownface,” some have called it.
Proper? Improper?
When they get around to casting the lead in The Barack Obama Story, they’ll probably
just cast Harry Lennix. But if they don’t, what is the ethnically correct thing
to do? Find a half-Luo, half-daffy American-hippie actor? Tell every actor from
each of Africa’s 3,000 ethnic groups that they’re all interchangeably black in
the eyes of Hollywood liberals? In fact, a film about the Obamas’ early
courtship has just been released, with Parker Sawyers of Zero Dark Thirty as the future president. His professional material
identifies him as generically “African American.”
Close enough?
The activists will never be satisfied, because being
unsatisfied — being outraged — is their business. It’s a good business: Universal
Studios’ “chief diversity officer” holds the rank of executive vice president.
The money in the diversity racket is big: Google is spending $150 million to
increase the diversity in its work force, in which whites are slightly
underrepresented while Asians are dramatically overrepresented — again, if
we’re using U.S. demographics for our point of comparison. And it is by no
means clear that we should: Google, like Hollywood, is global.
There is a certain irony to our historical moment: At the
very moment when a black American family has reached the apex of American
social life — the presidency, and a cute movie about their first date! —
African Americans are as a group experiencing a stressful disorientation: The
racial dynamic in the United States was, for many years, effectively binary.
Not any more. In an increasingly multiracial society whose most prestigious
institutions are truly global, African Americans are no longer the moral yardstick
by which the American commitment to our liberal founding ideals is measured. In
30 years, it very well may be the case that African Americans are no more of a
significant interest group than Vietnamese Americans or Norwegian Americans,
and the social and economic success of Nigerian American immigrant families,
among others, complicates the meaning of “African American” as a concept, in
that these communities are likely to maintain a certain distinctiveness that
renders “black” devoid of clear meaning.
That is a big, attractive lever for the Al Sharptons of
the world to let go of, which is why we’ll see more #BlackLivesMatter and
#OscarsSoWhite rather than less, even as the question becomes less significant
nationally.
What, you thought this was about how hard movie stars
have it?
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