Why diversity, not (in)equality? Or perhaps the assumption is that diversity is the expression of equality? Articulated most explicitly in the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or Kerner Commission Report, the discursive alliance between representation and demography turned on the conception of racial difference and the role that this conception played in contributing to the conception of blacks and the disadvantages and frustrations blacks experienced. Media was a crucial site for addressing grievances of disenfranchised blacks over lack of access to significant positions of employment and the exclusion of black images.3 Addressing racial, class, and gender inequality was never the explicit aim of this alliance; access and inclusion was. Prodded by the Civil Rights Commission and left to their own devices, television networks, newsrooms, showrunners, and advertisers entered a generation-long cycle of lurching in fits and starts toward granting access and including people of color and women in mainstream media content and employment.
Media scholars and historians 4 suggest that there was at least shared agreement among members of the civil rights establishment, black cultural nationalists, and the policy establishment about the importance of aligning television news and entertainment content, media industry employment, and the demography of minority populations. Nowhere is this consensus on the alignment of content, demography, and employment more evident than in the Kerner Commission Report. As media scholar Vicki Mayer reads it, “The Kerner Commission Report of 1968, which concluded that media representation helped fuel national racial unrest, linked problematic discourse (stereotypes) not to mass communication per se but to employment within its related industries.” She continues, “An explosion of publicly and privately financed quantitative studies of television content, employment practices, ownership patterns and cultivated audience effects buttressed social movement claims that distortions on the screen should be mediated through production practices and broadcast regulations.”5 For Mayer, issues of identity in studies of television production seemed tied to the labor that could be held responsible for the representations of race and gender on television. This historic conjuncture of the golden age of broadcast networks, the moral and political pressure of the civil rights movement, and news and entertainment content as the site of cultural affirmation, social recognition, and redress still remains the dominant framework for academic research on race and gender representation in media industries research, especially for cable and broadcast media and television. This reasoning and framework also continues to organize policy approaches to achieving media diversity.
Since 1965, for example, media and communication scholars, activists and pressure groups, journalists and critics, craft guilds and industry observers have provided periodic reports on the state of diversity in North American media and entertainment industries. These reports inventory the number of women, black, gay and lesbian, Asian American and Latino/Latina personnel employed in different production sectors of the U.S. entertainment media, from showrunners and writers in television to directors and producers in cinema. These reports also monitor the state of diversity in front of the screen (according types of characters by genre, role, setting, action, and so on).
Consider a few recent examples that illustrate the continuing influence of the discursive alignment of representation and demography as a measure of racial and gender equality. In March 2014 a respected television critic and columnist, Mo Ryan of the Huffington Post, reported on the dismal state of affairs for diversity in entertainment television: “At the outlets responsible for many top programs, women and people of color are enormously under-represented as creators. If one focuses only on the last dozen years at AMC, FX, Showtime, Netflix and HBO, around 12 percent of the creators and narrative architects in the dramatic realm were women. . . . According to the most recent stats from the Writers Guild of America, about 30.5 percent of TV staff writers are women, and about 15.6 percent of TV writers are people of color; both numbers represent modest gains from the past. San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which uses a different calculation method, puts the percentage of female TV writers for the 2012–13 season at 34 percent. . . . Yet according to SDSU’s most recent study, 27 percent of women bear the title executive producer, and 24 percent are a ‘creator’—numbers that have remained stagnant for a long time.”6
Sociologist and media scholar Darnell Hunt authored one of the reports cited by journalists, industry observers, and pressure groups concerned about the state of racial and gender diversity in Hollywood. Hunt’s 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report tracks longitudinal data on the distribution of actors, writers, directors, agencies, and audience in film, cable, and broadcast outlets. According to Hunt, minorities fare better as leads in cable comedies and drama compared to broadcast at 14.7 percent, while women fare worse as leads in cable comedies and dramas than in broadcast at 37.2 percent. Minorities, in contrast, are more likely to be leads on reality and other shows than on comedies and dramas in broadcast.7 Citing a Writers Guild of America West 2013 report, Hunt emphasizes that, according to the report, “diverse writers were underrepresented by a factor of about 4 to 1 among writer-producers with the most decision-making authority, both in the development of original network show concepts and in the day-to-day management of the storytelling process . . . despite the fact the minorities collectively accounted for 36.3 percent of the nation’s population in 2010.”8
In another highly respected state-of-the-industry report, Stacy Smith and her colleagues at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication provide a highly detailed annual report on the dismal state of gender and racial diversity in the Hollywood film industry.9 As with Hunt’s 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report, the San Diego State University study, and the Writers Guild of America West and Director’s Guild of America findings, Smith’s study is based on longitudinal data. Smith found a similar absence of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in Hollywood, drawing conclusions similar to those of Hunt and other researchers. On the index of gender, participation seems somewhat more hopeful than on race and ethnicity, though the general trends suggest that despite industrial transformations in production, financing, and service delivery in television and film production overall, movement in racial and gender inclusion and participation has not kept up with these transformations.
