Amid conflict over perceived systemic injustice and police brutality, our cancellation-obsessed culture has decided to get rid of anything that could be seen as too overtly sympathetic to law enforcement. Cops, a long-running show that followed around on-duty officers, was pulled from television, as was Live PD.
Many black Americans in the film industry, however, have argued that simply “canceling” the supposed problem won’t make it go away. If Hollywood wants real reform, they said, it should expand its programming and invest in minority producers, screenwriters, and actors.
“That’s a pound of flesh that the powers that be are offering to make a public statement of how they’re contributing to the current conversation that at the end of the day means nothing as far as I’m concerned,” Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, the producer of S.W.A.T and Southland, told the Wall Street Journal.
Hollywood’s problem isn’t necessarily its depiction of law enforcement, Thomas argued. It’s the lack of “diversity of life experience, ethnicity, and worldviews.”
And this problem isn’t exclusive to networks where white people make up the majority. Even at Black Entertainment Television, the conversation is very one-sided, said Nneka Onuorah, a documentarian who worked at BET for several years. Some of the network’s programs told “the same old stories that we tell about ourselves” over and over again, she said.
“I felt that we needed to diversify the types of stories that we tell about ourselves and expand the narrative to a more diverse audience,” she said. “Society sees many stories of us in stereotypical ways. However, we are a multifaceted race of people. I wanted to show more of us.”
Moving forward, we’ll need to have hard conversations about diversity and equality that, quite frankly, are long overdue. “What we’re looking for,” said Thomas, “are productive actions moving forward, not who you canceled.”
