Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film and the Articulation of an Ideology By Justin Daniel Gomer A ...

183 Pages·2014·1.33 MB·English

by  Justin Gomer

Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film and the Articulation of an Ideology

By
Justin Daniel Gomer

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
African American Studies
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Leigh Raiford, Chair
Professor Ula Y. Taylor
Professor Darieck Scott
Professor Scott Saul

Spring 2014
© 2014 by Justin Daniel Gomer
All Rights Reserved
Abstract
Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an Ideology
by
Justin Daniel Gomer
Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Leigh Raiford, Chair

My dissertation, entitled, “Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an
Ideology,” offers a political and cultural biography of the racial ideology of colorblindness from
its emergence as a coherent racial ideology in the years after the civil rights movement to its
dominant influence in social policy in the 1990s. Most importantly, the project reveals the
manner in which colorblindness became the racial project of neoliberalism. This elaboration of
colorblindness as an ideology and cultural form is best understood through an examination of
film during the period of my study. Beginning in the second-half of the 1970s, Hollywood
developed its own set of filmic aesthetics, narratives, and tropes that advocated colorblindness.
Moreover, Hollywood was not only central to the articulation of the ideology, it also depended
upon colorblindness in the New Hollywood era. In the post-civil rights era, then, colorblindness,
neoliberalism, and film are constitutive of and inextricable from one another.

The project illustrates three key themes. First, colorblindness is the racial project of
neoliberalism. The 1970s were characterized by an anti-government ethos that extended across
racial and political lines that neoconservatives used in the 1970s to attack issues like affirmative
action and busing as part of a movement intent on dismantling of the welfare state. Out of these
struggles emerged a neoliberal notion of “individual” colorblind freedom that neoconservatives,
beginning in the mid-seventies, successfully sold as the antidote to the “reverse discrimination”
of government mandated “group” rights. The growing popularity of neoliberal economics in the
seventies was not merely the result of the seeming failures of Keynesianism to cure stagflation.
Instead, the mounting opposition to the “overreach” of the federal government in busing and
affirmative action was fundamental in building the appeal of a return to uncompromising laissez
faire economics.

Secondly, colorblindness, although post-racial in theory, has served as a tool for whites to realign
and reconstitute white supremacy within a post-civil rights political correctness. Beginning in the
late seventies, white Republicans and moderate Democrats alike used colorblindness to eliminate
race-conscious programs intended to promote racial equality. These efforts have only
exacerbated racial inequality.

Lastly, my dissertation asserts that film served as a key battleground for the culture wars out of
which the ideology of colorblindness formed. Yet just as colorblindness needed film to form its
cultural cohesion, film needed colorblindness to reinvent itself in the desperate economic times
of the post-Classical era. Beginning in the 1970s, movies capitalized upon the volatile racial,
1
social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement that shaped
colorblindness and have continued to appeal to colorblind sentiments for profit. By the end of the
1980s, Hollywood was increasingly turning to historical dramas that imagined colorblind white
heroes at the center of black freedom struggles—emancipation and the civil rights movement,
specifically. And by the 1990s, entirely new colorblind film genres, most notably in what I term
the “Teacher Film,” had emerged.

2
For
Mom, Dad, Bryant, and Kelly
who taught me joy
and Adrienne, Belle, and Leo
who completed it

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 “The Law is Crazy!”: Antistatism and the Origins of 14
Colorblindness in the Early 1970s

Chapter 2 “Keep Away From Me, Mr. Welfare Man”: Claudine, 35
Welfare, and the Racial State

Chapter 3 The Oscar and the Oval Office: Rocky and Ronald 50
Reagan’s First Term, 1976-1984

Chapter 4 “Contorted in Anger”: Blue Collar and the Colorblind 74
Hand of the Free Market

Chapter 5 The Long Walk to Colorblindness: Hollywood and 92
Reagan Imagine America’s Colorblind Past

Chapter 6 “Lord, how dare we celebrate?”: Colorblind Hegemony 120
and Genre in the 1990s.

