I'm Dr. Ali Mattu.
Oscar nominations are out and we've got THE LEAST DIVERSE group of nominees since 1998!
Why should you care? Find out on THE PSYCH SHOW.
Every 2015 Oscar nominated actor is white.
Every writer and director nominated is male.
Most of the #OscarsSoWhite backlash has focused who's in the Academy and how the organization
works.
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn summarized it nicely when he said, "Apparently
93% of the Academy voters are white, 76% of them are male, and 0% of them are made of
Legos."
Seriously Academy?!? You snub The Lego Movie?!? I’ve been recommending it to every family
I work with because it helps parents connect with their children. Want to know how many
times I've recommended How to Train Your Dragon 2? ZERO!
The nominations are part of a larger problem with how Hollywood works, who gets hired to
produce content, and who ends up starring in it.
The thing I want to talk to you about is why diversity in media matters.
The first thing you need to know is the world has become a diverse and interconnected place.
In the United States ethnic minorities are going to become the majority group in the
near future. Internationally, events in one part of the world impact everyone else. That’s
what we saw with the 2008’s global economic crisis, the Ebola outbreak, and Kim Kardashian's
butt.
The media we consume hasn’t kept with these global changes. Take me for example — most
of the characters who look like me are stereotypes: terrorists, disgruntled computer programmers,
convenience store clerks, or people who eat chilled monkey brains.
Compare that with the majority culture in Hollywood. THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS TO BE A
WHITE MALE!
You can be a soldier, superhero, entrepreneur, millionaire, a regular dad, a mathematician,
and a cosmologist.
Actually Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking’s stories are pretty cool and highlight aspects
of diversity we usually don’t see on the big screen.
If you’re a woman, Hollywood doesn't have too much for you to do besides help men and
fit into a very specific type of body — one that’s impossible for 90% of the population
to achieve.
When you think about gender, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation,
language, age, and disability, it’s clear that there lots of ways to be human. In
some situations you can be privileged and in others a minority. But Hollywood keeps
giving us the same stereotyped characters. These portrayals are bad for everyone.
Why?
Stereotype threat and implicit bias!
You know those times when you get worried about becoming a stereotype? For me, it happens
every time I’m at the airport and get “randomly selected” for additional screening. I start
thinking, “Oh no! they think I’m a terrorist!”. I start sweating, avoid eye contact, and probably
end up looking kinda suspicious.
Psychologists call this stereotype threat. Experiments have shown that when you create
a situation that makes you afraid of fulfilling a stereotype, it changes your behavior for
the worse. Here’s how it works:
Stereotype: girls are bad at math. Stereotype threat: ask about gender on a math test and
girls do worse.
Stereotype: blacks are better athletes than whites. Stereotype threat: talk about race
differences in sports and a white athlete will do worse.
These changes happen because stereotype threat creates anxiety and makes you second-guess
what you’re doing. Stereotype threat is like a massive weight on your shoulders that
makes it harder to do whatever it is you’re trying to do.
Most of the minority characters we see in Hollywood are based on stereotypes and increase
stereotype threat. They also contribute to something called implicit bias.
Think of implicit bias as unconscious prejudice. It’s an idea that started in 1995 when psychologists
Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji created the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Since
then, over 4.5 million people haven taken the test and we now know that most everyone
has some type of unconscious prejudice, aren’t aware of it, and these biases influence everything
from the employees you hire to the people you hangout with at a Super Bowl party.
If stereotype threat is a weight on your shoulders, implicit bias are the walls that society builds
around you to keep you from achieving your full potential. Here’s how they work together...
We don’t have a lot of women in engineering because math and science classes are male
focused women who do enter the field experience hostile work environments. It’s hard for
NFL players to come out as gay because once you’re labeled as a “gay football player”
your performance might decline and teams are less likely to pick you up during the NFL
draft. Black men become anxious around police officers and police officers are more likely
to find black men as threatening. If you’re a religious minority running for political
office, you’ll probably stumble on questions about religion and run into subtle discrimination
even within your own political party.
Remember what I said about the world become a more diverse place? This is a good thing
because society functions best when people from different backgrounds come together to
work on shared goals. But stereotypes limit society. If you don’t believe me, then you
need to take a closer look at what happened in 2014.
Turns out there’s an easy way to get around this mess — counter stereotypes. Seeing
examples of people breaking stereotypes reduces these biases. THIS why diversity in media
is so important —diverse representation expands opportunities for everyone in society.
That’s exactly why we've had a monumental shift with gay rights over the past 2 decades.
There were no gay characters on TV the early 1990s. Now, we’ve got a range of gay characters
on TV. Those representations directly influenced political support for marriage equality.
Kumar, Mindy, Tom Haverford, Ms. Marvel, Abed, – they’re really important to me because
they defy stereotypes about South Asians and give me hope that my kids won’t be limited
in the way I was.
Still not convinced about the importance of diversity? I’ll leave you with this tidbit.
Researchers at UCLA looked at 1,200 TV shows and movies from 2011 and discovered that films
with diverse casts made more money at the box office and diverse TV shows had better
ratings. Diversity expands your audience. So if all you Hollywood executives want to
make more money, hire some diverse producers and cast diverse talent.
Who are some of your favorite diverse representations? Let me know in the comments below.
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