Race at the 2017 Oscars: Implicit Bias and Subtle Acts of Exclusion
Estimated read time: • March 13, 2017
THE CONTEXT
There was a lot of explicit talk about race, diversity, and inequity at the Oscars last night. That seems like a positive development.
THE PUZZLE
Amidst the explicit positive messages, how were problematic subtle messages communicated?
Race was front and center Sunday night at the Oscars. Mahershala Ali and Moonlight, Viola Davis and her moving speech, Ezra Edelman, Caroline Waterlow and their epic documentary on O.J. and race in America created headline stories as the Oscars took an overdue turn toward diversity and an emphasis on issues of injustice more broadly. But in 2017 when race has taken center stage not only at the Oscars but in our political and daily lives as well, we must also keep focus on the subtler messages about race that powerfully shape our lives.
Zootopia won the Oscar for Animated Feature Film. In his acceptance speech, director Byron Howard explained that he wanted to make a film about “embracing diversity even when there are people in the world who want to divide us by using fear.” Obviously directed at recent political events in this country, the statement got a big round of applause from the audience. On its surface the movie certainly seems to celebrate diversity. In the city of Zootropolis, many different animal species, including both predators and prey (and hilarious DMV sloths) live peacefully together. The movie offers an obvious metaphor for humans; we are given hope that our human groups may live together in peace and harmony. The explicit message to children is that we must celebrate our differences as we create a better world. But here’s the thing: in the movie, those different animal species are living peacefully together despite their genetic predispositions. The predators are able to overcome their natural tendencies toward violence and killing.
What, then, is this movie implicitly communicating about race to young children? Two problematic messages. The first is that human groups (races, ethnicities, religions, or nationalities) are a lot like species groups, biologically distinct and genetically separated. They are not! This premise becomes especially dangerous when combined with the second message from the Zootopia metaphor — that the different groups have naturally different skills, dispositions, and behaviors. The street hustling foxes, for example, have a tendency toward violence even if they are not acting on those natural impulses. In the metaphor, that means groups we associate with the shady street antics of the fox or the ferocity of the other predators, may uniformly and genetically have a tendency toward violence even if they are not acting on those tendencies at a given moment. This is exactly the kind of implicit bias that people hold toward African Americans.
A recent study from Yale University considered whether pre-school teachers have different expectations about different groups of children. The researchers played a short video of four children playing. The teachers were to watch a Black boy, a white boy, a Black girl, and a white girl to find the instances of problem behavior. Though there were no incidences of problem behavior in the video, researchers found that teachers’ eyes tracked the Black boy more than the other children. It’s not hard to see the cascade effects when groups of children are faced with these disparate expectations from such a young age, resulting in lowered expectations in school and more suspensions and expulsions.
The creators of Zootopia certainly did not mean to communicate any of these subtle messages. They merely wrote a story that fits with the implicit ways we think about human groups. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking forms the foundation for implicit (unconscious) bias. Our tendencies to watch Black boys harder and to dismiss Black girls gets compounded with structural inequalities, resulting in persistent disparities in education outcomes, housing, health, work, and wealth.
Moving from Zootopia, I was a bit surprised to see Jimmy Kimmel subtly insist that only white sounding names are “normal.” First, he attempted to joke about the name of Mahershala Ali’s daughter, asking “You can’t name her Amy?” Then, again, when the unsuspecting tourists entered the awards show, Kimmel asked a woman for her name. She answered, “Ulery” (apologies if I’m misspelling the name). Kimmel made an expression of shock and asked, “What?” Obviously accustomed to this reaction, Ulery explained, “it rhymes with jewelry.” Kimmel said, “Wow, that’s some name.” He then asked the man she was walking with for his name. He replied, “My name’s Patrick,” to which Kimmel responded, “See, that’s a name.” The implicit message is that white, Western sounding names are legitimate while others are not.
In the broadcast, you can see Ulery laughing and yet, the idea that her name is not normal or a curiosity probably lost its humor a long time ago. We call this type of delegitimization a "subtle act of exclusion" (a reframed way of conceptualizing microaggressions). Other examples with people's names include: mispronouncing people's names without trying to get it right, giving people nicknames because "it's too hard to pronounce," making assumptions about someone's nationality or ethnicity based on a name, and can even include giving compliments, "your name is so exotic - where is it from?" These acts are not necessarily intended maliciously but the net effect can be to make people feel uncomfortable, not normal, and like they don't belong.
Non-white people are often much more aware of these subtle interactions (and many, in fact, pointed out Kimmel’s problematic jokes about names on Twitter), just as they are more aware of problematic implicit messages in popular movies and other media representations. These seemingly small subtle acts and messages are actually impactful and important to address, as they perpetuate a racial system that values some people over others. If we learn to recognize these subtle ways that people are devalued, we will be able to truly do better creating inclusive and psychologically safe cultures.