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Race, media and cultural identities in Australia

By Andrew Jakubowicz - posted Monday, 12 April 2010


Soon the Australian government will have to deal with the recommendations from the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council headed by AFL tyro Andrew Demetriou. One thing the report will have to (but may not) consider is the media and the arts.

In multiracial/polyethnic societies such as Australia, the media play a central role in the production, circulation and transformation of ideas about race. The Australian media do a lot of “work” on race relations: they ensure that there is very little presence of people of colour, what Canadians refer to as “visibly different” anywhere in the media landscape.

Indeed if we want to discover where the daily media narrative delivers on Australia’s cultural diversity, it’s most likely to be in the news (where the issues are threats of violence or sports superstars) or in sporting coverage. Most of the visible difference on Australian television that entertains Australian audiences comes from the USA, the UK, or SBS. And this in a society that now has almost half the population either born overseas or with one parent born outside the country. So with half the population less than two generations “deep”, and many of them from non-Caucasian backgrounds, why is diversity better represented on British TV (with a population that has a lower proportion who are visibly different) than in Australia?

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When the “visibly different” are allowed in they tend to be shown as caricatures - Black Face on Hey Hey it’s Saturday; as sound and movement in advertising (for example the recent KFC kerfuffle); or as the Chinky Chinese cook in Buz Luhrmann’s Australia (reminiscent in more ways than one of Ken Hall’s 1937 Lovers and Luggers). There is considerable debate as to whether this situation has got better or stayed as abysmally poor as it was 20 years ago. Some commentators argue that the marginalisation of actors of colour continues, with few parts being cast with a democratic and cosmopolitan eye.

Most Australians are entertained by programs that do not reflect the nation’s cultural diversity. Australian politics works on the basis of managing pressure groups - no pressure, no politics, no change.

Once we understand that race is a concept that people use to structure their world views, our attention is of course drawn immediately to the main arena in our society where ideas are generated, tested, reinforced and renewed - the media. Unsurprisingly most people use the media for entertainment rather than specific information, and while news and information programs are popular (and not protected from circulating the most dangerous stereotypes and feeding the most aggressive prejudices) most of the time most people turn on the box or log onto the internet, or fire up their radios, or open a magazine or newspaper, in order to “escape” momentarily from their immediate environment.

Entertainment forms a huge space in which civil society evolves and finds its forms, values and narratives. It is in the diverse range of entertainment that people refresh their minds, reflect on their lives and build the social networks that give so much meaning to the everyday.

Whether its discussing Survivor at work, or musing with friends on the relationships in Packed to the Rafters,or chewing down on a Maccers while remembering The Biggest Loser, or even fantasising about the 3D soft-core eroticism and hard-core aggression of Avatar, entertainment does important social labour. Rituals of religion can fall into the “entertainment” camp, as anyone who has visited or watched Hillsong can attest; so too can the front page of so-called newspapers as the Lara Bingle saga is played out. The classic Shakespearean plays count, and they do a lot of work on race.

Entertainment, race and attitudes

The reason we are concerned about entertainment and racism relies on the fact that entertainment experiences might affect attitudes. Attitudes are patterns of thought that evaluate the information we garner from the world, and help orient us towards the objects of the attitudes. Entertainment plays a role in the three ways just listed, and can have a pernicious, a positive or a neutral effect, in which a similar event may be experienced in many different ways by different groups.

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The beliefs that people hold about other socio-cultural groups are essentially channeled in ways that can only intensify the affective dimension, the feelings that people hold towards other groups. Bereft of any complexity of information, audiences draw together two pipelines of influence. The first includes representations of “reality” that are truncated, selective and detrimental to Muslims (or Indigenous people etc). The second reflects absences from the normal worlds of entertainment.

When audiences think about other groups, they can be led to negative, partial and deprecatory feelings, drawing laughter for instance from “black face”, or emotional satisfaction from the defeat of the Other (e.g. Zulu, Avatar etc). Negative feelings are reinforced, and prejudice extended. People often sustain very negative affect based on very limited “knowledge”. Indeed the intensity of the affect may lead them to fabricate cognitive linkages that are without foundation in reality, but necessary to provide the framework for the feelings they hold.

A key dimension of attitudes lies in the behaviour used to sustain them; as simple as the choice of entertainment source - only seeking input that sits comfortably with beliefs and feelings. Or it may go further, by seeking to transmit attitudes to family, friends and workmates through jokes, conversations or even arguments. People may take their attitudes to entertainment milieu such as talk-back radio (defined legally now as an entertainment medium) or online. Or they may actually become part of the entertainment industry more directly, as writers, directors, producers, actors and a thousand other roles. Of course race is not at the forefront for most of these people, yet race work is going on in the background for many of them, often.

