Navigating White Hollywood and the Pressure to Code-Switch

I make a living acting in the machine known as Hollywood — an industry that commodifies me but isn’t for me. An industry where if I am using my hands too much on camera, the director shouts in all seriousness, “Not so much of the ethnic hands!” “White hands, Chris, white hands,” I whisper to myself while smiling.

By the way — that is a true story.

The essence of what I do is put myself in spaces where I must be chosen, where I must be selected as worthy enough to portray this thing. Beyond the ability to act, a large portion has to do with whether I am physically and aesthetically appealing, and pleasing enough to a certain gaze. When you make a living off your desirability, is the power of your body ever just yours? My body has been turned into an object of desire by whiteness, and as long as the main decision-makers and check signers in Hollywood are white bodies, then I must be desirable to and for them.

This is why I always say that it is nice to receive fat checks (I have rent to pay), but nothing changes until I and people who look like me are signing them. In my opinion, this is the other side of the same coin of being seen as worthless. Because if I am not desirable in some way, then I am worthless. And I fear that if I am too radically different from what they have already deemed acceptable, then I might lose whatever status I have already worked so hard to achieve. I just might not survive.

I made a film about this for The New York Times in 2020. The film was about the paradox of “making it” in Hollywood: to succeed, you need to stand out from the crowd while assimilating to whiteness. You have to strive to be yourself while fitting in. And if you aspire to be like one of those leading men you grew up watching on TV, well, you better look the part. Step one: calm those curls.

This was in 2020 — the whispering of change was all around us. With the George Floyd protests, people seemed to have gotten the message: there’s a problem and the old ways are not working. Companies and Hollywood started talking about diversity and hiring DEI professionals, and guess what — it didn’t do much of anything.

While there’s been a lot of talk, progress has been modest at best. According to a 2020 Pew Research report, Latines accounted for half the US population growth between 2010 and 2019 and made up 18 percent of the population (this has since increased). When will we get to see our nation’s diversity reflected on our screens?

I guess until that happens we are forced to fit their model. I’d love to tell you I am 100 percent past caring what they think, but that itch of wondering if I am physically code-switching enough is always in me. I have been a series regular on a network television show. This is a difficult feat for a Dominican, Colombian Brown boy from Queens, and still, in the moments when I am not actively working, I question my own body before the system. I wonder whether I should take all those drug dealer, criminal, day player roles that are still so prominent on our screens.

We live in a world where bodies of culture are constantly asked to give up parts of ourselves in order to move forward. This isn’t new information but it’s worth reiterating. Black and Latine actors are constantly forced to change themselves.

This is our fight — the fight of loving and being ourselves. We fight to love and embrace our curls, our skin tones, and our ethnic features in a world that sells us the idea that simply being ourselves is not good enough. It’s a world that sells us the NoseSecret tool, often advertised as “plastic surgery without the surgery.” It is a plastic tubing that you manually insert and force into your nose to create a narrower, thinner, and more pointed shape. At only $25, it’s a steal!

We consider those who commit self-harm a danger to themselves and to society. We criminalize that act. But what about self-hate? Who is there to protect us from all the pretending we do for someone else’s gaze?

When I told my pops I wanted to play pretend for a living, that I wanted to be an actor, that I wanted to go to Hollywood, he said, “It’s gonna be tough, but look the part. Pretend. Fake it till you make it.”

I have pretended. But at what cost? I kept my hair short and I got the nose job my first manager told me to get. And it worked. I worked a lot more. That’s the sad part about all of this. What gets me is when I still hear white actors saying things like, “You’re so lucky. You’re Latin, everyone wants you right now. I’m just white. I got nothing.” Or the man I bought a piano bench from on Craigslist who said to me, “It’s great they’re looking for more minorities, but now I can’t get a role, you know?”

I took a scriptwriting class, and what I learned is a bit disheartening. The longevity of a show is built on the idea that its characters can never really change. For the most part, lead characters need to remain self-sabotaging and can never truly grow because then the show would change. Execs don’t like change. This is what we are shoving into people’s brains — that we are meant to be stuck in cycles. That we are meant to be trapped by our delusions, poor habits, old stories, old clichés, old abuses, old dogmas, old oppressions, and that that’s OK. But it’s not.

