Michaela Dietz

WGS 3010

Professor Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama

Final Essay

Thursday, December 7, 2017

“The Best and Whitest”: Discrimination in the Film Industry Continues

Despite the claim that race relations and opportunities for people of color

have improved in the film industry throughout the years, social media movements

such as #OscarsSoWhite are still created to call attention to the imbalance of actors

and actresses nominated for film awards. Many who do win and get to the stage use

their time of dedications to call out the industry and inspire young non-white actors

and actresses not to give up, to keep fighting to be seen, to break past being comic

relief or sidekicks. Alternately, big names in the industry such as Spike Lee and Jada

Pinkett-Smith boycotted the awards show all together, the former saying, “We

cannot support it… How is it possible for the 2nd consecutive year all 20 contenders

under the actor category are white?” (Yuen 1). Opportunities in film have grown for

white women, women of color, and men of color since the dawn of the industry, but

the fact is that these people continue to be undervalued in a field that is still

dominated by white men.

Three classifiers contribute heavily to who and what we see—or don’t see—

in films: gender, race, and sexuality. These factors can in some ways be isolated, but

in others they can’t possibly be separated from one another. It is undeniable that

black women have a different experience in the film industry than black men or
white women; all three are oppressed in some way, but not in the same way. In spite

of this fact, the remainder of this evaluation will focus on these separate classifiers

as independently as possible.

Gender

Women have been part of films since the birth of motion picture, but they’ve

been boxed into certain roles both in front of and behind the camera. For those

acting and performing in films, women were given a small choice of roles. Erin Hill

has composed a list of men’s and women’s roles represented in studio tour films as

the appendix in Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (2016).

It isn’t hard to distinguish the patterns between the roles available to either gender.

In Universal Studios and Stars produced in 1925, there are 30-40 actors listed, while

there are only 15-20 actresses listed beside them in the next column (225). For this

particular film, that’s the end of the women’s column; men have seven additional

roles in Universal Studios and Stars. In MGM’s 1925 Studio Tour, there are

approximately the same amount of actors and actresses, the number being

somewhere around 10-15 for each. However, there are an additional 18 jobs in the

“Men’s Labor” column, such as cameramen, orchestra, and set builders. For the jobs

that are in both columns, men have more roles than women in many sections. There

were 10-12 male art director’s aides compared to just one female aid. These lists

also tell the history of “feminine” and “masculine” work in film: men are given roles

such as set builders, managers, and directors, while women are dancers, aides, and

wardrobe or costumes.
 Despite these tours being filmed decades ago, they still reflect today’s typical

film crew. Despite women making up more than 75% of workers in 1980 (123),

most of them made up the clerical staff such as secretaries. Even more recently, Hill

reports that only 6% of the top 250 films in 2013 were directed by women (57),

making women only 15 of the 250 directors on this list. The Oscars for 2015 had no

women nominated in cinematography, original score, screenplay adaptation,

original screenplay, sound mixing, or visual effects, which are seven of the thirteen

non-gender specific categories (Swanson). The Oscars aren’t the only awards

skewed towards men: "seven of the 15 Academy Award… have no female nominees

at all—visual effects, sound mixing, original screenplay, adapted screenplay, original

score, directing and cinematography" (qtd. by Carlin).

As actresses, women have become more regularly shown, but as flat

placeholder characters that perpetuate stereotypes and serve male characters’

character development. Two such recent films that come to mind are Jurassic World

(Colin Trevorrow) and Ant Man (Peyton Reed). In both films, there are two white

male protagonists that have elements of charm, wit, intelligence, and talent in their

respective fields. Featured alongside these heroes are one women apiece that are

nearly clones of each other. Both women are career-driven, which isn’t bad in itself,

but with that comes the typical coldness that accompanies fictional women with

careers. Over time, the male stars not only save the world, but manage to bring out

new elements of their female co-stars that couldn’t have possibly emerged without

their fun spirits and “I’ll protect you from the scary bad guys/dinosaurs” attitudes.

