Series What America Changed About Black History Hollywood as Historical Policy: Whitewashing, Mythmaking, and the Manufacture of National Memory

Abstract This paper argues that Hollywood functions as a state-adjacent institution that governs historical memory by shaping how the public understands violence, responsibility, and legitimacy. Through repetition, omission, and substitution, film and television do not merely reflect dominant narratives but actively manufacture national memory in ways that stabilize existing power structures. Drawing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black media scholarship and analysis of recurring cinematic tropes, the paper demonstrates how Black presence is erased, Black agency is reassigned to white protagonists, and systemic violence is sanitized across genres including war films, slavery narratives, civil rights dramas, and police procedurals. These narrative practices operate as cultural policy, producing public consent for injustice by preserving moral innocence and deflecting accountability. Situating media as a form of governance rather than entertainment, this paper shows how historical misrepresentation constrains political imagination and weakens demands for reparative justice. As part of Series — What America Changed About Black History, the paper contends that without confronting Hollywood’s role in manufacturing memory, efforts toward repair remain undermined by narratives designed to protect the nation from reckoning with its past. Publication Note This paper is part of the Series — What America Changed About Black History, a Black History Month research project examining how U.S. institutions shape historical memory, legitimacy, and accountability. Building on prior analyses of naming, documentation, substitution, and resistance, this paper focuses on film and television as instruments of narrative governance. By treating Hollywood as a state-adjacent institution, the paper analyzes how cultural production operates as historical policy—engineering public memory through omission, substitution, and sanitization. The series advances a structural critique of how national innocence is preserved and how demands for repair are constrained by narratives designed to manage rather than confront historical violence.