While we celebrate — or not — the results of last night’s Oscars, hopefully we don’t forget one important reason they were so interesting. Racial bias is unfortunately still a prevalent factor in American life and here are eight recent examples of it:
1. “Selma” wasn’t nominated for any direction or acting awards at the Oscars.
The fact that “Selma” lost to “Birdman,” winner of four Oscars on Sunday night, is acceptable. The fact that its director wasn’t nominated for Best Director is not. Ava DuVernay would have been the first black woman to be nominated and it seems clear even to the Academy judges that “Selma” was a better movie than, say, “Foxcatcher” (nominated for Director, but not Best Picture).
On the subject of direction, Laura Poitras, who directed the amazing Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour” also didn’t get a nod. It seems that being white is good. Being white and male is better.
2. There wasn’t a single nonwhite nomination for any best actor or best director or best original screenplay or best adapted screen play or best original score or you get the point.
In fact, only nine of the 127 nominees weren’t white and in all of Oscar history, only one nonwhite woman has won Best Actress. On the subject of women, Patricia Arquette was right about female equality. The nominations were almost all men (102 male nominations by my count). This number is not higher, because after much hard thinking, Academy members were finally convinced they had to nominate women for the Best Actress and Supporting Actress awards.
3. Voting members of the Academy are 94 percent white.
The median age is 62. In other words, the Academy has succeeded at being older and whiter than the most highly admired body in America: Congress.
It also is 77 percent male (slightly less sexist than Congress, if you’re wondering), but its members still decided that all the possible Best Pictures this year were movies about men.
This is a problem because, like Congress, the Academy’s lack of racial diversity
makes underlying biases worse.
4. More blacks are incarcerated today than were slaves in 1850.
The same Hollywood bias transitions into the real world. Police officers statistically pull black drivers over more, shoot at black suspects faster, and racially profile when they stop people. Cases like Eric Garner’s or Michael Brown’s are admittedly rare, but they come from a societal view that some scholars argue criminalizes being black.
5. “American Sniper” was nominated for Best Picture.
Kudos to the Academy for not letting “American Sniper” win anything but Best Sound Editing. Let’s say a movie was about jihadis, Russians, Japanese, or Palestinians killing Americans or our allies. They were trying to protect their country, ideology, or religion at all costs and their families suffered. (So, it’s propaganda, basically.)
Would we like it if people in those countries started tweeting about killing all whites, Christians or Americans? When they do, by the way, we call it terrorism and we’re horrified.
“American Sniper” isn’t about the tragic effects of war; it simply glorifies America. When people tweeted highly racist things after the movie, Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper refused to even issue a statement asking people to not use the film to promote hate and bigotry.
6. Craig Hicks, who allegedly shot three Muslims in North Carolina, is not presumed to be a bigot.
If a Muslim man with a Facebook page full of pro-Muslim and anti-atheist comments had shot three atheists dead, it would have been overnight terrorism news.
Hundreds — or thousands — of us would have held vigil and talked about defeating the evils of Islam.
Because it was a white man with a Facebook page full of pro-atheist comments who shot three Muslims dead, newspapers have refused to jump to any conclusions. The difference in media coverage and tone is unsettling, regardless of whether or not it really was a parking dispute.
7. People have called President Obama every insulting word they could think of, because he refused to be a racist.
Fact No. 1: We are not at war with Islam, no matter what “American Sniper” made you believe. We’re at war with radical Islamist terrorists, who have interpreted the Koran in a way most Muslims would disagree with.
Fact No. 2: Awful things have been done in the name of Christianity, including, but by no means limited to, the Inquisition, crusades, and slavery. So why does Mr. Obama “deserve to die,” “is a terrorist,” “is an anti-American *******” (put any expletive there), because he mentioned these things?
The question remains if we would have responded the same way if Mr. Obama was a white president without the middle name of Hussein. I don’t think so.
8. An Oscar voter said that she didn’t vote for “Selma” partially because she found the cast’s wearing of “I can’t breathe” T-shirts offensive. “Am I supposed to vote for it just because black people are in it?” she asked.
Well, after all this, what I have to say is “Yes, anonymous voter. Yes, you are.” You shouldn’t have nominated “American Sniper” even if it truly was the Best Picture to ever grace the planet Earth, because it promoted hatred and bigotry. You should have voted for a black female director instead of for “Whiplash” (a movie about jazz … starring whites).
The Oscars are not about the objective “best” anyway. There are plenty of movies that are cultural legacies, but didn’t win because of subjective opinions or intolerant judges (like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Citizen Kane” and “Brokeback Mountain”).
So the question isn’t “Is ’Selma’ really better than ’American Sniper’?” The question is “Is ’Selma’ so much worse that we couldn’t afford to take a stand for racial equality and nominate a black female director?”
The fact remains that actors of color have very few opportunities. Mindy Kaling and Lupita Nyong’o have had to basically create careers for themselves.
So why is something like the Oscars really such a big deal?
Well, the reason we want to watch white straight people (think about almost all Disney movies, “The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Hunger Games,” “Twilight,” or “Divergent”) is because we’ve been taught that watching them is interesting, romantic, funny, or dramatic from a very young age. This results in a culture of racial biases, feeding into our political reactions, and it’s very hard to break out of this when we grow older. All of the eight points above — from our reactions to “American Sniper” to electing a pretty white Congress — come from the same source of bred race bias. That has to change, and media is a good way to change it. Encouraging people, especially children, to watch life from a Muslim or black’s perspective could help fix these problems. And if the Academy
appreciates movies of color in the future, maybe more will be made.
In the end, America itself is pretty diverse. It’s time we acted like it.
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