Both women even have the same no-nonsense, cold-hard-bitch bangs and bob
haircut. These are only two examples of Douglas Massey’s idea presented in his

article America Unequal that “social groups can be classified along two fundamental

dimensions that define the conceptual space of social cognition: warmth and

competence” (Ferguson 456). In the instances of Ant Man and Jurassic World, the

female leads display plenty of competence as a scientist/martial arts master or the

coordinator of a park with real living dinosaurs, respectively, but they are cold to

the male protagonists at first and don’t have families of their own to care for

(conveniently making them available for the protagonists to woo). On the other side,

women are seen as friendly and compassionate, but only as assistants, damsels, or

some general woman-shapes that have just enough speaking lines to remember that

our struggling male protagonist has a wife.

Race

Of course, these examples only apply to white women—women of color have

both their gender and their race scrutinized by casting directors and misconstrued

by screenwriters. Nancy Wang Yuen compiled statistics that show how non-white

women fair in film in her book, Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. For

African American women, they are less likely to have lead roles opposite African

American men, and Scandal’s 2012 premiere was the first show to have a black

woman leading a TV drama in forty years (24). Only two Latina actresses have won

a Golden Globe for lead actress television cable show, the second only happening in

2015 with Gina Rodriguez’s win for Jane the Virgin. Overall, women were given 30%

of speaking roles in 2015 films; in 2013, only 14% of African American women
made up women in the top 100 films, followed by 5% Latina and 3% Asian, leaving

an entire 73% of women’s roles to white women (27-28).

While white women are stereotyped in films, women of color are typecasted

twofold when they’re even casted at all. In addition to the previous statistics, Yuen

has also conducted interviews with actors/actresses of color as well as evaluated

existing interviews with current stars to evaluate the persisting racial inequality in

film. These interviews illustrate how much of an obstacle typecasting is for an

actress of color, mostly being “too much” or “not enough” of their own race. At

actress America Ferrera’s first audition, the casting director asked her to “sound

more Latino.” In the interview, America says that, “I genuinely didn’t realize until

later that she was asking me to speak English with a broken accent” (Yuen 90).

Actresses of color will be denied parts specifically made for their race because they

don’t perform stereotypes well enough for what the casting agents are looking for,

or even because they don’t “look the part.” Yuen interviewed an actress named

Dawn that was told she was so light that she “barely pass[es] the paper bag test” and

wouldn’t work for commercials because the audience wants to “know automatically

what you are” in terms of race (46).

With typecasting being one side of the industry’s racism, a preference for

white people playing any other role is also evident. Actors and actresses who know

very well that their names alone will get them called in for stereotypical roles will

change their last names on their resumes and get more roles based on their

invented Anglo names (76). However, even this isn’t enough to get non-white talent

non-typecasted roles. Yuen writes that when a Latina actress auditioned for a
McDonald’s commercial in English, she was redirected to the Spanish version of the

commercial (76). When casting directors can’t find someone that works for them,

they will cast white people in the same roles, such as Scarlett Johansson as the lead

in the anime adaptation of Ghost in the Shell or Emma Stone as an Asian-American in

Aloha. In other words, if the actresses don’t perform these stereotypes how

filmmakers want them to, they don’t have a chance at making a career for

themselves.

As for directors of color, a Google search doesn’t even get to a person of color

until number 17 (Spike Lee), doesn’t show a woman until the 22nd picture (Sofia

Coppola), and has no women of color listed. Entertainment Weekly’s list of “the 50

Best Directors” has no women at all.

Sexuality

Finally, the last point made here (although certainly not the last issue of the

film industry) is how sexuality is portrayed and who gets to tell these stories

through film. Hand in hand with gender is the sexual dynamic of the dominant

alpha-male and the submissive hyperfeminine or hypersexualized female. How

“feminine,” sexualized, or submissive the partner is usually depends on racial

stereotypes. Asian women are tagged as submissive and meek if they’re not the sexy

and dangerous martial artist; black women are “sassy” and loud as well as

hypersexualized; and Latina women are “firey” and sexy. White women are given

more flexibility with such personalities, but they’re still being rescued by a man, or
they’re the ones fighting bad guys in ridiculous midriff-bearing armor or getting

caught in their bras and underwear.

Another aspect of sexuality that is poorly represented is LGBTQ+ identity.

