He Looks Like a Big Flag

This chapter traces the articulation of colorblindness as a coherent ideology around the issues of busing and affirmative action in the years between 1974 and 1978. The chapter offers a close reading of Rocky, highlighting the manner in which the film offers race-conscious images and implications to colorblind political discourse. Just as the political struggles over integration produced a coherent colorblind ideology, they also, through Rocky, reflected the first appearance of Hollywood’s colorblind aesthetics. Rocky was instrumental in shaping colorblindness, which was fundamental in the opposition to affirmative action and busing. This analysis of Rocky highlights the integral role Hollywood played in both the white backlash of the late 1970s and the articulation of colorblindness. The chapter then turns to the intersection of the rise of colorblindness and neoliberalism. Ultimately, it argues that neoliberal thought gained momentum in the 1970s because it offered solutions to two problems: first, to the economic sluggishness of the decade, and second, perhaps more importantly, to the broad “problem” of excessive government intervention and to matters of racial inequality specifically.

Introduction

This section offers an overview of the history of the racial ideology of colorblindness, beginning with it’s first use in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision. It then explains the difference between colorblind ideology and colorblind rhetoric. Drawing on theories of racial formation, cultural representation, and discursive transcoding, the chapter outlines the theoretical my argument regarding the role of Hollywood in shaping colorblindness. It then provides an overview of the scholarship on colorblindness before outlining the book’s major arguments.

Lord, How Dare We Celebrate

The final chapter examines teacher films, those movies in which a (typically) suburban white woman accepts a job teaching student of color in low-income urban neighborhoods. Although the late 1980s and 1990s certainly do not mark the first instances of teachers as protagonists in American cinema, it was during these years that films centered around white teachers and their inner-city nonwhite pupils became increasingly popular and developed specific themes and tropes that were inherently informed by the logic of colorblindness. This analysis of this genre is situated, most notably the 1995 film Dangerous Minds, within the context of the War on Drugs, urban blight, the dismantling of affirmative action, and, most importantly, neoliberal educational reform in arguing that colorblindness ultimately produced entirely new film genres that are inherently colorblind.

I Can’t Wear Your Colors

This chapter examines Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term, the rise of the War on Drugs, and Rocky III (1982). Reagan took office hopeful that he could ban affirmative action and stop school desegregation orders by reframing racial discrimination as an individual rather than a group is- sue. With this, Reagan’s Justice Department developed a politics of colorblind neoliberalism. Reagan also ramped up the War on Drugs, which targeted low-income black communities and relied on resurrecting popular media representations of urban blacks as animalistic criminals in need of discipline and punishment by the state. Rocky III engages Reagan’s War and, in so doing, reveals that although colorblindness in many ways represented a new racial discourse in America—one based in racially neutral language and neoliberal notions of individualism—beginning in the 1980s it increasingly relied on very old tenets of antiblackness.

Keep Away from Me, Mr. Welfare Man

This chapter examines Third World Cinema’s first film, Claudine, within the context of the emerging colorblind ideology and widespread antistatism of the early 1970s. It begins with an overview of the racialization of welfare discourse beginning in the 1960s. The chapter then analyzes the film through three lenses. The first is TWC’s larger philosophy, rooted in the integrationist ethos of the civil rights movement. The second is a close analysis of the film itself, focusing on how the movie offers a black nationalist critique of the welfare state and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that includes a direct rebuke of colorblindness. Finally, despite TWC’s civil rights origins and the film’s race-conscious black nationalist politics, the film’s marketing catered explicitly to colorblind sentiments, thereby contradicting the racial critique of the film.

Conclusion

The conclusion situates the book’s analysis amid contemporary controversies, including the 2016 election of Donald Trump and #OscarsSoWhite. It explores how contemporary black filmmakers continue to use film to contest antiblackness and white supremacy on and off Hollywood movie screens, in front of and behind the camera.

The Law Is Crazy!

This chapter examines the intersection of colorblindness and antistatism in New Hollywood exploitation films of the early 1970s. Focusing on Dirty Harry (1971) and Coffy (1973), the chapter explores how the success of New Hollywood relied in part on its ability to function as a laboratory for the development of colorblind ideology. Together, these films, similar in genre but marketed to vastly different audiences, reveal the disparate ends colorblind rhetoric served in the first half of the 1970s. Both appealed to emerging colorblind sentiments and helped shape the antistatist ethos of the early decade while reinforcing popular and dehumanizing notions of blackness. That ethos provided the necessary foundation on which colorblindness would gain traction in the ensuing years.

We Are What We Were

This chapter explores a spate of civil rights and slavery dramas produced in the late 1980s and 1990s—most notably Glory (1989), The Long Walk Home (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), and Amistad (1997)—against the evolution of the Reagan administration’s position on the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. It aims to deepen our understanding of movies commonly labeled “white savior” films. White savior critiques often miss the deep historical context and intricate role Hollywood has played in anti–civil rights maneuverings. Beginning in the latter half of the 1980s, both Reagan and the movies frequently represented civil rights and abolition as driven by a colorblind white ethos. For Reagan, the efficacy of this position was clear; for Hollywood, perhaps less so. Yet together, the reimagination of colorblind black freedom struggles by both factions proved integral to the growing influence of colorblindness, which had become and would continue to be the driving force behind the dismantling of key civil rights programs in the post–civil rights era. As colorblindness became increasingly influential, Hollywood performed the vital task of reimagining an American past in which colorblind white heroes were at the center and colorblindness was responsible for the abolition of slavery and the victories of the civil rights movement. Together, Reagan and Hollywood’s dramatizations of black freedom struggles in the late 1980s and 1990s positioned colorblindness as an enduring quality of American whiteness and insisted that colorblind logic should inform the country’s legislative future.