Representation,
history and ‘black Britain’
1998 marked the fiftieth anniversary
of the arrival of SS Empire Wind rush (22 June 1948) (7)
Symbolises the inauguration of
postwar, permanent, mass migration and the ‘coming to the homeland’ for black colonial
people (7)
The British nation was once again
confronted with the memory of Black presence: that of Stephen Lawrence, the
victim of an ugly and brutal form of British racism (7)
Iconic moment in British history.
(The arrival of Windrush and the official inquiry into the murder of Stephen
Lawrence (7)
This signalled that within and
despite the context of a now broad Black presence in the United Kingdom (7)
Stubborn forms of racism persist (7)
Racism and Britishness both on
Britain’s streets and within the fabric of its institutions (7)
The BBC, the cornerstone of
British’s television history, was traditionally founded on Reithan ideals which
claimed to hold in place core programming, universality and accountability.
(10)
…specifically in relation to television’s
alleged impartiality, cultural sensitivity and moral responsibility when it
touches on racial lines (10)
Despite the escalating commercial
impulses across the channels, they are generalist, mixed genre broadcasters
with an all purpose mission to inform, entertain and educate all the people at
least some of the time (10)
Channel 4’s targeted minority
mandate (10)
The other channels merely have
clauses in their policy documents indicating a ‘common-sense’, ‘responsibility
freedom’ and ‘taste and decency’ approach to the treatment of race of screen
(10)
Although all broadcaster are covered
by certain ethical codes of conduct (10)
Media policy, regulation and
management culture within the institutional context of British television…play
an integral part in the way expressions of Blackness are negotiated, produced
and reproduced (10)
British television’s founding ethos
of ‘public service’ is important for how it generates and circulates meaning
about nationhood, community and society… (10)
‘Public service’ is based on the
generous principle that what ‘we’ like watching is not always all that ‘we’
(should) expect television to offer (10)
This struggle over formal equality
and racialised difference is a key feature of British race relations (10)
Discourses of liberal pluralism and
social Whiteness which have characterised the history of Black representations
on British television (10)
Patterns of racism have persisted on
and off screen (10)
The beginning of the third
millennium saw nearly all the major terrestrial British broadcasters and arts
organisations pledge an improvement in their approaches to cultural diversity
(10)
A response triggered both by the
loss of disillusional Black ‘customers to alternative viewing systems (10)
The year 2000 alone saw the launch
of the British Film Institute’s three-year Cultural Diversity strategy
(‘Towards Diversity’) (11)
The BBC’s public efforts to boost
diversity through its ‘Diversity Tsars’ and diversity debate (11)
Channel 4’s Black History crusade
(with Untold 2000 and the on-line Black and Asian history Map) (11)
This last initiative, a
cross-industry action-plan established ‘to change the face of television’ (11)
They plan to set targets for ethnic
minority employment (senior levels included) (11)
Establish an on-line talent
diversity database (11)
Modernise cast and portrayal (11)
Share non-commercially sensitive
research on cultural diversity and allow the government’s department of
culture, media and sport to monitor progress.(11)
‘Good race relations practice’ (11)
It is this ‘pull’ between past
(Britain’s post-imperial history and the institutional history of British
television in relation to a Black presence), and the future (of Black Britain
at the turn of the century and of British television in the context of wider
technological change) (11)
These incarnations of Blackness in
the cultural field - and, for the matter, new modalities of racism - are
inextricably connected to issues of memory, history and race (11)
Disrupt notions of distinct ‘now’
and ‘then’ (11)
New attitudes towards ‘race’ - while
they emerge in the present - are often tied to older conceptions of ‘race’ and
ideologies of racism from the past (11)
It assumes that ‘race’ or racism is
a new problem which only arrived here when ‘the Blacks did’ (11)
‘Race’ and ‘racism’ operate on the
margins of British society and can be made extricable from the internal
dynamics of British social and political life (Hall, 1978) (11)
‘The active-audience thesis’…which
shifted the emphasis from what the media ’do’ with audiences, to what audiences
’do’ with media images (Halloran, 1970)
This was especially useful for the
newly emerging theories around race, ethnicity and the media, because it
identified that each reader/viewer was able to actively decode and interpret
meaning in different ways, instead of being textually-constituted or ’locked’
into any one ascribed meaning (27)
Some also recognised that our social
relations (ethnicity, for example) help us to structure understanding (Morley
and Brunsdon, 1978) (27)
Hall agreed, that the media do have
a power to set agendas and cultural frameworks…that viewers themselves are
active, and decode messages in different ways.(27)
Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, which developed the issue of ‘agenda-setting’ (oh
how the media establish and organise a particular set of issues) especially in
relation to news and documentary reports on race. (28)
Hartmann and Husband found that,
although direct effects on media audiences were unlikely, news reports kept
within a British Culture tradition, eg: derogatory to foreigners) (28)
They argued that these reports