Besides Moonlight, there are very few well-known films that focus on someone

being in the LGBTQ+ community and being a person of color. Most of the popular

films about coming out or dealing with queer sexuality are fronted by white men or

women. The film Stonewall is based on the Stonewall riots, but it starred a white

man and showed him instigating the historical event when two trans women of

color, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were the real ones behind the movement

(King). Gay white men are most often represented in films because they can be the

sassy “gay best friend” or the hyperfeminine gay man who flirts with the straight

male protagonist for comedic purposes. Lesbian women are usually featured in

order to excite the men of the film, and those lesbians are going to be thin, pretty,

and feminine to be all the more enticing to the characters and the male audience. If a

lesbian isn’t there for sex appeal, she’s there for comedic purposes. The Pitch Perfect

franchise has a character played by Retta who is an African American lesbian

looking down the blouse of her white oversexualized co-star.

Why It’s Important

Perpetuating these stereotypes is damaging for both the actors and the

audience of films and television. Actors in such films are insulted at best and shamed

at worst. Allison Young and her Navajo co-stars were told to leave the set of Adam

Sandler’s The Ridiculous Six if they were going to be so “sensitive” about how their
people were being represented, nearly reducing Allison herself to tears (74). A

Chinese American actress named Susan played a character named after a racial slur

she was called when she was younger (75). Rita Moreno says that having to perform

these racist stereotypes in films such as the “Polynesian girl or Arabian girl, an East

Indian princess” was so demeaning that it furthered her depression with each role

(76).

Seeing these roles being performed is just as demeaning and discouraging for

an audience. While there is the assumption that children don’t know about race

differences when they’re very young, a study by Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R.

Feagin shows that children as young as three years old identify race, with “370

significant episodes involving a racial or ethnic dimension” over a span of eleven

months, equaling one to three episodes per day (Ferguson 195). This means that

throughout most of their lives, children will notice when there’s no one on TV or in

movies that look like them, or if they are, they are only a select few roles such as the

maid, the gangster, or the poor person.

Conclusion

More opportunities for women, especially women of color, and the LGBTQ+

community will greatly diversify not only the cast and crew of films, but what is

produced for audiences. Knowing how hard it’s been to break into the industry and

get these stories told in an accurate, meaningful, and respectful way will generate

content that will inspire even more people to work in film and other art fields

simply because they know that they have a chance. If not, then these people will at
least have stories to look to and see themselves in, to see themselves as worthy of a

two-hour story filled with strong, intelligent characters that look like them and deal

with similar issues.

 Work Cited

Carlin, Shannon. “The 2016 Oscar Nominees Recognized Women In More Categories Than In

Recent Years.” Bustle, Bustle, 14 Jan. 2016, www.bustle.com/articles/135113-the-

2016-oscar-nominees-recognized-women-in-more-categories-than-in-recent-years.

EW Staff. “The 50 Greatest Directors and Their 100 Best Movies.” EW.com,

ew.com/article/1996/04/19/50-greatest-directors-and-their-100-best-movies/.

Hill, Erin. Never Done: A History of Women's Work in Media Production. Rutgers University

Press, 2016.

King, Jamilah. “Meet the Trans Women of Color Who Helped Put Stonewall on the Map.” Mic,

Mic Network Inc., 25 Oct. 2015, mic.com/articles/121256/meet-marsha-p-johnson-

and-sylvia-rivera-transgender-stonewall-veterans#.JpnO6zmHf.

Massey, Douglas S. “America Unequal.” Race, Gender, Sexuality, & Social Class, edited by

Susan J. Ferguson, 2nd ed., SAGE Publications, 2016, pp. 194–202.

Swanson, Ana. “The Oscars in Six Charts and Maps.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 22

Feb. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/22/the-oscars-in-

six-charts-and-maps/?utm_term=.56336e7b7bbf.

Yuen, Nancy Wang. Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. Rutgers University Press,

2017.

Van Ausdale, Debra, et al. “Using Racial and Ethnic Concepts: The Critical Case of Very Young

Children .” Race, Gender, Sexuality, & Social Class, 2nd ed., SAGE Publications, 2016,

pp. 194–202.