Conclusion 148

Bibliography 153

ii
Acknowledgements

Mine was a dissertation not supported by university fellowships or extramural grants; I
was repeatedly denied those resources. Instead, this was a project completed with the incredibly
generous support of so many wonderful people. My dissertation chair Leigh Raiford is a better
advisor than any graduate student deserves. Equal parts genius and kind, she always saw a better
scholar in me than I actually am. Whatever academic merit this project holds is mostly because
of her mentoring. The other three members of my committee—Ula Taylor, Darieck Scott, and
Scott Saul—helped round out what amounted to the academic equivalent of the ‘92 Dream Team.
As I began this project I knew they were all brilliant; what I did not know was how thoroughly
they would commit themselves to my dissertation and my intellectual development. Although he
is not a member of my committee in a bureaucratic sense, Michael Cohen was as important to
this project as anyone. He spent countless hours helping me conceptualize each chapter and
offered insightful feedback at each stage of the dissertation. Moreover, his race and film course
was the genesis of this project and I have always thought of my dissertation as an attempt to
write something he might assign in that course.
While the aforementioned group of professors made up the core of my academic
education, many other faculty members in the department in the African American Studies
Department, including Percy Hintzen, Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Charles Henry, and Hardy Frye
generously helped me along the way.
The African American Studies Department at UC-Berkeley is a special place I had the
privilege of calling home for nearly a decade. The heart and soul of that department is Lindsey
Herbert. Her title of Undergraduate/Graduate Advisor does not begin to cover the numerous hats
she wears. She saved me numerous times, as she does ever other student in our department.
Kathleen Moran, the Associate Director of UC-Berkeley’s American Studies Program,
kept a roof over my family’s head and dinner on our table for most of my seven graduate school
years. I had the opportunity to work with her during my first summer in graduate school and she
gave me work every semester thereafter. She also found odd jobs for me whenever I needed a
little extra money. Maybe more importantly, she, along with Michael Cohen and Christine
Palmer, taught me how to teach.
I also had the pleasure of attending graduate school with some of the most brilliant
emerging scholars in the academy. I benefitted greatly from their company both inside and
outside of graduate seminars and I am lucky to call many of them friends. My close friend
Christopher Petrella provided a daily sounding board for dissertation difficulties during this last
year. Our daily workouts provided a much-needed respite from dissertating this last year. Ron
Williams II, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Petra Rivera-Rideau, Ryan Rideau, Jasmine Johnson, Ianna
Owen, Jasminder Kaur, Mario Nisbett, Ameer Loggins, Reggie Royston, Michael McGee, and
Zach Manditch-Prottas, offered their knowledge and friendship and made this process more
enriching and more fun.
In high school, my US History teacher, Jerome Facione, first introduced me to thinking
critically about race. In many ways his class was the genesis of my career in academia.
A remarkable circle of friends surrounds me outside of the academy. My dear friends
Kyle Michel, Shelley Michel, Michelle Dickson, and Tim Dickson have given me so much joy
over these years. They are the best friends I could ask for.
And finally, my family…
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My mother and father worked too hard in jobs they didn’t like their entire lives so I
wouldn’t have to. They afforded me the privilege, opportunity, love, and encouragement to
pursue a career that offered more than a paycheck. My brother Bryant and my sister Kelly amaze
with how effortlessly they make success appear. Together, my parents and siblings continue to
inspire me.
My two immaculate children, Belle and Leo, were born during graduate school. They
have made obsolete what I thought were the boundaries of joy and happiness. Raising them has
given my life more purpose and love than I ever imagined. I hope when they are older they
understand that this was ultimately for them.
Lastly, and most importantly, my wife Adrienne deserves to have her name on the author
page of this dissertation alongside my own. We did this together, just as we have everything else
over the past twelve years. She read, edited, and encouraged this project all the while sacrificing
her own career ambitions to take on the lion’s share of parenting our two children. She is an
amazing partner and an even better mother. None of this happens without her.
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Introduction

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the
consciousness of what one really is, and is
‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical
process to date which has deposited in you an
infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”
– Antonio Gramsci

On the March 17, 2010 episode of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert interviewed
Nell Irvin Painter, a noted historian and emeritus professor of history at Princeton University.
Colbert began the interview by asking Painter, who was promoting her book entitled, The
History of White People, if she was white (she is, in fact, black) because, as Colbert insisted, “I
don’t see race.”1 The joke, whereby Colbert insists he is unable to distinguish a person’s racial
identity, and that his knowledge of his own whiteness is entirely the result of others informing
him, is a regular bit Colbert performs when dealing with issues of race on his program. The
routine illustrates the obvious absurdity of the idea, let alone possibility, of a truly colorblind
society in which people are incapable of discerning variations in skin color. Yet, while Colbert
jokingly performs colorblindness in a literal sense—in which he is literally blind to color—
declarations of the supposed post-racial colorblind reality of America in the age of Obama are
commonplace. For example, on December 1, 2013 the Republican National Committee (RNC),
in recognition of the 58th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery
bus, tweeted (@GOP) the following: “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role
in ending racism.”2
Colorblindness has become, in short, the ruling racial ideology of the post-civil rights era.
It informs the manner in which laws, public policies, and college admissions are written and
enforced. For example, in the controversial murder trial of George Zimmerman—a man who
shot and killed seventeen-year-old African American Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in
February of 2012—the judge prohibited the prosecution from accusing Zimmerman of racially
profiling Martin in their opening statement.3 Less than eight months after Martin’s killing, the
Supreme Court heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, the latest episode in a nearly
forty-year crusade to eliminate race conscious affirmative action admissions policies in
institutions of higher education that result in “reverse discrimination” against white males by
giving an unfair advantage to people of color. These anti-affirmative action lawsuits are
consistently based on the argument that race conscious admissions policies violate the principle
that the law is colorblind. While the Court ultimately did not eliminate Texas’ affirmative action
program, anti-affirmative action lawsuits have been largely successful. Affirmative action today,
to the extent that it exists, is a mere shell of the program conceived of by John F. Kennedy and
implemented by Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s.

