#Oracle FCCs interview Examples

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Oracle FCCs Support Activities Use Cases

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Paper Two: The Oppositional Gaze

With an unprecedented degree of available media content for consumers to view, it is worth considering how these near-incessant streams of information impact us as well as our vision of the world and those who inhabit it.  Television, Film, Radio, Music and literature are not only reflections of the world but more importantly they are subjective representations of their creators’ reflection of the world.  They are a template from which all observers must assess the world as well as themselves and their lived experience.  The viewers and consumers of media, especially during this plugged-in era of the hypnotic, ever-present smartphone and earbuds, are rapaciously gathering data and ideas about the world they inhabit from curated fiction and non-fiction at an increasingly frenetic pace.  The desire to keep this autobahn-paced intake of entertainment harvesting and maintain the endorphin-high chaotic feasting of novelty has put a pressure on content creators to truncate nuance, in a world where more than ever, conversations of increasing complexity are necessary for progress and survival.  I mention this to emphasize the gravity of influence that media has over listeners and viewers as well as to underline the casual way that messages are consumed.  This casual, constant absorption of stories and ideas (be they fictional or non-fiction, a distinction that matters very little when talking about the very-real consequences that these influences can have) can leave the modern bewildered listeners susceptible to the subliminal (as well as the conspicuous) bedlam of messages they are bombarded with in their daily lives.  These points are made to exhibit that any forthcoming evidence or argument made for inequality-prompting trends in media are far from trivial and are more pertinent to observe and address than ever, not just for their pernicious nature but their pervasiveness.

           Issues of representation for People of Color have always been problematic in news/entertainment media and advertising in the U.S.  The Anglocentric and patriarchal representation of artists, entertainers, models, musicians, business professionals, scientists, actors is rampant.  Much of this comes about from majority white ownership of media and advertising companies. Entman and Rojecki suggest, for the most part, outright intolerance and racism of the many individuals, the moving parts and people in media businesses, be they newspapers or television companies, is probably not to blame.  More plausible is that the systems in which they are cogs, are flawed on this point.  Regardless of who is to blame, it is a white-majority and white perspective bias that result in People of Color being withheld opportunities to be on television shows despite having a wealth of talent, vision and intellect.  So too is it a belief in this racist system when historically and presently, Black filmmakers cannot get funding for serious projects discussing racial figures, or plights specific to the Black community, or non-comedic/action films that feature majority Black casts.  These decisions discussed as recently as Spike Lee’s post-2000’s struggle to get significant funding for a Malcom X biopic are the results of white-owned production companies’ misguided and racist conviction that there is no profitable majority audience for these films.  Not only does that assume that white audiences have no interest in learning about Black figures, and assumes that the emotional, psychological experiences of Blacks are so alienating to white people (a deeply dividing notion) as to be disinteresting, it also presumes that the only audience, and the most important audience to consider, is a white audience to begin with.  This presumption, when viewed in the reverse, negates the validity and existence of Blacks entirely.  In much of early radio, well into the 50’s until the Carter administration endeavored to amend the issue, the FCC wouldn’t greenlight Black radio stations or programs and wouldn’t fine any stations that exhibited blatantly discriminatory practices.  Sadly, there are countless examples of these sorts of exclusionary racially motivated acts over the decades.  

A lack of representation creates a disservice to those who go unrepresented as entertainers but also as consumers, not just for the inequality that the media is maintaining within the confines of its business practices, but also in the message that it sends to consumers.  To white consumers, with no Black-owned, black culture featured media, this insulates them and creates no understanding or available empathy or tolerance.  When Blacks are represented by white writers and curators of media, they are likely to be misrepresented when they are depicted at all.  For consumers, this normalizes whiteness to the point of invalidating the existence of Blackness, it creates a latent hostility from whites and a wrongheaded presentation of the world.  For Blacks, there is a great and terrible othering that occurs, either by misrepresentation or exclusion.  The writer of “The Oppositional Gaze” bell hooks talks about how Black female spectators would deal with the pain of this omittance, of this complete erasure of their existence, at times to attempt to “ignore race”, other times to ignore cinema altogether, as it obstinately decided it wouldn’t represent People of Color either at all, or accurately and honestly.  Bell hooks says,

“Not all black women spectators submitted to that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of the women 1 talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification with films--that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; at times it caused pain. As one black woman put, l could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep." For black female spectators who have "looked too deep" the encounter with the screen hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was a gesture of resistance, turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation.” (bell hooks, The Oppositional Gaze, Chapter 7, page 121, paragraph 3).

