Op-Ed: Beyond OscarsSoWhite, Hollywood needs to confront historic racism on the big screen (via latimesopinion)
Around the time I was 13, in the early 1980s, I started watching movie screeners with my uncle, Gene Wilder. The screeners, sent from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, were provided to academy members for consideration of Oscar nominations.
Nearly without fail, whenever my uncle and I would pop a classic movie into the VHS player, some ruinous and racist image of the happy bellhop, cheerful slave or servant, seldom speaking but ready to tap dance, would emerge. Gene could see the disappointment in my face and know I was thinking about the pain these images would cause me and the African American side of my family.The new films we watched in the 1980s were not much better.
It’s important to understand that this isn’t about blaming an earlier generation for views common in its day or asking artists to know what tomorrow’s sensitivities might be.Those earlier characterizations of people of color in movies were not merely cases of harmless ignorance, but a form of cultural violence. They were consciously created to legitimize hateful attitudes and make acceptable levels of social oppression with full knowledge of their effect.
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