Filming History
On January 14, 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 88th Academy Awards. For the second year in a row, only white people were nominated in the four acting categories. Black actors were snubbed following a year when movies like Creed, Straight Outta Compton, Beasts of No Nation, Dope, and others were released to significant critical acclaim and perhaps just as important, commercial success.
The outrage first on social media and beyond was immediate. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, started in January 2015 by April Reign with this tweet, quickly went viral. As the hashtag gained in popularity and attention, mainstream media started reacting to the Oscars’ all-white nominee slate.
Some black actors and filmmakers announced they would not be attending the Oscars. Several white actors embarrassed themselves. Host Chris Rock announced that although he would still appear, he was completely rewriting his monologue for the show that addresses the issue.
The Oscar snubs are symptomatic of the larger problem: the lack of inclusiveness throughout the entertainment industry for persons of color, both behind the camera as well as in front of it. The vast majority of studio heads and show creators are white men. Stories originally written with persons of color as the protagonists are routinely changed to feature white performers. Historical dramas routinely omit persons of color from the histories they themselves made. When they are present, persons of color are routinely sidelined to supporting and/or stereotypical roles. Erasure and stereotyping is endemic to American movie making culture.
Historical fiction is especially vulnerable to this sort of erasure.
Last fall, Suffragette, purporting to tell a story of the women’s suffrage movement in England in the early years of the last century, didn’t include any persons of color, despite historical records of their participation in the events depicted in the movie. Similarly, Stonewall, claiming to depict the 1969 riots considered the symbolic beginning of the LGBT rights movement in the U.S., changed the main leaders of the protests from transgender women of color to a young white man. The ancient Egypt depicted in both Exodus and Gods of Egypt was full of white people. Go back a bit further and you see gross misrepresentations and outright violence towards people of color throughout film history.
With movies like these, the movie industry fails another way: they misrepresent white people. They show all- or mostly- white environments, without showing any of how these environments are created and maintained. The 1986 film Hoosiers tells the story of an all-white basketball team from fictional Hickory, Indiana who win the state basketball championship in 1952. However, Hoosiers leaves out why the team was all-white in the first place. The inspiration for Hickory was the town of Milan, which in 1952 didn’t allow black people to live there. Virtually every depiction of World War II in film and TV shows the effects of segregation with their all- or mostly- white casts, but does not depict the racism and violence that maintained that segregation. More recently, Suffragette, with its already whitewashed cast, neglected to show any the racism that characterized the movement the movie depicted.
White environments do not come about by accident or nature. They are intentionally created and maintained through countless acts of boundary-keeping and exclusion, large and small, every day. Whitewashed movies and shows are both a symptom and a source of this exclusion. Studio executives, an overwhelmingly white (and male) group themselves, convinced that white audiences won’t watch movies and shows with black protagonists, make less of them. The resulting films and shows, by depicting an idealized history scrubbed of both persons of color and discrimination against them, engender nostalgia for an idealized history that never existed. Movies and shows are as much creating the past as depicting it, and nostalgia for that fictional past in turn inspires present day racism.
To fix this, I think filmmakers have three options.
First, they could tell stories right. Include the persons of color when they were present and depict the racism and violence committed against them. To be sure, this will complicate some narratives. It’s harder to cheer for an activist leading a revolution if part of that revolution is openly racist. Historical figures from George Washington to General Patton were extremely racist, and portraying this makes them harder to love.
I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. I think audiences can grasp, even enjoy, complex stories about complex people. It wouldn’t hurt to find out.
Second, filmmakers could be truly colorblind. Makers of whitewashed films frequently justify their casting decisions because the race of the individual characters doesn’t matter. To which I say: terrific! If the race of the characters really doesn’t matter, act like it. Cast persons of color in any role, even if the person they are portraying was, historically white.
If filmmakers don’t want to talk about racial justice, fine. I get it — sometimes you just want to tell a love story, or a crime drama, or a western without getting into all of that. But don’t simply scrub people of color out of historical settings where they either existed or from which they were deliberately and violently excluded, present an all-white cast, and pretend you’re “colorblind.” You’re actually being the exact opposite.
Instead, filmmakers should cast historical movies as if race didn’t matter where and when the movie took place. For example, instead of casting four white women as the leads in a movie like Suffragette, why not mix it up a bit? Instead of Meryl Streep, try Alfre Woodard or Shohreh Aghdashloo. Replace Helena Bonham Carter or Carey Mulligan with with Lucy Liu, Salma Hayek, or Naomie Harris. Of course this would make the film historically inaccurate, but it’s not like the movie was historically accurate anyway. This solution addresses a number of problems at the same time — it gives persons of color access to more and better roles, and in doing so it increases the inclusiveness of Academy membership. And it also stops Hollywood from using whitewashed depictions of the past to create and recreate our racist present.
The third option for filmmakers is simple. If they are unwilling to either tell stories right or tell stories wrong, but in the right way, they shouldn’t tell them at all. Some stories cannot fit into a traditional heroic narrative without significant distortions, so don’t tell them. Find other stories to tell. Ones that can be told with accuracy and heart.
Trust me, they’re out there, waiting.
POST SCRIPT:
It seems I spoke too soon. In light of the recent …puzzling decision to cast Joseph Fiennes in a Michael Jackson biopic as Michael, Orlando Jones had this suggestion. Let’s hope the producers take it to heart.