1 Nell Irvin Painter. The Colbert Report, performed by Stephen Colbert. (2010; New York: Viacom, 2010),
2 Republican National Committee, Twitter post, December 1, 2013, 6:58 a.m.,
https://twitter.com/GOP/status/407161769069924352/photo/1
3 Lisa Lucas and Corky Siemaszko, “George Zimmerman’s Trayvon Martin murder trial will not open with
discussion of race.” New York Daily News. 21 June 2003, Accessed March 3, 2010,
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trayvon-martin-trial-won-open-race-article-1.1378952
1
The colorblind maneuverings of the Supreme Court over the past four decades have
coincided with an American public that similarly believes anti-black racism is a thing of the past.
A report issued by the Brookings Institute a decade after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
World Trade Center reveals that nearly half (46%) of all Americans, and 60% of conservatives,
believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against
blacks and other people of color.4 A 2008 Gallup poll revealed that while roughly half of all
whites believe racism against blacks to be widespread, a majority of whites do not feel that
racism plays a “major factor” in black’s education levels, income, life expectancy, or prison rates.
5 Yet, in terms of the specific issues mentioned above, a minority of whites reported that they
believed racism was a “major factor” in the disparity between black and white education levels
(32%), income (35%), life-expectancy (25%), and prison rates (44%), and a startling number
believe racism was not a factor at all in these issues—29%, 22%, 33%, 20%, respectively.6
Therefore, because racism is understood under colorblind logic solely as individualized, as one
person’s bigotry towards a racial group rather than as a structural component of American
institutions that produce white supremacy, it can be both widespread and not responsible for
racial inequality. This distinction is paramount, as it allows for a post- civil rights “political
correctness” that can acknowledge racial inequity, on strictly an individual level, while
simultaneously ensuring little if nothing is done to fix such inequity on the structural level.7
Therefore, people are far more invested in offering platitudes of racial sensitivity so as to appear
“politically correct” in regards to race, regardless of their personal feelings about the social
determination of race.
Yet, despite the post-racial attitudes of a majority of whites and an overall insistence on a
colorblind approach to social and legal policy, in virtually every measurable metric the United
States remains fundamentally divided along the lines of race.8 While de jure discrimination may
have ended in the 1960s, in terms of wealth, income, unemployment, life expectancy, health
disparities, prison sentences, and so forth white supremacy and black inequality remain
indisputable features of American in the Obama years. Since the 1960s, the unemployment rate
for blacks has consistently remained north of double that of whites. More troubling is that over
the last fifty years the unemployment rate for blacks has remained well above recession levels.
Since the 1960s the median household income for whites has remained roughly one and a half

4 Daniel Cox, E.J. Dionne Jr., William A. Galston, and Robert P. Jones, What It Means to Be American: Attitudes in
an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years After 9/11, Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute. September 6,
2011.
5 “A Downturn in Black Perceptions of Racial Harmony,” USA Today/Gallup poll, July 6th, 2008,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/28072/Downturn-Black-Perceptions-Racial-Harmony.aspx; “Majority of Americans
Say Racism Against Blacks Widespread,” Gallup poll, 4 August 2008,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/109258/Majority-Americans-Say-Racism-Against-Blacks-Widespread.aspx.
6 “Majority of Americans,” Gallup poll; Also, USA Today/Gallup poll, July 6th, 2008.
7 By “political correctness” I mean that in the post-civil rights era Americans have adopted an attitude that is both
intolerant of personal declarations of bigotry and nervous about any discussion of race altogether, racist or not. For
example, on the one hand, people like radio personality Don Imus have lost their jobs for making bigoted remarks,
while on the other, Georgia State Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign after making
comments about the discomfort she, a black woman, often sees in white farmers she is assigned to help. The former
illustrates the country’s post-civil rights intolerance of declarations of bigotry while the latter elucidates our
discomfort with the mentioning of race altogether.
8 For the history and persistent practice of racial discrimination in housing, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Back
Story to the Neoliberal Moment: Race Taxes and the Political Economy of Black Urban Housing in the 1960s,”
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 14:3-4 (March 2013), 185-206.
2