We must begin to ask ourselves: What images and stories have been placed deep into our minds around race and humanity, rights and fairness? What narratives have we been fed since the day we were born? For so long, Hollywood has denied people of color any depth, authenticity, and meaning because the only way you make a thousand movies a year is if you have a certain level of automation, and cliché stereotypes are part of that automation. Think about what would happen to the industry if it actually produced films that were nuanced, complex, and honest.

Imagine if every script session started with: “Does this story help bring humanity into that space? Does this story marginalize an already marginalized community? Is this story true? Does this person have to be white? Does this story represent society and race and class in an honest way? Does this story help us see and imagine a new, more cooperative and loving world?”

This reimagining must begin behind the camera first because we can’t be authentic in our storytelling if we’re not being honest about who is telling these stories. Casting up front will not change who is signing the checks.

I need Hollywood to make it commonplace and ordinary, not extraordinary. I’d like to see a Brown “When Harry Met Sally,” or an Afro-Dominican futurist fantasy with a bachata score, an Indian and Puerto Rican bromance buddy comedy, two second-generation South Asian kids saving the planet, a meet-cute romance drama about two young Cambodian American kids in college, and all where the Brown leads are just hanging out and talking and not making everything about race. Imagine if that was just commonplace, not exceptional, not a big deal, not the reason to make the movie — it just was.

William Blake called imagination the “divine vision.” It involves all the senses, it involves everything: the body, the speech, and the mind. I believe in the media’s power to start showing me something divinely different, so we can begin to imagine a new future. Television used to be a sign of everything that wanted to erase me, and now I have been a series regular on a Fox sitcom called “Call Me Kat” — curls and all. To be on TV, a medium I watched with so much awe as a child, feels pretty amazing. Though I must continue to ask: Am I just a guest who can be uninvited as quickly as he was brought in? Or am I an equal?

My goal has always been to use Hollywood as a vehicle for getting to a place where I could create the art I wanted to create, say the things I wanted to say, and hopefully help uplift others in telling their stories. It’s nice to receive checks, but the real power is in being able to sign those checks, and nothing changes until the people signing checks begin to look a lot different, and a little less like old, straight, white males.

It’s not about checking boxes and making sure people of color are cast. It’s about honoring the stories that allow these people to be so magnanimous and so worthy of being more than a device for your small-minded white stories. If we looked beyond checking boxes and actually began telling stories that represent what culture is, we might begin to see that.

Today, my relationship with code-switching has evolved significantly since that 2020 video. I’ve made a conscious decision to embrace and rock the natural texture of my curls unapologetically. Which is to say I have chosen and keep choosing to be myself. I need reminders of this, but it’s my baseline, where I come home to. If I change, it’s because a role that is honestly representative of society asks me to — not because some tired plotline needs another reformed gangbanger.

To my fellow Latines and people of color in Hollywood: stay vocal and assertive about boundaries and the representation you wish to see. Create your own art and tell your own stories. Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. This is why the lion must write.

And try not to just talk about supporting each other and breaking down barriers; actually put your money where your mouth is (you know who you are). Just because there are Brown/Black bodies in the room does not mean we cannot perpetuate harmful systems of power as well, or that we are not capable of exclusion. Are we committed to anti-racist work in all the spaces, no matter how uncomfortable it may make us? By uplifting one another and evolving who signs the checks, we can create a more inclusive and truthful representation of us. We can pave the way for future generations to see themselves on screen without having to compromise who they are. And we all deserve spaces of belonging.

The book of who we are is not a fixed text. It is flowing, it is fluid, it is expansive, we are shaping it, right here, right now.

Christopher Rivas is the author of “Brown Enough,” an exploration of what it means to be Brown in a Black/white world. He also hosts two podcasts: “Brown Enough” and “Rubirosa.” On screen, Christopher is known for his work on the Fox series “Call Me Kat,” opposite Mayim Bialik. His latest book, “You’re a Good Swimmer,” is about the enchanting journey of conception without gendered terms and inclusive of all family dynamics.