Quentin Tarantino's latest exploitation bonanza, Django Unchained, is exploding in theatres across the US – and it's sparking a firestorm of commentary about race, storytelling, and cultural appropriation in the process. As Ismael Reed pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the film, ostensibly about black narratives and resistance to slavery, was produced by the Weinstein Company – a white-headed company. Reed also noted that the film depicts a specific image of black communities and their struggles, which is interpreted through a white lens; the end result has some seriously questionable elements. Debate about the film has turned into a major talking point in a number publications large and small, with editorials in defence and critique of Django Unchained laying out their case for readers, while one of the film's stars, Samuel L Jackson, highlighted the discomfort over the frequent use of a racial epithet in the movie when he challenged a journalist to say the word out loud. Fellow filmmaker Spike Lee has notably boycotted the movie.
The debate certainly hit upon a larger issue: the tendency for people in positions of social and cultural power to tell the stories of minorities for them, rather than allowing minority communities to speak for themselves. Such narrative dominance is often exerted in the name of a good cause, like "awareness" or "getting the story out there".
Look at the "development porn" that surrounds conversations about Africa, for instance; the entire continent is often viewed as a monolith with a singular experience, and then projects like the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's Half the Sky create an image of uniformly oppressed and miserable women, playing upon western perceptions of what places like Africa look like.
Kristof, of course, has built up a sizable empire around exploitative "suffering porn", featuring miserable women of the global south and himself as the Great White Saviour, but he's not alone. Look at the depictions of Malawi in discussions about Madonna's high-profile adoption (and contrast that with Binyavanga Wainaina's sharp, incisive How to Write About Africa essay, which skewers western narratives about the continent). Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire showed us chipper orphans in a development porn-esque version of India; much of the media westerners encounter of the global south is produced by white people, for white eyes, featuring white voices.
This isn't limited to the global south, of course; Detroit has featured heavily in US-based poverty porn, as has Appalachia, over the voices of actual residents of these regions.
Meanwhile, the experiences of the populations being spoken for are ignored. The Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee in Mighty Be Our Powers, for example, noted that when she talked to Congolese women about the issues that affected them most, the response might have surprised westerners. Accustomed to hearing stories about rape and brutality in Congo, western minds might have expected to hear "rape" described as the number one issue. Instead, political participation was identified as the primary issue, followed by economic empowerment. Rape was number four.
These women pointed out that economic and political empowerment was the path to self-determination and more rights for women. Why, then, would rape be viewed as the most pressing problem by the west? Because Congolese women had learned that the only way to get aid and assistance was by talking about rape.
Counteractions to dominant narratives are few and far between – and when they do appear, they're usually discounted, because they don't fit with the existing storyline. In fact, there's considerable resistance to communities attempting to take back their own narratives; take, for example, the tension between sex workers and abolitionist feminists who claim to be advocating for them, but actually put them at greater risk of harm. With friends like these ...
In the fast-moving world of journalism, the issue can be particularly fraught, as editors need stories to run quickly and rely on a network of known writers and contributors, many of whom occupy positions of social privilege. When those then become the default voices presented in the media, it perpetuates imbalances.
As a writer, I'm often forced to take on a story that I perhaps shouldn't be telling, and I write it in the awareness that if I don't cover it, it's unlikely it will be covered at all (often because a writer from the community under discussion won't be sought out, even if I provide recommendations and contact information for possible choices). I work under pressure to locate sources from within the community, taking advantage of underutilised tools designed to help people do just that. SheSource, for example, a project from the Women's Media Centre in the US, is a massive database of sources with a vast breadth of expertise to draw upon. It's free and open to anyone, making it easy to locate a potential source or writer with just a few clicks.
Such resources make it easily possible to seek out the people best qualified to comment on specific issues: members of those communities themselves. This requires, however, that privileged voices step down to make way for minorities, ceding positions of authority and power. Are they ready to do that?
