How Media Shapes Racial Identities
A Conversation with Powys Dewhurst (Interviewed by Kinnana Issa)
Powys Dewhurst, An independent filmmaker and a media stakeholder who has worked as a producer of forward-facing film and TV industry events in Canada in collaboration with film organizations, schools, TV broadcasters, film festivals, and media entities in Canada, the US and the UK, further serving as a board member of various film organizations. He works with young, underrepresented creatives and has sought to raise awareness of diversity and inclusion inequities in film and TV.
Powys is a movie geek who sees in the world of TV and film the power to transform lives, but cautions that it is also a double-edged sword. He is the kind of person all Henna friends have to know. He doesn’t hold back when it comes to supporting diverse film and TV creators and hopes young diverse filmmakers will look beyond the boundaries of what they believe is expected of them. On the occasion of Black History Month, Powys will be talking to Henna about the representation of race in the media, his personal experiences, and the contemporary Black history in the North American media, while reflecting on what brings diversified communities together.
To know Powys, we would probably need to know about his intimate relationship with the world of movies. “Growing up in the island of Barbados, I discovered a deep love for movies. Before my teens I was a bit introverted. My father had a little handicraft tourist shop in which he sold locally handmade items like grassmats, designs made of shells, local paintings and things of that nature. He also sold People magazine, in which I read about movies and TV production. One day, when I was about 11 or 12 years old,I had read that 1930s Hollywood acting legend Claudette Colbert was retired and living in Barbados. I found her phone number and telephoned her. She answered, but I was so nervous that I said it was a wrong number and hung up. This was my first illustrious experience with the movie industry. We had one TV channel in Barbados which was curated by the government. So everybody watched the same thing. If I wanted to watch anything else I would rent badly pirated VHS movies from a local vendor with the movies looking dark and the colours were muddy but I didn’t know it at the time and thought movies were supposed to look like that. I tried to watch everything from sci-fi, dramas, fantasy, Academy Award-winning films, classics, cartoons. There were no restrictions on what I could rent.”
After coming to Canada Powys became more attached to movies, even took part in making them: “I watched movies on laserdisc, at the Cinesphere, and home when I would drag 16mm projectors, film reels, and VHS over 30 kilometres on the bus, subway, rapid transit and pulling the movies by hand cart in the spring, summer, fall and frigid snowy cold of winter. I took screen education with a great high school teacher Mr. Ross who was infectious with his love for what he did, he introduced me to the work of the great Canadian animator, Norman McLaren. After learning more about film in high school screen ED, I took film courses at Ryerson, and eventually, I entered the film industry as a technician, filmmaker, and currently, my love and focus is developing young people and providing access, screenings, training and working with a range of film and TV entities to that end. As an adult, I’ve been fortunate to film and mentor in East Africa, and on lonely African plains at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, I’ve fallen asleep under breathtaking night skies to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A on a slowly dying laptop. I’ve had a small National Film Board immigrant fantasy film be chosen to represent Canada at World Expo 2010 at the Canadian Pavilion in China along with work from Denis Villeneuve and Norman McLaren and I’ve sourced and interviewed a range of industry veterans from Emmy and Academy Award winners, to technicians.”
Yet, it wasn’t easy to be a Black person in the industry, and sacrifices were made to get representation in the media “Whether real or performative, the last few years have been encouraging and brought about changes for underrepresented communities with the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others and the ensuing global outrage, being a major catalyst in a seemingly endless parade of injustices. Many BIPOC pioneers have been fighting for decades for this change, and many have lost careers in part because of it.”
Black History Month
It has become clear to Powys that the way Black people are often perceived isn’t the result of direct interactions, but rather due to the collective misconception fed by the media. He asks “Why do people occasionally cross the street when a Black person is walking along the sidewalk? Why do people grab hold of their purses or wallets when a Black person gets into an elevator or sits on a bus? When you ask if they have ever been attacked by Black people or hurt in any way, the answer is usually “no.” So why the visceral reactions? They don’t really know. Why are Black men on average given much longer jail sentences for the exact same crime as White men? Why are unarmed Black men shot by police in North America at a higher rate than any other group? Fear. Irrational, illogical, fear. Nurtured by over a century of movies, TV, newspaper editors, casting directors, authors, etc. Most of it is unconscious bias while on occasion it’s overt.”
