“Cover-Your-Ass” Tokenism or Meaningful Collaboration?

#OscarsSoWhite and the Summer of Racial Reckoning Sparked a DEI Revolution, But Only So Far.

For Documentary Magazine, I have a new article that was recently published about a subject I had been thinking about for the last couple of years, sparked by conversations with different people specifically in the documentary industry, but I think it applies to lots of areas of the business: It’s the recent trend of more people of color and underrepresented voices being hired in the entertainment business, but the very real question that underlines those hires: How many of these instances are merely “box-checking,”or to “cover your ass,” or “documentary beards”—to use phrases that I heard repeatedly—and how much of the time is it to actually better and deepen a project?

“Daughters” is one of several high-profile docs co-directed by a white and Black filmmaking team.

My intention is not to re-litigate the debates around certain projects such as the docuseries “Tiger,” which was criticized for having two white directors, but to interrogate a practice that has great promise and potentially good intentions for the industry, which is diversifying its ranks. By all accounts, for example, “Sugarcane,” directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, was born specifically out of a longstanding journalistic relationship with the filmmakers. And similarly, as Sam Pollard told me, his partnership with filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir goes back some 30 years, yielding a fruitful and mutually respectful working collaboration.

But for every positive example, there also seems to be just as many negative examples, where producers and filmmakers have felt like they were being used as tokens. Erika Dilday, the AmDoc executive director and POV executive producer, puts the number at about “50/50,” she said, suggesting that many people still remain clueless. Or as Brad Lichtenstein admitted to me, “I have definitely been in the room more than once where someone says, ‘I really feel like we need someone Black here, or we’re never going to get funding if we don’t have someone Black.’” Such decisions, then, are not about creative or artistic impulses, but capitalist calculations in the wake of the industry’s supposed racial awakening.

In the interests of keeping the article focused, which I think goes into some great detail into the complexities of the situation, and I should give a big thanks to people like Erika, Brad, Jess Devaney, Yoruba Richen, Marcia Smith, and others for being candid with me, there are two points that I didn’t include, which I think are worth mentioning here.

Documentary producer Jess Devaney, who runs Multitude Films, makes the necessary argument that even if the industry is trying to find storytellers who are closer to their stories and their subjects, that doesn’t account for the fact that lots of filmmakers who are “black and brown and queer and disabled filmmakers don’t only want to make films that look just like themselves,” she said. “Those of us are advocating for representational authorship are not trying to reduce storytelling to those subjects whom only we share experiences and identities.”

The other point, which probably requires an entirely new article in the future, is that multiple people told me this newly enlightened movement toward hiring diverse directors and crews may have already peaked, with corporate DEI executives being shown the door and DEI initiatives being shuttered. If the doc business is operating at roughly, say, an estimated 60% of what it was just a couple of years ago, as someone suggested to me, that’s a whole lot less work for everybody, especially for those who had historically been on the margins. As Firelight’s Marcia Smith told me about the momentary blip of new opportunities they had been seeing, “Most of the people with whom I spoke about the new money we were offered advised me to accept it while we could because the offers weren’t going to last.”

Indeed, in times of industry retrenchment and cost-cutting, things like diversity, morality, and equity may be less of a priority. As we move forward in this new climate, I hope these discussions can fuel more conversation and accountability.