           Fictional media creates inequality by presenting inequality, by creating a false reality bereft of complex People of Color as written and represented in good faith by employed people of their own culture to do their stories justice.  What is a person to do but, as some of those that bell hooks has interviewed, but to either turn away, or to swallow the pill that society rejects your experience, your history and your narrative, and you must engage on the most detached level with these white-majority pieces of biased media? There is of course the alternative that she suggests elsewhere in the text; resisting, critiquing and fighting to change these systemic problems that create a lack of relatability and accuracy for Blacks, a painful and exclusionary scenario, as well as engenders more division and lack of empathy from uninformed (and woefully uncultured, uninstructed) white viewers.

On another front, news media often (either out of cynicism or laziness, the maligning result is the same) perpetuates harmful stereotypes for men and women of color.  Whether representing issues of poverty with deriding image clusters equating poverty with violence and Blackness or the local-news media tendency to replicate biased police reports and announcements of arrests without any nuance or consideration to the alleged criminal, (statistically more likely to be shown in cuffs, in mugshots, and unnamed if they are Black) there are plenty of systemic habits that do nothing but to depict a negative (and wrong) view of people of color to the nation as a whole.  These misrepresentations are pervasive and harmful, they communicate an adversarial and dangerous picture of people of color which does nothing to show reality.  These blunt-force misdirected and wrongfully-presented ideas in news stories are not trivial, as I argued in the opening paragraph.  They have great consequence, people interact with others based on this media-born information, these harmful racial stereotypes.  People like Trump get into office on racist dog-whistling propaganda, on hate-speech genocidal language references to helpless refugees, because ideas have power, because representation matters a great deal. When news shows use euphemistic language to describe white nationalist statements, or don’t lead a quote where Trump is being entirely dishonest or inventing statistics with statements that point out that lie, that matters a great deal when you consider that 60% of people stop ingesting a news story after reading a headline.

The realm of ideas, concepts and conceits matters a great deal, as these things catalyze our perception of the world and the people that inhabit the world around us.  The out-of-context soundbite that we “learn from”, the catchy click-bait-motivated headline that we skim over, may just influence the hand that pulls the lever in the voting booth.  This sobering reality reminds us that Media, our pseudo-oracle, the influencing ever-blaring window to the “outside world”, is deeply influential in forming our opinions on public policy, our view on religion, our political outlook and more locally, our tolerance of a new neighbor, who we are likely to hire in the workplace, if we would grant a loan to a person whose name or race seems unfamiliar, or whom we suddenly associate with an alarming and unflattering news story.

In the era of Youtube, Vine, Twitter, Instagram and even higher-profile companies like Netflix, Hulu and so on, the broadened media ecosystem has given more people than ever are given a voice, which is great when it comes to representation, where on streaming sites and social media, comedians, artists, and models of all backgrounds are given a fair chance to represent and share their work and stories.  Conversely, again though, the trouble of curation comes in as Youtube and many news and social media sites have also given platform to nefarious thinkers and content creators.  Interestingly, the system breaks down when advertisements create click-motivated ad revenue, and sensational stories, misleading headlines and the “trolling” aspect of many content creators enter the fold.  Youtube specifically has been shown to have algorithms that the suggested video content will lead most people to more right-wing leaning and white-nationalist or conspiracy-oriented videos. Only terrifying and depressing motivations can be assumed from not just the creation of these venomous or at the very least, patently false and time-draining clips, but from a multi-billion-dollar companies’ impetus to promote content like this.  These systemic structures still exist, and they are inherently evil influences and perpetuators of white supremacy.  

These days, with media rampant, it is so important and difficult to communicate the power of a president’s words, or the angle that a writer would take, or the negative influence that a stereotyping or racialized character in a show would do to people young and old, of white or of color.  As we attempt to navigate this space, free speech ideologues who doubt in the power of words and ideas or who ignores the malevolent nature of dog-whistling and historical context take pleasure in smugly feigning ignorance (or exhibiting true ignorance) as they rebuke attempts to call out blatant racist pundits and propaganda.  Even centrist self-proclaimed liberals and generally rational/logical thinkers decry events of Twitter de-platforming of people like Alex Jones of the Far-right Infowars media site once he incited violence (aside from the appalling transgression of spreading hate speech and lies for years on his website) or refusing to give admitted nazis and white-supremacists such as Richard Spencer an opportunity to speak publicly or on campus as attempts to destroy “the first amendment”.  You can safely bet that most of these thinkers and skeptics are white men who have no (colored) skin in the game.  Media and those powerful people who manipulate it (in front of or behind the camera/the computer/the writing desk), greatly, terrifyingly shapes the world by shaping our understanding of it.  Media puts thoughts in our heads, opinions in our hearts, feelings in our psyche, and subsequently puts our action into motion, which if we aren’t careful can put our children into cages, our bodies into illness, our parents into addiction, our siblings into prisons, our families into poverty, our environments and our communities into disrepair, all of this and more culminates in our very humanity and moral, unifying aspirations into shambles.