My purpose began with the realization that there are many stereotypes amongst many areas of entertainment, specifically the film and television industry. The goal of this project is to acknowledge and analyze the trait of tokenism that is often used in Hollywood; the tokenism of stereotypes often used in cinema and television. I focus on this topic by using the lens of the article “Community Mediation: Writing in Communities and Enabling Connections through New Media” written by Getto, Cushman, and Ghost. The thing that Hollywood seems to attempt is the mediation of cultures and ethnicities, but not always in the most appropriate of ways. The way that remediation is attempted is when someone or something, “acknowledges the boundary between the definition of community identity and the possibility of connection to both internal and external audiences” (160). The part that the film industry misses is the correct and appropriate way to remediate those communities. I focus on those wrongly done examples, and contrast them with what I like to call “bridges”, as the article expands on it, “Understanding how new media can work as a bridge to and from specific socio-cultural contexts is crucial at this time when communities are developing digital identities in order to sustain their everyday struggles for self- representation and learning” (162).
I continue this process by collecting artifacts that represent the tokenism I have noticed. I divide them into two categories: Bridges and False Remediation. To better display my curation, there is a video that displays the meaning in a new format.
eyes open
Through the realization of such things in the industry, I had decided to analyze the representation of tokenism in the film industry and actors within the community who have spoken out against the use of tokenism. I complete this task by collecting artifacts such as film and television clips and award ceremonies reactions. I focus on movies and television shows that have been mainstream amongst our society. I use a separate page to display films that use remediation as bridges for communities. They are the ones that do not use tokenism or stereotypes, and those movies effectively show how their is false remediation in Hollywood. The reason for this approach is for an audience to have a higher ability to understand, the assemblage, for example, the point that I am trying to get across.
approaching hollywood
My approach discerns from the realization that Hollywood has tried to mediate their versions of races, ethnicities, and cultures. I decided to focus on specific labels like “Magical Negro” and “White Savior” and classify movies under those labels. To identify parts of this community that is contributing to the use of tokenism and recognizing the other side: the ones who are actively making change within this wrongdoing. To juxtapose the nature of our film industry against that of the moral standings of few in the industry itself.
how to understand tokenism
The primary sources that I had used to draw from mostly consist of movies and television, specifically YouTube as my source. A channel that I often pulled from was the Fandango scene videos that they had uploaded from the actual film itself. I would take clips from the trailers of films, which seems even better because it seems more likely that an audience would have seen the trailer rather than the actual movie itself.
I researched through Google and finding articles that support my idea of #OscarsSoWhite. It also referred me to broader ideas within the community to the point where I identified singular actors and actresses that have spoken against the issue. I often referred back to a Tumblr blog to understand a viewpoint from the minorities that I have been trying to discuss in this case. A woman of color runs the blog and often opened up discussions amongst the people who follow her: consisting mostly of the questions and creating dialogue to understand better how to represent a minority without resorting to the tokenism trait adequately. A more popular tool that I had used in my research is the social media foundation, Twitter. I took multiple screenshots from tweets that had been posted from famous people who had contributed to trending hashtags used in my project: #OscarSoWhite and #whitewashedOUT. I often referred to multiple articles to see what had been similarly said about tokenism in the industry around other communities.
Tokenism in Hollywood 