Representation matters:

Representations matters. Who you see on TV and in your everyday environment, whether it be friends, teachers, parents, cousins, celebrities, news anchors, entrepreneurs or yoga teachers, affects how you see the world. If you don’t see someone who looks like you who has the same skin colour, similar background, and has achieved something great, how are you supposed to be great? I’d venture to say it’s almost impossible. You don’t know what is possible if you can’t see it. If you can’t see someone who looks like you achieve incredible success, you're limited by what you can accomplish.

Our heroes are changing and it’s incredible because it’s showing people from around the world they have the ability to achieve whatever they want. Hollywood has historically controlled Western popular culture, which was run by white people. White people controlled the stories we told, how we told history, what kind of history we learnt, and whose stories mattered. It was what mattered to them. Why would white people in Hollywood tell black people’s stories the way it was happening? They told it from the perspective of how it was happening as the ruling class, but it wasn’t from the perspective of how black people experienced it.

Look at 12 Years a Slave. A fantastic movie that discusses what it’s like to live in slavery. Such an important movie. Then you look at old Disney movies and it’s sometimes hard to fathom how racist they were. I mean the guy running it all, Walt Disney, was a racist, if you choose to believe his grandniece. These racist tropes have been ingrained in culture for generations because that’s how white people rationalized slavery. They looked at black people as lesser than even animals who had inferior intelligence with larger muscles who could be good labourers. Because white people were the original colonizers and colonialists who had weapons like guns that people in the savannah couldn’t build, they used their power to control people.

White people controlled the world for centuries. It was mostly the British in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but before them it was also the Dutch and the French. That’s not true for all of history because you had Genghis Khan, the Chinese, the Byzantines in the modern day Middle-East and the Ottomans, but most of today’s superpowers are born out of predominantly white European cultures. When the Europeans came into power and controlled the media and what populations saw every day, they could control the stories that were told. They could control how history was being written.

Look at the Tulsa race massacre. A lot of people don’t know this ever happened. White supremacists burned and lynched people in Tulsa, Oklahoma for what people called Black Wall Street where there were thriving black businesses. John Oliver quotes this in his episode about US history. There’s a clip from a black man from Tulsa who didn’t even know what happened in his backyard (starts at 11:45). It’s because the massacre was largely omitted from local, state and national histories. No one knows about it because we were never taught about it. If we were never taught about it based on what governments want us to know about, think about how much we really don’t know about history. It’s like people in China not knowing about the Tiananmen Square massacre or Americans never knowing about 9/11.

There are so many people’s stories in history that will never be told and that’s really sad. We decide our lives based on the stories we hear about the world and the ones tell ourselves. Everyone likes a good story because it’s how we connect. We use stories to evoke emotion in other people and get them to understand our perspective. If the stories we’ve told for 100+ years in western culture have always been one sided and from a colonialist/imperialist perspective, then are we telling everyone’s stories?

No, we’re not.

This is why I’m so excited about the next few decades because we’re now hearing stories from all over the world. The Internet has allowed people to tell their own stories. They don’t need traditional media and Hollywood to tell their story, they can tell it themselves. Netflix has capitalized on this based on understanding that the world is much bigger than America. Hollywood has been so hyper focused on the US market that it has missed out on the opportunity to create local stories in specific countries. Hollywood’s hold on popular culture is breaking.

We’re seeing more and more countries’ domestic entertainment industries exploding. Look at Bollywood and Kpop. These are mega industries that dwarf Hollywood. The reach that some of these movies and music have is unbelievable. Don’t get me wrong; all the stories coming from those places are built on systems very similar to Hollywood. We saw this in Bollywood with the recent suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput who killed himself because he said Bollywood had too much nepotism, which is true. If you get to be an elite, you’re going to do everything in your power to maintain the status of you and your progeny in that elite class. You don’t want outsiders coming on board.