What accounts for the persistent patterns of racial and gender exclusion reported in these empirical studies? Surely after years of reporting on such practices of exclusion, media executives, advertisers, content producers, and program purchasers are aware of the dismal state of affairs with respect to diversity in media industries. In the face of so much documented evidence about the lack of racial and gender diversity in television and cinema, what else might be going on? What else might account for the failure of these reports and the evidence they present to gain any lasting traction? What would it take at the level of policy prescriptions, industry practice, and guiding assumptions for this evidence to matter in ways that would change the practices of exclusion they report? Periodically, advocacy groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and GLAAD use these reports to leverage studio and network executives to hire more women and people of color, develop more content aimed at diverse audiences, and earmark job training programs to develop talent in different sectors of the industry.10
What if we shifted the angle of vision, treating inequality and the absence of diversity as a process? What if we see the absence of diversity, or more properly inequality, in media as a crucial component of the production of creative objects, labor relations, financing, distribution, and marketing, and not just discrete outcomes within the associated fields of production aimed at representational and demographic parity.11 Why not expand the analysis to include the very way we frame and interrogate issues of diversity? As the handful of reports cited already show, research scholars, craft guilds, industry leaders, regulators, and advocacy groups understand diversity in media industries as a matter of whether or not television, cinema, and now different sectors of new media like gaming employ a diverse workforce, which by extension is presumed to result in more diverse content.
This continues to be an important goal, to be sure, but it conceives of diversity as a fixed outcome, measurable in the number and distribution of discrete indicators like the number of minority showrunners or the number of women in lead roles. While this approach addresses questions of representational parity, it raises other questions, especially the relation between media industries and inequality, including whether correctives to inequality can be addressed by the exchange of bodies and experiences responsible for making content, rather than by exposing the assumptions, micropractices, social relations, and power dynamics that define our collective cultural common sense about the nature of social difference and the practices of inequality.
As a research agenda and public policy goal, by far the dominant approach to media diversity is framed from the vantage point of a problem whose specific roots go back over fifty years to black urban unrest, the golden age of network television, and a liberal consensus on the Great Society. In this discursive alliance, legal, cultural, social, and political assumptions located in the Great Society and the civil rights movement consensus set the terms of a framework that aligns demographic representation, the politics of representation, the conception of media and television as cultural sites of redress for racial injury, and the assumption that a corrective of the image will equal social justice and political parity. That is, the legal terms of state recognition engendered by the civil rights movement, the idea that demographic parity and media parity should be equivalent, that merely having diverse content would achieve demographic parity, and that minority access to the dominant image culture would equal social redress. So by dwelling on the conditions of possibility and the assumptions that frame media studies approaches to diversity and the empirical evidence by which media scholars measure its distribution and assess its efficacy, perhaps we can begin to account for why the discursive alignment that defines much of the research on diversity and the media has proved to matter so little in reordering the racial order of things in the media.
By conceiving of diversity as a social accomplishment and emphasizing the shifting, contested, and precarious nature of the social context and power relations that diversity elicits, organizes, and charges relative to its changing conditions of possibility, we might begin to ask different questions about media practices of diversity as a proxy for inequality. Diversity’s precarity invites probing the shift in academic and popular discourses of diversity, especially legal disputes over the very meaning and conception of difference generated by a host of new legal and cultural claims and grievances. A good place to begin might be with the disarticulation between the problems to which studies of racial and ethnic distribution in content and production were generated to provide answers and our own conjuncture, on which these studies are called upon to comment.
