Although I love movies, I haven't watched the Academy Awards since the early '80s. In 1980, a piece of undeniable dreck, Kramer vs. Kramer, won the best-film award over Francis Coppola's masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. That injustice was followed the next year, when, equally inexplicably and insultingly, Ordinary People got the nod over Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.
Alas, the Oscars are in the news these days not so much for their persistent failure to recognize greatness but for failing to adequately recognize skin color; more precisely, because of this year's all-white slate of nominees. The obligatory charges of racism have been hurled and demands for a boycott duly issued.
Will Smith was among the first to jump on board, despite the fact he has himself been twice nominated for best actor. Al Sharpton, with his antenna ever sensitive to racial slights in the service of self-promotion, has called upon viewers to "turn the dial" to other fare during the Oscars broadcast. And Danny Devito nicely summed up the crude liberal line on all things pertaining to race when he said "It's unfortunate that the entire country is a racist country" (except, presumably, for the rather small part in it he occupies at any given moment).
Thus we are led to believe that ultra-liberal Hollywood is actually, beneath the surface, ultra-racist Hollywood.
About which a couple of observations.
First is that the "race card" is now being increasingly played against liberal targets. It is, after all, possible that no two swaths of American life are more dominated by leftists and pervaded by leftist orthodoxy than American college campuses and Hollywood, yet these have been the sites in recent months of greatest racial turmoil.
Conservatives have thus become bemused bystanders to the latest rounds of racial grievance-mongering; as longstanding critics of "political correctness," they are enjoying watching the left devour itself in a spasm of holier-than-thou righteousness and accusation and counter-accusation.
The right has become largely immune to the playing of the race card because perhaps the signature contribution of the Obama era to American political discourse has been to equate conservatism itself with racism. From the beginning, the left has treated any criticism of Barack Obama as motivated not by differences in values or ideology but the color of his skin (even if the president himself, deplorably, acknowledges that "not all" of his critics are so motivated, just, apparently, most of them).
Conservatives have therefore been excluded from polite company when it comes to discussion of racial matters; hence, that polite company, defined as morally superior liberals, now has nowhere to turn but inward, toward each other. With the right sufficiently (if unfairly) tarred by the racist brush, where else to find new victims than leftward?
The right doesn't take the race hustlers seriously, the left has no choice but to, which now makes them the easy mark for the hustle.
As for those racist Oscar voters, the Academy has already proposed purging the ranks of their old white (and, by definition, racist) males in favor of younger and more racially "diverse" members. But going beyond the effort to get the vote bean-count right by manipulating the voter bean-count, it is not clear in all the uproar what solutions to racist Hollywood are being offered.
The Oscars could, of course, and as in other walks of life, introduce some kind of racial quota system; a requirement that at least one of the nominees for the best actor, actress and director awards be black. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the current complaints lead in any other direction.
The problem is, of course, that any such quota system, apart from its moral odiousness, smacks of precisely the kind of tokenism that the left derides as an expression of white condescension. It also comes with an inherent ceiling--if you are guaranteed to get at least one black nominee, all you're ever likely to get is one, even in years when more might be deserving.
Things could become even more complicated when Hispanics, Asians, gays, Muslims and any of the other groups victimized by racist, sexist, homophobic white males begin to demand quotas as well. There is, after all, no reason why, once begun, the racial/ethnic bean-count suddenly stops with a particular "protected" group; rather, the underlying assumptions inexorably lead to a form of proportional representation for all as exquisitely and finely calibrated as possible.
And, going further, why stop with just the Oscars? Given that the legal doctrine of "disparate impact" is built on the notion that, in a society where racism was eradicated, every racial and ethnic group would be perfectly represented in every endeavor, wouldn't any circumstance (which would always be every circumstance) in which such a result didn't obtain be, by definition, de facto evidence of racism? So why not, in the interest of racial justice, mandate perfect racial and ethnic balance in everything, from symphony orchestras and high school debate clubs to NASCAR racing teams?
We all know, after all, that racism is the only reason there are no white full-time cornerbacks in the NFL.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/01/2016