But the Internet is democratizing everything. Now people can collaborate and create incredible movies with their phones, some editing software and smart direction. More stories are being told that we’ve never seen before. We understand the human experience in a way that we’ve never seen before, especially in Western culture. More movies are being made by people who are not white talking about stories that are not white. I love a good American classic like American Pie or Shawshank Redemption, but the context, environment, dialogue and social underpinnings of that movie are white and American. We haven’t told the story of a black woman struggling in poverty that has beat the odds and raised her children into exceptional people. We haven’t seen a popular movie become that.

Look at typecasting. People from specific backgrounds have been assigned basic roles based on the colour of their skin or race because that’s how white people have seen them. Indians being cab drivers or owners of gas stations, black people as poor and doing drugs, Middle Eastern characters as violent and terrorist. These things have real consequences because people assume everyone from that race is that person they’ve seen in the movies. They’re not smart enough to understand stereotypes that have been perpetuated by the mass media that they have been conditioned for so many years to believe. They don’t think Indians can be CEOs, black people can be doctors, or Middle Easterners can be entrepreneurs because they don’t know those stories.

Now, those stories are being told. We’re seeing more diverse stories from various different countries. I saw parts of a Nigerian rom-com Netflix made the other day, which is amazing. I’m sure that movie has done exceptionally well in Africa because it’s a local story with local actors who Africans can look at and relate to. It’s not white people trying to be black or Native American which has happened so many times in the past. It’s real people.

The best example I think of with regards to representation is Black Panther (#WakandaForever). Bob Iger talked about this on a recent podcast with Reid Hoffman that he knew Black Panther was going to be a mega hit because of how much it meant for so many people. If you think about the amount of people on the Earth who have never seen a superhero that looks like them, it’s insane. Billions of people have always thought of superheroes as white. Until Chadwick (RIP King). Chadwick did a fantastic job but it wasn’t just his acting in the movie, it was the symbol he represented. He showed people it was possible to be a black superhero. He inspired a generation of kids who saw for the first time someone who looked like them become a superhero.

Look at the Obamas in the US. How much they’ve inspired black and minority kids to reach for the top, not just in America but also around the world. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you can’t hold the highest office in the world. It showed young kids that being president is a possibility. This never existed before.

When you think about all the people around the world that are not white, it’s more than white people. Just India and China alone. Those people have only seen white superheroes when they watch Western media. Now, having people who are not white play superheroes like Chadwick, they are inspiring people in a way we’ve never seen before. That’s super exciting.

I wanted to write this as well because of what’s recently happened with the Royal family. Meghan Markle had her bombshell interview with Oprah last night and I couldn’t help but think of the repercussions of what the Royal family had done by pushing her out. As Harry said in the interview, given the size of the commonwealth and that it’s almost all non-white countries, the monarchy had an amazing chance to embrace Meghan and her mixed-race background to further strengthen the monarchy. She was a symbol and emblem of how it was possible to be a princess. She represents black excellence. Yet the monarchy tossed her aside and did the exact same thing they did with Diana. You could argue that it wasn’t her race that pushed her out as they did the exact same thing with Diana, but race was definitely a factor. They asked about Archie’s skin tone before he was born. Given the history of the monarchy, an institution that has existed for over a thousand years that has always been white, any change to that feels threatening. They’re thinking is so old-fashioned and by not adjusting with the times, they’re threatening to become irrelevant in the commonwealth. Many countries still appreciate the commonwealth because of what the Queen has done over the last century but when she dies, are countries from around the world who have black citizens going to appreciate the institution that was racist to their only mixed race member? I’m not so sure.

This is why representation matters. Seeing people who look like you inspires you to be better. It shows you it’s possible to be something great. I saw it with my own dad. He was the only brown guy in the old rich white industry that is corporate finance and yet he used that to his advantage. He loved being an outsider and being doubted because he knew he was just as capable as everyone else. His path is so inspiring because he was a symbol of greatness. He showed me I can be anybody I want and I’m just as capable as everyone else, even if I don’t look like them. I got lucky because I had someone like that in front of me. For many people, they don’t have amazing role models in their immediate lives so they look to popular media for their role models. For so long, the role models they looked up to never looked like them. Now that’s changing, and it’s so exciting.

Representation matters.