Discussions on cultural racism

By erasing discourses of race, new racism switched the focus from race to culture, originating a new type of racist ideology called cultural racism, which is utilized to explain social status differences between White and non-White people a product of cultural deficiencies rather than a product of White discrimination. Since cultural racism finds its legitimization on stereotyped ideas of what the essence of a culture is, the act of harmfully appropriating other cultures – that is representing them or using their elements improperly – becomes extremely relevant. Contemporary popular American cinema still tends to represent almost exclusively White perspective, without taking into account other cultures’ experiences or representing them problematically. Hollywood productions, like other media, contributed profoundly to spread simplified notions of race and stereotypes and in representing minorities and such misrepresentation and exploitations of minority groups’ cultures keep happening in Hollywood. A Qualitative Content Analysis and Foucaultian Discourse Analysis were conducted on 54 movie reviews to answer the research question how are cultural racism and cultural appropriation discussed and defined in American newspapers, magazines and movie reviews websites’ articles that are about six Hollywood movies (The Last Airbender; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; Exodus: Gods and Kings; Pan; Doctor Strange; Ghost in the Shell) that were released between 2010 and 2017? The results showed that references and discussions over issues related to cultural racism and cultural appropriation are not the primary focus of the articles, but are indeed present. Such discussions showed consciousness towards cultural racism and in some cases an open acknowledgment of the racial politics still being perpetuated in certain fields. Nevertheless, such acknowledgment is often expressed implicitly, in some cases followed by justifications or counterbalanced by positive reviews. The study also showed that the concept of culture is not brought forward often, while, on the contrary, there is higher presence of framing the discourses related to issues like misrepresentation and cultural racism in terms of race.