White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights by Justin Gomer

Abstract

Reviewed by: White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights by Justin Gomer Megan Hunt White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights. By Justin Gomer. Studies in United States Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 252. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5580-2.) Neoliberal concepts of color blindness have hindered meaningful engagement with race since the 1970s. But amid ambiguous race-neutral discourse, white Americans found a conceptual space to visualize the racial conflict they [End Page 546] could no longer articulate. That space, according to Justin Gomer's White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, was the cinema. Gomer's analysis begins with Dirty Harry (1971) and Claudine (1974), which communicated divergent voices of color blindness and antistatism in the early 1970s. Color-blind marketing undermined Claudine's "black nationalist critique of the welfare state," while Dirty Harry's frequent implications of overblown state protections for criminals reflected white America's lurch to the Right (p. 47). Gomer highlights the latter film's explicit references to the Miranda and Escobedo Supreme Court decisions, the constitutional rights to counsel secured in the 1960s, as evidence of the film's concern with a bureaucratic "coddling of the accused" (p. 29). However, Cape Fear (1962) had offered a similarly cathartic engagement with white racial anxieties and increased civil rights protections for the obviously criminal almost a decade earlier. By the mid-1970s, continued battles over integration produced a coherent color-blind ideology, which Gomer convincingly argues is at the heart of individualist narratives like Rocky (1976). White northerners, celebrating Jim Crow's demise in the South while upholding exclusionary practices closer to home, strategically reframed white supremacy. They resented busing and affirmative action, and those who could adopted an increased identification with their immigrant ancestry, like Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, himself, sponsored by his friends at Shamrock Meats. Narrative and aesthetic choices in Rocky make it clear that its protagonist has not benefited from America's racist past. Rather, he is the hardworking, self-reliant descendant of immigrants, pitted against the entitled Apollo Creed, the African American champion Rocky is plucked from obscurity to fight, repositioning the spectacle of interracial boxing for the color-blind era. It is, Gomer writes, "one giant Bakke metaphor on the silver screen" (p. 81). Rocky and Apollo reunited in Rocky III (1982) to face a mutual threat from the urban ghetto. Apollo Creed, now the image of bourgeois respectability, provides color-blind credibility to Rocky's resentment of Clubber Lang's young Black upstart. As Gomer shows in an accessible and convincing account of 1980s political culture, Ronald Reagan was simultaneously providing White House credibility to previously localized white resentments. By the time he left office, Reagan had cemented color blindness as national creed, prompting Hollywood to reconstitute Black history through the white savior, a trope that readers are perhaps more familiar with than the neoliberal, color-blind individualist Gomer's book foregrounds. By the advent of the 1990s, color blindness was more than Hollywood's preferred lens. It became its approach to both the past and the present, shaping films as diverse as Glory (1989) and Dangerous Minds (1995). Here, Gomer expands existing explorations of the civil rights melodramas of the late twentieth century. But his book offers more than filmic analysis alone, providing a sociopolitical exploration of color blindness from contested idea to neoliberal ideology that would be useful regardless of whether it was applied to films. That Gomer provides such potent cinematic examples is a testament to the central premise of the book: that the conditions and consequences of the color-blind ideology warrant our attention in a multitude of fields. [End Page 547] Megan Hunt University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association