Each time American Idol begins a new season I usually only watch the audition clips. Sometimes I’ll check out the actual competition and listen to the performances and see who gets voted off, but I’m more entertained watching the auditions. I’m very clear that one of the reasons I’m entertained with the auditions is because I like to hear the songs selected, performers comments, judges reactions, and overall search for finding new talent. I am however, one of those viewers who is overly compassionate for the contestants. For example, I’ve been known to cover my eyes for a contestant who is singing poorly in embarrassment for them and tear up at times for folks who genuinely are excited and overwhelmed when they get selected to move on to Hollywood.

One of the things I’ve said for years about American Idol, is that it is one of the few shows were we get to see working-class and working poor White people represent themselves. Do you remember the last time you heard a working-class and/or working poor White person on television? The last time I remember hearing from them I can name on one hand: Diane Sawyer’s special on Appalachian Whites which she called “Hidden America” , when the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse occurred in August of 2007.  Prior to that there were two other mines that collapsed in 2006 , one in Virginia and the other in Kentucky, and after that the working-class and poor Whites who could not leave their homes in the Gulf Coast area during Hurricane Katrina. These were the last times I remember, aside from American Idol; I’m sure there were others in some regions, but not here in NYC (interesting how I blocked out the entire election campaign).

My point it that it is not often we hear from working-class or working-poor Whites in mainstream media. American Idol is one of the only spaces that feature them. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, contestant Vanessa Wolfe from Tennessee:



All four judges loved Vanessa; they think she is authentic, although ill prepared for the audition. Yet she gets through to the next round to Hollywood. My understanding of what the judges thought her authenticity was about her class and geographic location. Each judge says they will choose “the country girl” except for Simon who says “yes to YOU Vanessa.” Vanessa is authentically and unapologetically a young White woman from a working-class family from the US South. There are many similarities I share with Vanessa. For example, when she began to share of her anxiety at the 33-second mark she says, “I’m so nervous I know the judges are high profile people and I don’t want them to look down on me or nothing like that. What’s life without a risk or two?” I know, deeply and intimately know that feeling of fear of having “high profile people” look down on me for who I am and where I’m from.

However, immediately after Vanessa we are introduced to Jason Hamilton from Alabama when host Ryan Seacrest discusses people’s hopes of turning their luck around and changing their lives. It is Jason’s story that is parodied in ways that immediately made me uncomfortable.
As Jason shares with Ryan his survival of three brushes with death, the creators of American Idol hired actors to create what they coined “cheap dramatizations” of Jason’s survival. You can watch these at the 5:30 minute mark on the clip above.

What struck me was the overt classism, elitism, regionalism*, and condescension in these “cheap dramatizations.” If you watch carefully you see how the images and environments Jason shares are created in very problematic ways. For example, when he shares his survival of a childhood illness his grandfather diagnosed, the person is wearing a baseball cap and picks the baby/doll up with one arm and dangles it in the air. This I find a commentary on the parenting of working-class White people in the US South. The second scenario they have the actor portraying Jason wearing suspenders that make him walk and look uncomfortable, his friend has a mullet hairstyle (and not in a “mod/fashion” way), and they are shooting at cans with “Jason’s” mouth gaping open. The final skit was of Jason almost getting run over by a vehicle. We are led to believe the person driving the vehicle is drunk and cannot drive straight while “Jason” runs for his safety.

I understand that people must sign a consent form to be filmed; yet I wonder if that consent form includes parodying the lives of potential minors (Jason says he’s 26, yet not all American Idol participants are over 18)? It is one thing for me to find entertainment in people enjoying or standing up for themselves, it’s another for me to enjoy laughing at them because they are poor or from the US South. The montages or skits of participant’s lives do not entertain me. It is one thing to interview the singing hopefuls and have them speak about their own experiences, it’s an entirely different one to recreate, with actors, an experience a singing hopeful has shared.

I began to wonder: who else is upset about these representations? Is there a time when we, people of Color, activists, media makers recognize that any form of classism, elitism, regionalism is hurting all of us? Who has their fist in the air for working-poor and working-class Whites in the US when treated the same way we, people of Color and working-class people of Color, are in the media?

Now, before folks start confusing a few things, such as how working-class and working-poor White people were represented by the Diane Sawyer piece, which I believe, although community members spoke for themselves, that Sawyer’s approach and lens she used was not one extended to any other working-class racial or ethnic community as argued by some activists. Also, I think it’s important not to confuse our biases towards working-class and/or working-poor Whites or people of Color from the US South with the point I am making (and being born and raised in the Maryland/DC area, which is below the Mason Dixon line and thus in the US South, I know many of those biases).

Just as we examine what we learn, how our ideas are influenced and how we are socialized by the media with regards to specific topics such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, poverty, citizenship, safety, violence, and sex/uality; what are we learning about working-class and working-poor Whites from US media?

