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A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-9361611

1558-1454

Lisa Phillips,

Race, History, and American Society

Eithne Quinn has written a masterful analysis of post–civil rights–era Hollywood through the lens of the Black creatives who pushed a more realistic narrative of the Black experience onto the big screen. Quinn explains the historical circumstances that converged to create a short five-year time period from 1972 to 1976 during which Black writers, producers, technicians, actors, and distributors operated less hampered by the white Hollywood establishment. More nuanced than anything produced under white control, films like Watermelon Man, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Angel Levine, and The Landlord emerged absent the stereotypical “Blaxploitation” tales of Black hypermasculinity, female promiscuity, and the related problematic depictions of inner-city single motherhood and drug use, among others that would later come to represent the Black experience. Instead, audiences were treated to films that portrayed people as complex characters and ended “unhappily”—not the typical resolution white liberal audiences expected, but more realistic and satisfying for Black audiences (82). What enabled this five-year time period to emerge? Quinn argues that Black actors, particularly Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, both of whom escaped the wrath of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, had to be willing to leverage their box office pull to join forces with Black writers and producers to exert control over as many parts of the process as possible. The early 1970s were key here, as whites were determined to show themselves to be liberal on racial issues in this immediate post–civil rights era. Poitier and other Black creatives took full advantage of this space.It quickly became apparent, however, that whites’ version of racial progress did not include an economic component, enabling Quinn to argue that Hollywood was at least keeping pace with, if not at the forefront of, the emerging neoliberal understanding of equality, one that gave lip service to access, opportunity, and inclusion while simultaneously maintaining insidious informal all-white Hollywood networks in which most decisions were made. The neoliberal understanding was better than what came next, a “soft white” cultural backlash, which culminated first in a gutted Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), then in a cultural reconfiguration of the civil rights era's emphasis on color-blindness, one that emphasized individualism and an end to government-mandated affirmative action policies. The book's power lies here, in Quinn's analysis of Hollywood's influence in ushering in a new cultural understanding of whiteness. She expands on the work of film scholars, critical race theorists, and labor and cultural historians to reveal white men's eventual embrace of an individualist rhetoric that was designed to emasculate Black men's “use” of any governmental mechanisms that would “help” them get ahead. Charlton Heston, Quinn tells us, “followed the classic neoconservative trajectory,” having supported the March on Washington in 1963 to seeing a billboard for Barry Goldwater the next year, saying to himself, “Son of a bitch, he is right,” then voting for Nixon in 1972 as an “energetic democrat,” all the while eschewing any attempts by minority actors to call attention to discrimination (109). Hollywood creatives led what was a coalescing version of white masculinity both on- and off-screen. The book's title, A Piece of the Action, is meant to signal just that for Black creatives: a mere piece “during a decade of struggle against recalcitrant power structures” (23).Divided into five chapters, the book begins in the late 1960s with analyses of several films, ranging from In the Heat of the Night (1967) to Black Panther (2018). Quinn analyzes the films’ narratives and includes their production histories. Doing so enables her to pinpoint exactly when, where, and how the white power structure coalesced. Including the brief five-year period during which Black creatives had almost complete control provides Quinn with a good comparison of exactly what was “white” in all of the rest. White producers, directors, and writers guided films to narratives that were rooted in their own stereotypical assumptions, assumptions bolstered by the Moynihan-inspired neoconservative academic tropes that had just done the same. White-generated narratives began to reinforce each other so that, by the late 1970s, a new white working-class hyperindividualist and antigovernment ideology swept Ronald Reagan into office. White creatives made decision after decision to “look” as if they were inclusive—for example, hiring Black actors and emphasizing Black story lines to appear “liberal”—but controlled all of the mechanisms that really mattered, including the stories themselves.What Quinn actually describes here is the emergence of a new version of racial capitalism spearheaded by whom she labels “retreatist liberals” as opposed to “social activist liberals” (46). In her discussion of the production of In the Heat of the Night, for example, Quinn argues that Norman Jewison, its famed white director and retreatist liberal, insisted that the plot emphasize workplace integration in the South although no one on the actual set, other than Poitier, was Black. Within a matter of months, Hollywood would be subjected to an EEOC investigation, but by then the damage had been done. The groundwork for “an incipient postracialism” had been laid in the separation of the economic from the liberal (47). The most effective part of Quinn's analysis is the juxtaposition of white-controlled productions with Black-controlled ones. From Sidney Poitier to Harry Belafonte, from Pam Grier, Mario Van Peebles, Diahann Carroll, and Richard Pryor to the Harlem-based Third World Cinema Corporation and others, what they accomplished in a brief five-year period drives Quinn's overall argument home. First, the writers, producers, crews, and actors were predominantly Black even when the script called for a white actor. Second, the narratives portrayed complicated protagonists. The Angel Levine's main character was a hustler who realized the work was a “tragic pursuit . . . expressive of the false promises of capitalism” (87). Later hustlers were “transmogrified,” Quinn argues, into ghetto heroes in films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, The Mack, and Superfly. These films glamorized a version of Black masculinity that provided a commentary on “the injuries of the racial wealth gap and the turn to alternative opportunity structures in a bid to gain pleasure, status, and cash,” one directly at odds with the white retreatist liberal narratives that depicted Black men as down on their luck because they gambled their money (159). Black women were depicted as “hard working, thrifty, and aspirational,” complicated characters in the Black-produced films Coffy and Claudine as opposed to the Jezebels, mammies, and matriarchs audiences were used to seeing, a direct refutation of the Moynihan Report (182).It was not to last. Once the soft white power structure coalesced, not only did Black stereotypical characters reappear, they did so alongside Rocky Balboa and other white working-class victim-heroes; Ronald Reagan was elected; tax incentives and affirmative action were obliterated with the active and tacit support of white retreatist liberals. Quinn advances our understanding of the overlap between neoliberalism and neoconservativism significantly, putting Hollywood at the center of the story, in a book that is a pleasure to read.