With all the Black Lives Matter protests happening all over the world companies have been quick to announce their support for Black people as the violence and racism has to stop as they as they say. There was one story that was really interesting as apparently the company Hallmark, that is known for creating a lot of TV shows, posted a message expressing how they support Black people in these times. This generated a ton of backlash at first just from the general public. They were expressing how the company doesn’t really use visible minorities in a significant way and so the message seemed fake.
Then news reports from people within the entertainment industry started to come out on how apparently they have always been told that this network refuses to use things such as interracial couples and many times they would hire people of color only to not use them at all. The reason for this is that people allege that companies like these often have an unwritten rule in the industry where they actively prevent say people of color in certain scenes because that’s not what the investors want. According to the reports too many don’t say anything for fear of being blacklisted.
I wouldn’t doubt if that’s true as businesses and industries usually have some kind of systematic bias or discriminatory practice that you can’t exactly outright say is true for obvious reasons. Of course with recent events a lot more people seem more confident to go ahead and blow the whistle I guess you can say. I think for Hallmark this will be an interesting case study to see what a business does now that in current times the pressure to not been seen as a racist per se is at an all-time high.
At this point the only real argument I can imagine would be that the shows they make largely revolve around eras where mixed couples wasn’t widely shown. So they are in a sense just trying to replicate the time. We’ll see if that angle actually works.