worked within an established cultural framework, which in terms of Black people
was, ‘more conductive to the development of hostility towards them than
acceptance’ (Hartmann and Husband, 1974) (28)
Stereotypes became increasingly
central to debates around race and representation in the 1970s and 1980s (28)
Many of those who were critical of
the media’s representations of Black people also began to call for ’positive
images’ in order to balance out the ’negative images’ which were often used to
depict Black people and their experiences (28)
Changing the ‘relations of representation’
(Hall in Mercer, 1988) (28)
There was a demand that representations
of Black people were drawn in more accurate ways (28)
‘misrepresentation’ were readily
applied by those who also recognised that film and television do not simply
reflect reality, but construct a reality of their own (28)
All stereotypes are negative, and
thus by simply eliminating them, representations of race would become more
‘balanced’ (29)
Stereotypes are shorthand; they are
ubiquitous because they help us decode people (29)
Stereotypes are social constructs
designed to socially construct (29)
1960s Black Power slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ (30)
‘Blackness’ was in fact something
which could not be defined in any simple or singular way (30)
This also involved accepting that
not all Black films are good, not all ‘realistic representations’ are positive
(30)
The concept of ‘diaspora’ emerged
out of this need to produce a development of thought, and became a particularly
useful system of representation and unit of analysis through which the
plurality and diversity of Black British communities could be understood. (30)
In spite of connections of
connections, there is no ‘pure’ Black cultural, political or religious form
that all identities are pluralized, and that all representations do, in fact,
work differently (31)
The first, is that Black people, whether
in grass-roots political struggle, intellectual discourse or on a more
individualised, personal level have fought a very active campaign for equality
and recognition in Britain, which has paved the way for our current claims to
relative ease with ‘being British’ (32)
“whiteness” is a politically
constructed category parasitic on “Blackness” (West 1990) (32)
Hall asserts that ideologies become
‘naturalised’ and ideology, politically constructed representations - such as
representations of ‘race’ - are conveyed as being ‘given by nature’. (12)
‘The “white eye” is always outside
the frame - but seeing and positioning everything within it” (13)
[The media] has the power to control
and shape attitudes and beliefs held in the popular imagination, e.g. Cohen and
Gardener, 1982; Ferguson, 1998) (13)
Karen Ross (1992) on white
perceptions of ethnic minorities on television demonstrates that attitudes of
whites towards non-whites are influenced by media representation. (13)
White people who do not have direct
experience of black culture, their attitudes will be grounded exclusively on
media representations (13)
Ross with Peter Playdon (2001)… ‘is
most media products are inscribed with the same set of cultural assumptions
(and prejudices) because their producers share the same cultural experiences,
then those underlying norms and values which may well be hidden but nonetheless
exist, are transmitted as an un-self-conscious truth’ (13-14)
Images of ‘blackness, do not
represent the social reality of being black, rather they position us into a
‘way of thinking about blackness’ (14)
All representations are culturally
constructed and positioned in a specific historical context (14)
Media images of ‘race’ do not
reflect an accurate portrayal of the spectrum of black culture (14)
Ethnic minorities, in particular,
are marginalised by a white ideology that naturalises itself as ‘common sense’
and the norm. (14)
Hall (1990) argues that the methods
in which black people and their experiences are represented and subjugated
under white ideology (14)
Edward Said’s (1978) principle of
Orientalism, functions to construct blacks as ‘Other’ (14)
Hall claims that the insidious an
‘invisible’ nature of this ideology leads black people to understand themselves
as ‘other’ (14)
Woodward (1997) says. ‘Identities
are produced, consumed and regulated within culture - creating meanings through
symbolic systems of representation about the identity positions which we might
adopt’ (15)
Ethnic minorities continue to be
subordinated in accordance with white ideological hegemony (15)
Whether the fault lies with commissioners
or writers, the fact remains that the spectrum of blackness on TV is narrow,
and has remained almost stagnant in the last decade or so.”
"Unfortunately there really aren't
that many roles for authoritative, strong, black characters in this country. We
just don't write those characters, that's a fact."
“If a show does feature black folks, they
are usually one-dimensional, sidekicks of the lead character or the
rapist/murderer/gang-banger on Law & Order.”
“There’s an idea that programmes contain
characters from ethnic minority groups purely because they ‘should’.”
“Ethnic minority audiences complain that
Black and Asian people are rarely shown as ordinary citizens who just happen to
be Black or Asian.”
“Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding analogy suggests
representation is an on-going process with the viewer employing their agency to
create their own meanings in the work.”
Daily Mail article on the Olympics:
“This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but
it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white
middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such
a set-up.”
