Core Post — Week 7

“The recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry. In large part they were driven, as most things are in network television, by economics.” (Gray 68)

This week’s readings, in particular the pieces by Herman Gray and Jennifer Esposito, brought to mind the 1989 article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” by Peggy McIntosh. Specifically, I contend that McIntosh’s conception of “White Privilege” is an informative undercurrent through the phenomena explored in each of the two other articles.

In examining our purported “color-blind” our “post-racial” America, Esposito calls for an interrogation of “whiteness” and its naturalized advantages in order to move towards a more socially just society. In citing Applebaum on page 533, she highlights, however, that false notions of meritocracy remain a preferable system for white when compared to such reflection, since it preserves the basis for anxieties around “reverse discrimination”. This binary focus is central to Esposito’s analysis of Ugly Betty, as she returns to a key argument that “the focus remained on Betty’s Latinaness, not on Marc’s whiteness. Marc’s whiteness remained at the center, as ‘normal,’ while Betty’s race was inscribed as different and other… discourses on race… ask that we pretend not to see differences even though they have become part of national policies.” (532).

In her essay, McIntosh rigorously conducts such an interrogation, and even composes a list articulating some concrete aspects of white privilege. Her thirty-fifth point corresponds neatly with the issue at stake in Ugly Betty — “I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.” Not only does this condition, one of many “daily effects” as McIntosh names them, highlight the central hurdle that Betty and other people of color must routinely face, but it — along with the others — also reflexively acknowledges a reliable privilege, a relative ease or convenience, that Marc refuses to acknowledge. It is worth noting, too, that different identities confer different types and degrees of advantage or disadvantage, as noted by McIntosh. What remains constant, though, is the tendency to normalize white masculinities especially in such a fashion that does not give rise to many, if any, concerns among white men towards the conferral of unearned power and strength associated with doing so.

In closing, I return to Gray’s article to investigate how white privilege seems to have played out in this slice of industrial history. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have done so passively, and by drawing on the unearned power and political strengths intrinsic to white privilege. A cursory google search reveals white men holding the highest offices in all of the four broadcasters throughout the period in question, and so we might surmise that Gray’s quotation at the start of this post remains true — there was no good faith, grassroots effort to give representation to more people. Instead, “television programmers at the networks pursued these images and representations more aggressively and consistently, incorporating them into a strategy that would do what television does best: generate profits by identifying and packaging our dominant social and cultural moods,” rather than interrogating the institutionalized foundations of that dominance (69).