Bookkeeping racial stats feeds journalists’ vanity.
The Los Angeles Times coverage of this week’s Emmy Awards show immediately brought out that most tiresome phrase in contemporary journalism: “making history.” Across media, the clichéd formulation appeared in descriptions of actress Sheryl Lee Ralph’s ostentatious acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. It was an opportunity for the media to once again show its preference for agitating about race and gender. Lorraine Ali observed, “Ralph is only the second Black woman ever to win in this category, decades after Jackée Harry’s win in 1987 for NBC’s 227.”
The statistic itself is less interesting than the media’s tendency to “historicize” race and gender. Taking notice of a winner’s skin color and sex twists the event, turning the news into propaganda. This happens so often that casual readers of news may have stopped paying attention, which makes the event itself — and the phrase “making history” — meaningless.
L.A. Times writer Ali reports from the West Coast swamp that is the film and TV industry, where liberal sentiments and awards are promiscuously dispatched. Journalists who operate with “historical” interest do so to inflate the significance of their reporting. But the cliché “making history” has become a tool of intimidation. The term is not innocuous, nor always exactly true, but a politicized reflex of non-thinking, usually uninformed journos. It’s part of the way the profession has tipped arrogantly into being arbiters of social morality.
The “making history” phrase, possibly derived from the enthusiasm expressed by sports reporters instantaneously shuffling statistics, is suspicious when used carelessly. Entertainment writers who might not even admit to abetting radical cultural change follow the politically correct trend that in fact makes them irresponsible advocates more than reporters.
Political hacks do it, too, especially when they can reduce the ethnic identity of mixed-race, ethnically complicated politicians (whether Obama or Kamala Harris) to PC nuggets — i.e., using “Black” as a designation, no matter how imprecise, allows for the manipulation of popular sentiment.
Even entertainment coverage has become devoted to totaling race and gender quotas rather than assessing quality or achievement. The fact that Ralph’s Emmy speech, plus Zendaya’s and Lizzo’s wins, were for junk TV is overlooked by this tribal bookkeeping. Hack journalists keep readers devoted to such swamp practices as the Emmy Awards, pretending that ceremonies devoted to celebrity narcissism have serious value. They deny the embarrassment of solipsistic gloating.
Ralph’s acceptance speech included an a cappella performance of a song titled “Endangered Species,” a new low in award-show temerity. She twisted gratitude into grandstanding, retaliating against the struggles and hostility imposed by the showbiz profession. Inflating her personal success as social advancement (“I am an endangered species / I am a woman / I am an artist / And I know where my voice belongs”), Ralph imposed her vain concept of progressive change upon the viewing public.
There’s history to this performance: “Endangered Species” was first written and performed by the mediocre faux-jazz singer Dianne Reeves for her album Art & Survival, an example of Nineties race consciousness sold by minor performers imitating the conscientious jazz greats who preceded them (but in this case parroting Maya Angelou’s homespun ethnic feminism, “Phenomenal Woman”). Reeves’s race-pandering became official when George Clooney used her jazz kitsch in Good Night, and Good Luck, a hagiography of the radio and TV journalist Edward R. Murrow. It was another instance of self-righteous, political showboating, like Ralph’s Sprechstimme.
Writer Ali’s own exhibitionism extended to marking various Emmy wins as indications of “how far television has come.” But only so far: Ali reported that “the winners were still largely white, and from majority white shows.” This is how the media uses race consciousness against itself — and us. Ali questioned host Kenan Thompson’s performance of a theme-song medley from the series Friends, The Brady Bunch, and Game of Thrones as “mostly or entirely white until he inserted himself into their universe.” It’s despicable culture-writing to ignore that Thompson’s obvious showbiz savvy and celebration was not limited by his racial identity.
Every award show becomes an occasion for cheap “historic moments,” no matter that the record-setting occurs with cyclical frequency. It’s a sucker journalist’s beat, geared toward hype. Keeping the public in tallying mode is a low form of social engineering. When journos behave like gatekeeping historians, they are, in fact, breaking history.