As I realized I needed to write this piece I was taken back to a book I read a few years ago in a graduate seminar I took at the University of Maryland when Dr. Patricia Hill Collins was appointed to the Sociology Department. This class was called Critical Race Theory. I was one of about 15 graduate students who were allowed to take this course. We read a book by Puerto Rican Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva called “Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States.”

Bonilla-Silva conducts several interviews over a period of time about people’s thoughts regarding race in the US. Part of his research is devoted to talking with White people from various class backgrounds and geographic locations. What drew me to remembering this text for this article was this finding of his:

“…[Y]oung, working-class women** are the most likely candidates to be racial progressives. This finding contradicts the claims of most of the media and scholars (from Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality onward), who contend “racists” are poor or working-class whites.  These commentators contend poor whites project their fears, their sense of losing out, and their concerns with demographic, civil, and political changes in America onto racial minorities” (p. 132).

You see, I remember being told that working-class and working-poor White people were rarely on television or interviewed in the media because they do not have the knowledge or ability to mask their bias and racism. The stereotype that working-class and working-poor Whites are all racists regardless of geographic location is erroneous especially based on what Bonilla-Silva found. The idea that people who may control several media outlets in the US are “educated” and racially White, make the decision based on this stereotype that working-class and poor Whites are so “ignorant” that they would be overt in their bias and that it would wreak havoc (as if people of Color, or anybody else really thought racism no longer existed!) is clear to me. See how those messages are constructed? How stereotypes can lead to silencing groups of people? When I read Bonilla-Silva’s book I realized this stereotype is deep and still oppressive. He states, “[p]reliminary analysis of survey and interview data from these two projects suggest that younger, educated, middle-class people are more likely than older, less-educated, working-class people to make full use of the resources of color-blind racism***” (p. 71). This is a great example of how power is misused and affects us all.

Bonilla-Silva writes:

“In this chapter I profiled white racial progressives…I found that young, working-class women are more likely than any other segment of the white community to be racially progressive. They were more likely to support affirmative action and interracial marriage, have close personal relations with minorities in general and blacks in particular, and understand that discrimination is a central factor shaping the life chances of minorities in this country. Most also admitted that being white is an advantage in this country” (p.144).

And we come the ideology and existence of privilege and White privilege. Bonilla-Silva’s research speaks to this ideology and, as I often share with my students when we discuss this topic, White privilege is not the same for all White people. Let’s take Vanessa, the American Idol singer who was advanced to Hollywood; there are some privileges she has, like her families ability to get her from Tennessee to Atlanta for the audition, the ability to pay for that travel (although we do not know how they arrived in ATL, it could very well have been the bus versus a private car), she is a US citizen, can speak English as her first language, and has at least one parent who loves, cares, supports and shelters her. However, in her interview she discusses the one “good” dress she has is the one she is wearing and purchased for under $5, her excitement over the reality that she will be on an airplane for the first time in her life to get to Hollywood, her privileges, exist but are minimal in comparison, to say some of mine.

Some may argue that Vanessa still has her Whiteness, and that in the US is very much a privilege/commodity/asset. What I would like readers to deconstruct is that Vanessa’s Whiteness is very much tied into her class, geographic location, citizenship, language, age, and gender identity and expression. Her privileges are also tied into these things. She is not just a White girl, she is more than that and thus more complicated. We see a complicated version of Whiteness presented in her story, and then we see another version of Whiteness, not very different from Vanessa’s, in Jason. He is male, working-class, has certain religious beliefs, from the US South, yet he is targeted and his life “cheaply dramatized” to humor viewers. What do we gain from laughing at working-class and working-poor Whites in this country? I think we lose more than we gain.

So who is going to stand up for the Vanessa’s and Jason’s we see (mis)presented in the media? Are we going to ignore them because they are White? Or do we realize that Media Justice is about recognizing and eliminating bias of all forms; educating ourselves and when we can, others; using the power we have as media makers to recreate the messages and representations of our communities and ourselves? Oppression in any form towards any group does nothing but continue to violate us all.

If you are compelled to write to Fox TV and express your concerns about this (mis)representation you can reach them the following ways:

 

Email: askfox@foxinc.com

Snail Mail that goes to the stars and producers:

American Idol

P.O. Box 900

Attn: FOX BROADCASTING Publicity Dept.

Beverly Hills, CA 90213-0900

*I want to thank the many scholars and intellectual activists I have in my network who helped me think about what terms and phrases would capture what is occurring within this specific marginalization/oppression/stereotype of people living in and from the US South. I will use their initials to identify them as I did not ask permission to share their full names: Thank you to P.S., E.G., B.K., K.B., M.G.S., A.P., and S.H.

** Bonilla-Silva’s qualitative interviews included transgender women and their beliefs and values are included in these findings.

***I am not a fan of the ablest term “color-blind racism” as it positions people with disabilities as being the “same” as people who embrace a race neutral ideology, which is a form of racism. I use the term because it is a direct quote. Instead, I will use the term “race neutral/ality.”