As a media industry professional, Powys reflects on Black History Month and sees it as a time to reverse harmful perceptions about Black people: “I feel Black History Month is about repairing the damage. That’s how it’s most effectively used. Not just in triumph over trauma but in meeting and empowering people with positive revelatory ideas and imagery. It’s about excavating centuries of negative imagery and ideas presented about us and changing those perspectives. It works to help society think differently about Black people and also to counteract the damaging internalized perceptions of ourselves that we’ve ingested for centuries. Movies, TV, media, books, on a whole have done a terrific job over the last century of showing Black people as dangerous, thieves, lazy, criminals, fast-talking conmen, rapists, having less value than others. The further back you go, the more disturbing it becomes.”
One hit movie, in particular, shocked Powys. “Birth of a Nation, produced in 1915 and directed by D. W. Griffith, was a celebrated smash hit in the US and beyond. It portrayed the Klu Klux Klan as heroes and Black people as lazy, hostile, dimwitted, hyper sexualized killers in pursuit of innocent white families. It’s not a revelation that society is malleable and shaped by images. Decades of research has been written on media’s influence on society. A few months after the release of Birth Of A Nation, the second incarnation of the violent KKK terrorist group was formed. Media has had a powerful impact on shaping people’s thoughts and actions and even more so at the influential birth of cinema in which viewers were far less sophisticated in discerning what they were watching. However, as we’ve seen over the last several years and since the birth of social media, people still have a hard time determining truth from lies in the media they are digesting. I wonder if on a subconscious level they know what the facts and the truth is, but maybe they need the lie to reinforce their own beliefs and subsequent actions. While Birth of a Nation is indeed a landmark film with regards to inventing and developing filmmaking techniques we use today. I watched the movie twice in my early twenties and will never watch it again. It’s not clear if Birth of a Nation contributed to the massacres and lynchings that were prevalent during the 20th century, but and many other forms of media, did contribute to heightened anxiety about the criminality of Black men and we’ve undoubtedly internalized it.”
Despite the high achievements Black people have made, Powys sees this negative perception to continue informing public judgement: “This negative imagery of Black people informs hiring, sentencing, and work promotions. On a whole, our society doesn’t think of Black people as marine biologists or nuclear physicists or having a solid family unit. Some of my family are airline captains and instructors going on 30-40 years. They still hear of people who are wary about having a Black pilot fly them to their destination, just as they hear reservations about having a female pilot. Over time, movies and TV and books have shown us how pilots, bank managers, scientists, astronauts, Pulitzer-prize winning authors, university presidents and so on are supposed to look. We’ve all ingested those images and they inform our perception of the world. I work in media but it can be a truly destructive thing.”
Life Before Canada
Powys has lived in four countries: Dominica, Barbados, Antigua and Canada. He’s also a British Citizen. Before coming to Canada, race for him wasn’t a barrier: “As a kid in the Caribbean I was lucky to be immersed in diversity before I even had a word for it. I grew up around Black and White Caribbeans, Middle Easterns, South Asians, Indigenous Kalinago, British, Australian, Canadian and American expats families who were in the Caribbean on contract for a handful of years, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, European, among others. Everyone from all backgrounds went to certain cultural activities, church events and holiday river trips. For the most part, colour didn’t define us as it does in North America. However, class and nationality did.”
Film and TV Industry and Representation
As a youth, entering the Canadian film and TV industry wasn’t what Powys expected: “When I entered the industry it wasn’t diverse in Canada. I assumed that the diversity of the population would be reflected at all levels of industries as it was back home, but it would take some 25 years before that ball began to start rolling towards real change. I’ve also wondered why it took over a century for North American film and TV to recognize it was lucrative to create diverse content for an extremely diverse world. To reflect diversity they needed not just actors of diverse backgrounds, but writers, production executives, directors, and showrunners who have the eyes and lived experiences to speak to the authenticity of the content. And it doesn’t mean trauma on screen necessarily. Somewhere along the line someone convinced us or we convinced ourselves that the Black stories we want to see on screen should be about trauma, abuse, and degradation. I’ve seen real-world Black trauma for over 20 years. I’ve seen Black people on screen being shot, beaten, lynched, humiliated, violated, and minimized. There comes a point when it’s masochistic. I’ve been ingesting those images for over 20 years. It tells Black youth that it is the beginning and end of all they are. We have lives that we are trying to get through like everyone else and we have to broaden the stories we tell about ourselves. Even if they are about trauma, perhaps we have to say something else about it, or tell the story in a different way. Jordan Peele’s Get Out for example, is all about trauma and oppression and appropriation but it tells this in a fresh, mesmerizing and dynamic way. And as fun as that sounds, there are stories about Black love, Black joy, Black adventure, Black family, Black invention, Black science fiction and fantasy etc. that are dying to be told.”
