Antonio Gramsci was an Italian linguist, political philosopher and a Marxist. In the late 1920’s, Gramsci developed the Hegemony theory which now helps us to understand the representation of ethnic minorities in Western and British television and cinemas.
In short, Gramsci suggested that we live in a hegemonic culture in our capitalist society in which dominant groups maintain power and protect common class interests, namely, wealth and ownership, through the use of cultural institutions and alliances with other members of the elite. For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a "consented" coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force. Basically, certain groups stayed dominant through an underlying form of pressure (or ‘fist of force’) which reveals itself when there is a dilemma over who will have the ruling authority within a society.
We can use Gramsci’s hegemony theory to explain why ethnic minorities are represented the way they are on television and film. For example, ‘Attack the Block’ is a movie about a group of black youths who steal and use knives and general violence to send a message, but have their way of life on the block changed when the leader of the gang (Moses) causes an alien invasion to occur. Although the youths end on a positive light by destroying the aliens and saving their block, they are generally represented as the lower class thugs that they are expected to be. Hegemony coincides with this representation as the youths are shown to be the lower-class society members who are ruled by the authority of the police (who attempt to arrest the youths various times throughout the movie). It is interesting to note that the authority figures are white, along with the female theft victim Sam, and this relates to the hegemonic ideology that the white characters are dominant through their wealth and position in cultural institutions – the police obviously have more money than the youths due to their jobs, and working in institutions such as the police force and the NHS (since Sam is a nurse) ultimately gives them a more dominant place above the poor, unemployed youths. Furthermore, the white police officers can use their ‘fist of force’ or right to exercise power over the unruly youths to ensure that they stay in their lower position in the hegemonic structure.
But why do we accept this state of hegemony? Our British and Western culture has been trained since the dawn of capitalism to have a natural hierarchy in which the poor are less significant than the wealthy, and naturally we have come to accept it as the social norm. We are never going to be completely equal no matter how hard we try, as there will always be a state of dominant authority to ensure a state of peace amongst all the social classes.