Racism, ethnicity and the media - 20 years on

In 1990 I led a team of researchers to explore issues of racism and the media in Australia. We taped weeks of television and radio and pored through dozens of magazines and newspapers. As we reviewed our data and looked at genres as diverse as news and current affairs, children’s programming on TV, short stories in women’s magazines, advertising spreads and TV commercials, we were drawn to some rather glum conclusions. The content of Australian mainstream media reflected an already increasingly defunct picture of power in Australia, except as it became clear, in the media industries.

Where there was diversity it tended to be imported because of political struggles by people of colour in the USA and the UK, who had demanded their inclusion in the everyday diversity of media. Faces reflecting that diversity read the news on every US TV channel, but on few if any in Australia. The streets of Neighbours and Home and Away remained blandly Anglo, with an occasional and often violently resented non-White newcomer. These people appeared and disappeared with monotonous regularity, as though there was a tipping point at which the commercial channels had to do something, just to say they were, but then move them on before offence was caused.

One of the major debates about entertainment and race encompasses the field of “diversity casting”. A number of Australian reports have targeted this issue, though apparently with little impact on media producers. If we look at the two top recent shows on Australian TV, the US-produced NCIS has had great success in the USA and Australia, and reflects the pattern of diversity casting that typifies US dramas; the major leads are White males, then White and Hispanic females, and then a Black male. This is more diversity than would be found in an Australian drama series (other than on SBS e.g. East West 101). On the other hand the leading US comedy Two and a Half Men does not have diverse casting in the leads, making it rather more White and similar to Australian soaps (such as Packed to the Rafters, which is all White Anglo in the leads, and only allows a supporting role to Greek Australian George Houvardas).

When Melinda Houston in The Age wrote about diversity casting she triggered among other responses an article and debate in the blog TV Tonight. Blogger David Knox argued that audiences want to see greater diversity (viz. Underbelly, now featuring as a key character Muslim Lebanese Ozzie “Johnny” Ibrahim) yet usually producers and advertising clients don’t like diversity. Even the British have attacked Neighbours and Home and Away as “hideously White”, though as a consequence H and A now has a small continuing part for a Korean actor - in 2010, one Asian!

Last year the MEAA (Media Entertainment Arts Alliance) took on the ABC over its claims to diversity in casting and the perceived reality of exclusion. Writing to Kim Dalton head of ABC TV, the union argued that:

Diversity in Casting
Australian screens should reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community. As Australia’s national publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC needs to fulfill its Charter responsibilities by ensuring that its productions cast performers belonging to all groups in all types of roles, so that the Australian community is portrayed realistically on screen. Discrimination against performers because of age, sex, race, creed, colour, sexual preference, national origin or disability must be eliminated.

The MEAA request appears to have generated no response from the ABC, and is one of dozens of calls to the media and the film industry over the past 20 years to reflect the reality of Australia (beyond Wog Boy). Hopefully the rolling anger over this situation (on sites such as Facebook’s Diversity Casting) may lead to political action.

Conclusion

It’s no wonder that Australians in general have such crass and simplistic views of the multitude of cultural groups that make up our society, let alone the rest of the world. And by Australians here I do actually mean the full range of people. Greek Australians often only know as much about Vietnamese as they picked up at school, while Somalis know very little about any of the 200 or so other cultural communities that flourish in this country. When the Indian students got upset about being targeted in violent attacks, many Australians could tell you Sachin Tendulkar’s run rate, and not much else about India or Indians.

The level of inter-cultural knowledge in Australia remains extraordinarily low. Debates on education do not address the problems that it causes, and the media and entertainment industries for the most part ignore the issue altogether. In part this has been the direct outcome of authorities abandoning high level commitment to multiculturalism as a policy centerpiece for Australian society, and urging instead integration and Australian values.

In Peter Garrett and Stephen Conroy we have federal ministers who have done nothing to advance the causes of cultural diversity in entertainment, the arts, and communication, and indeed have stood by silently as these issues have slid backwards into crisis after crisis. The Australia Council for the Arts no longer has a Multicultural Committee, nor stimulates debates in this area as once it did, even in the darkest days of Howardism. Given a choice, the government appointed two high quality but White members to the already all-White ABC Board, recommended by a committee made up only of White Australians.

There is a crisis of recognition of diversity in public culture in Australia, one which gnaws at the heart of the country. It is racism at its most systematic, unselfconscious and destructive. Well-meaning powerful White people no longer care about democratic cultural diversity, and as a consequence they inherit the whirlwind they are sowing. While it may appear to draw a long bow to suggest the lonely stabbing death of an Indian Australian late in a Melbourne night can be traced to the decades of all White Neighbours, the bow can still be drawn, and the string sadly will not snap at the suggestion.

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A longer version of this article can be found on the author's website, AndrewJakubowicz.com.



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About the Author

Andrew Jakubowicz is a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney. He blogs for the SBS program CQ: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/cq/tab-listings/page/i/2/h/Blog/

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