Voices From Inside the System
‘I’ve Been Telling Hollywood to Hire Black Talent for Years’
Tiauna Jackson became an agent after her friends couldn’t find representation they liked. Now she’s taking on a system that prefers lip service to actual change.
Voices From Inside the System is a new GEN series where we interview people who have had firsthand experience in industries with especially fraught histories of systemic racism. We asked our subjects to think deeply about the role they played and the work they did. We asked them why they stayed or why they left, how they might be complicit, or if they thought they — or anyone — could fundamentally change the system.
Tiauna Jackson, 38, is a Black talent agent and owner of the Jackson Agency. After working as an accountant for nearly a decade (“mostly for wealthy white billionaires”), she started her own agency in 2014. The website Diverse Representation keeps track of Black representatives working at film and television agencies; of the thousands of agents in the industry, the site currently lists only 45 Black agents. Between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of people of color on TV increased to 22% from only 17.8%. According to a 2019 Hollywood diversity report conducted by UCLA…