Marvel’s Black Panther was a turning point for Black content on a global scale. Case in point: “Marvel’s Black Panther came out in 2018. It was intelligent. We were heroes and inventors portrayed with dignity. The movie had a Black director, and Black cast. It was an unprecedented hit and a shock to the film industry. Black people and the world on a whole flocked to see this movie. We weren’t playing slaves. We weren’t getting beaten and whipped on screen. At US $700 million Black Panther was the biggest grossing Marvel movie domestically ever, until it was unseated by the juggernaut Avengers: Endgame months later. Black grandmothers were going to see Black Panther. Pastors told their congregations to see the movie. People around the globe from Nigeria to the Caribbean finally had something, even for a moment, that portrayed Black people with courage, adventure, dignity. It was a movement. It was something we had never ever seen before. And thank God for Disney for recognizing the limitless possibilities. We weren’t slaves, gang members, prostitutes, wise talking conmen, maids. Similarly with Spider-Man Into The Spider-verse, the Sony animated film about a Black Spider-man, Miles Morales. They were smart, well written, mainstream entertainment that showed the world that we were queens and kings. Even if it was a comic book movie, those little things can be a balm to the mind of an underrepresented kid of colour, who unlike White kids, has gone their whole lives without seeing images of themselves like that on screen.”
Yet, he had to wait for a few years since he came to Canada before he saw some changes on screen “When I arrived I was surprised to see the lack of stories about me and people with my experiences. I arrived in Canada during the wave of Black American gang films in the earlier 1990s post Boyz N the Hood. I hadn’t been in a gang, none of my friends had been in a gang, but maybe we felt we had to adopt these stories. It doesn’t mean they weren’t good stories. It just meant they weren’t our stories. But I was Black. The people in these gang movies were Black. And so we went with it.”
Local Heroes in Film and TV
Powys believes in the importance of acknowledging both distant and recent pasts:“We tend to think of Black history in terms of the distant past, but the recent past needs to be celebrated for the doors that were pushed open and the efforts made for the rest of us. There were many great organizations, advocacy groups, NGOs, activists. There was Full Screen, The Black Film and Video Network. The 1990s was buzzing with people like Cameron Bailey, producers Karen King, Glace Lawrence, Claire Prieto, Lana Lovell, as well as BFVN president Dirk McLean and many others who sought awareness and equity within the film and television industries. Earl White is another unconventional, unsung hero who brought young underrepresented youth to the film industry for over 20 years, and unfortunately, his contributions have been largely minimized or ignored. Thankfully there are many entities who have been working for change over the years.”
Together, But Not the Same
As a person, Powys has a passion for diversity and seeing the different voicesof the world reflected on screen. Therefore he has been active with many initiatives to support BIPOC/IBPOC creators: “The term BIPOC or IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour), describes groups that have historically been marginalized and faced systemic injustices, and while our experiences are different, it unifies us and gives us strength when the load is too much to carry. There is a difference between our struggles but we unite in solidarity. I also believe in true diversity and inclusion. We have a tendency to go in one direction after a movement. After the MeToo movement, some organizations proudly thought they had achieved equity. However, they didn’t realize they only had white women on staff and excluded all other women. After the murder of George Floyd there was an increase in Black people in the film and TV industry which is wonderful however the world is diverse and other groups should be remembered for balance. It’s about full diversity and full inclusion at all levels of society. When I say diversity and inclusion I mean everyone, including, ages, genders, LGBTQ, people living with disabilities, women, men. The world. That’s what diversity and inclusion means. The world. It’s really not that complicated. Not one thing here and there. It’s remarkable how many think they are promoting diversity and inclusion by doing one thing. That ain’t it. I’ve lived my life trying to include everyone.”
Powys believes that standing hand in hand as BIPOC/IBPOC communities helps us deal with race-inflicted traumas. “Racism can bring trauma, and trauma can bring you to an early grave with the stress it inflicts on you physically, emotionally, and mentally. The anger, hopelessness, and frustration have physical effects too. It can be destructive to have to deal with it.”
He concludes that “Life is about knowing different people’s experiences as much as we can. To educate ourselves about these experiences is to minimize conflict. If everyone does this the world may work seamlessly. People say “life isn’t fair.” I’ve never understood nor accepted that. Why not? Fairness is an unattainable goal. Life will never be fair. But it’s the striving for fairness at all costs. That’s the win.”
