The Oscars have always been one of the more explicit examples of just how little mainstream American culture values ethnic minorities and women. Be it Hugh Griffiths winning an Oscar for his blackface performance in Ben Hur 50-odd years ago or this year’s highly publicized “Selma snub”, the Oscars have always been dominated by white men, both in front of and behind the camera.
However, is it the Academy itself which is responsible for the exclusionary nominations year on year, or do the Oscars simply represent a film industry which is rife with structural inequality and racial exclusion?
According to new research, minority ethnic and female artists are chronically underrepresented at almost every level in the film industry. The survey, which looked into the cast and crew of the top 200 films of 2014, found that minority ethnic characters made up only 16% of all the speaking roles. Only 8% of starring roles were played by minority ethnic actors.
To put this in perspective, the 2010 US census found that 36% of the US population belonged to a minority ethnic group, which means that, as a whole, the biggest films of 2014 underrepresented people of colour by half. Similarly, just 24% of the films surveyed accurately represented the racial make-up of the UK.
When it comes to gender, the picture gets even bleaker, with a jaw-droppingly low 3% of the speaking roles being played by non-white women. Even white-women are underrepresented, accounting for just 33% of the total speaking roles in last year’s biggest films. Although women make up 50% of the global population, they made up 50% (or more) of the cast in just 16% of last year’s films.
Even behind the camera, white men occupied the vast majority of positions, directing 88% of the films. Non-white male directors were at the helm of 10% of the movies, whilst white women were responsible for just 2% of the films. In 2014, the only high grossing film directed by a minority ethnic woman was Selma.
Writing credits are much more diverse, but still, women only accounted for 20% of the screenplays while non-white males accounted for just 24%.
The survey also looked at just how far the industry has come in the last 10 years, and found that, compared to the top films from 2004, there are 2% more non-white characters in films. This equates to a 1% rise every 5 years which means that if the industry continues to improve its diversity at this rate, it will take 100 years until people of colour make up 36% of speaking roles; the actual proportion of non-whites in the US.
However, when it comes to gender representation, things have actually gotten much worse over the last decade. Women made up 50% of the principal cast in around 23% of the films in 2004, but this dropped to just 16% in 2014. Similarly, while 54% of starring roles were played by women in 2004, that number also dropped to 36% in 2014.
As alarming as the statistics in the infographic may be, they fail to tackle an important, yet subtle, element of the structural inequality within the film industry: the kind of roles minority actors and women get. While people of colour may only make up 16% of the total cast of 2014’s biggest blockbusters, they end up playing similar characters time and again: the sassy black sidekick, the tough-yet-warm-hearted convict, the swag drug dealer, the goofy immigrant with a hilariously poor grasp of the English language, the math nerd virgin – these are the roles our minority ethnic actors are relegated to, rarely getting to tackle a role with real depth and therefore rarely getting the opportunity to showcase their talents.
Aside from the impact this has on out minority actors and film artists, according to an essay published by Stanford University, it has a wider and more pronounced effect on all black and minority ethnic (BAME) people. The constant negative representation of BAMEs in the mainstream serves to reinforce and compound negative self-image and internalized hatred, as well as damage self-esteem and even foster intra-racial tensions in the same communities and cultures.
For women, too, the lack of powerful female protagonists in mainstream film and television contribute to the perpetuation of archaic gender roles. As gender representation in the film industry continues to get worse over time, more and more of the female figures our daughters see in the mainstream will be submissive sex objects, secondary to the whims and stories of men.
One of the most common arguments we see against making Hollywood more diverse and inclusive is that it will alienate movie-goers. However, research shows that ethnic minorities actually account for a whopping 44% of film admissions, and films which have more diverse casts with over 30% BAME actors usually fare better at the box office, in comparison to more white-dominated films. This suggests that Hollywood whitewashing isn’t a grass-roots phenomenon dictated by the tastes of the public, but a deliberate system of inequality pushed upon the industry by those in control of it.
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