"How could it be otherwise given that the history of American cinema is also the history of American racism? I’m reminded of this ugly truth every time I watch an old film in which there’s not a single character who isn’t white. Or the only black or Asian character is the maid or houseboy, serving the boss with a smile. Obviously much has changed, but too many new movies just play the tokenism game, using minorities as accessories or emblems of the white character’s presumptive good intentions — like the Prius parked in the driveway...
It’s an institutional problem, which doesn’t mean it isn’t also an individual one. Along those lines we have to ask how vision — art itself — is used to rationalize and perpetuate racism, inadvertently or not. Are white directors who consistently work with primarily white casts asserting their creative vision or just racist? Most white directors make movies about white people, whose stories are framed as universal. The upshot is that whiteness is represented as the norm, which inevitably has a way of rendering everything else as “abnormal.” A white cast is a creative choice and just as problematic as the economic rationales that are trotted out to justify discrimination...
it’s always too easy to conflate individual achievement with systemic change. And it takes nothing away from the hard work and creative brilliance of the black actors and filmmakers who succeed on their own terms, against long odds, to note that the structural facts that made those odds so long in the first place are still very much in effect. Which may be partly why the foothold that African-Americans manage to gain in Hollywood from one generation to the next can seem so fragile, and progress so easily reversible...
Even when those heroes are not historical people, they carry the burden of representativeness. In the prestige movies that court critical and academy approval, black people are often symbols and symptoms, their stories parables of pathology, striving and redemption. These stories are frequently rousing — and the performances that anchor them are often full of rich feeling and complex humanity — but it’s still the case that the focus on the extreme and the exceptional comes at the expense of the ordinary."
As a person who grew up with only the company of media-portrayals of black people (#SiliconValleyChild), I'm realizing that I had no guidance in how to just live. The exclusive portrayal of people at two extremes - black as poverty and destitution of spirit; black as overwhelming strength and inspirational success - has, I realize, almost certainly contributed to my fear that I have to be exceptional in order to avoid being impoverished/forgotten/dead.
FB: "If anything, the industry needs exceptional individuals to help obscure just how bad things are." <-- this is so tremendously true of so many institutions.
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