UCLA Social Sciences Dean Darnell Hunt

I’d Like to Have Super Speed Like the Flash

Photo by Aaron Salcido.

Darnell Hunt is Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is also Professor of Sociology and African American Studies. He previously was Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, and also served as lead author of UCLA’s 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Hollywood Diversity Reports. Before taking part in a Zócalo/UCLA panel discussion titled “Will Black Panther Really Change Hollywood?” at the ArcLight Hollywood, he spoke in the green room about Ralph Bunche, “The Wire,” and the pushback he got when he first started reporting on diversity in Hollywood.

Q:

What superpower would you most like to have?


A:

Super speed like The Flash.


Q:

What dessert do you find impossible to resist?


A:

Carrot cake. Sometimes it can be too sweet, but I love it when it has a nice cream cheese frosting that’s not too sweet.


Q:

What teacher or professor changed your life, if any?


A:

A professor in business school years ago told me what it was like to be a professor. At the time I wasn’t thinking about becoming a professor, but the more I heard him describe what he did on a day-to-day basis, the more I was interested. I never had a class with him. We just played basketball during lunch.


Q:

What’s the strongest pushback you’ve ever gotten from Hollywood for your work studying its diversity and lack thereof?


A:

The strongest pushback was probably early in my work with Hollywood when people were somewhat skeptical about the business case to be made for diversity. Which is why we developed the report that we do now—to come up with a design that allowed us to look at the relationship between diversity and the bottom line. The lesson I took away from that pushback is that you need to have a compelling answer for those who critique the work on the business imperative.


Q:

What question do you get most often from students?


A:

It’s been a while, but when I taught, I got questions all the time about how much I work out. I probably wouldn’t get as many questions now because I’m not as big now as I was then.


Q:

What is your all-time favorite movie?


A:

I think it would be, for me, right now, a neck-and-neck race between Moonlight and Black Panther.


Q:

Is there a TV show, film, or even a performance that is a touchstone for you in its sensitive, accurate portrayal of race and ethnicity?


A:

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is The Wire. I respect what the writers were able to do. They get the nuance and complexity of race.


Q:

How often do you get asked who Ralph Bunche was?


A:

All the time.


Q:

And when you’re asked, what do you say?


A:

Ralph Bunche is probably the most famous African American who most people have never heard of. The first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, well before Martin Luther King, Jr. He was one of the founders of the United Nations. He was an amazing scholar—he wrote one of the most important sociological studies of the first half of the 20th century. And, later in his life, he became an activist—he marched with Martin Luther King. And of course he went to UCLA. He was valedictorian in 1927.