#OscarsSoWhite They Don't See Race, or Films about Black People

When the Oscar nominations came out, I was in class. I experienced the outrage second-hand, at first, through social media. I wondered vaguely what all the fuss was about. The Academy Awards uphold racist institutions, their voting process is racially exclusive and biased; this should come as no surprise. I went home and Googled "oscar nominations." Well, this was a surprise. 

In all honesty, the Academy has outdone itself. The nominations for the Oscars have not been this lacking in diversity since the mid-nineties. No female directors, cinematographers or screenwriters were nominated. Of the nominations for acting, all 20 are White. That is, all of the nominations for lead and supporting roles are held by White actors. Selma, the historical drama dir. by Ava DuVernay and based on 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, is nominated for Best Picture, and its nomination feels much like a dog being thrown a bone. (Note: Selma hasn't yet been released in the UK, so I haven't seen it.)

The prevailing theory among those who see little to no issue with the Academy's nominations is that the nominations represent the best of the best that the film industry has to offer, selected by a large pool of experts in the field. It was only a coincidence that the best 20 performances of the year were all given by White actors, the majority of whom are Anglo-American or White British, out of the literally hundreds of ethnicities on the planet. We should also look at the social make-up of the group who vote on these what gets nominated: in 2013, the LA Times found that of 6,028 members, 93% of the Academy voters were White, 76% were male, with an average age of 63-years-old. Who would've guessed it? The Academy is literally full of old White men. 

Even with a Black female president and hundreds of new, younger, less-White, less-male invitees to the Academy, a strong bias clearly shows - in the numbers and in the nominations. This trend of old White men controlling everything and ruining it for everyone else in the public and personal spheres, on multiple levels of society, is commonly referred to as "the patriarchy" or "the kyriarchy" or "institutional oppression". And the phenomenon manifests itself in other ways too. In the film industry, it comes out in the box office figures. At the end of last year, I put together some diagrams looking at the 25 top-grossing films of 2014* in the United Kingdom.

I focused on race and looked at the directors, writers, lead actors and lead actresses. Here are the other three graphics and a list of the films I looked at is at the bottom of this post. There is room for error - in that I might have incorrectly deduced the race of a particular person, or that some of the top grossing films have changed since I compiled my data. 

In the UK, only one of the films in last year's top-grossing 25 (as they were in late November, early December) was directed by a non-White person. None were directed by women. More women were involved in the writing process, with 5 women among a total of 47 writers across 25 films. All of the women were white. Of the remaining writers, 2 were men of colour: 1 of Mexican and Cuban descent and the other, Black. The other 40 writers were White men. Only 3 of the actors in leading roles were men of colour; 2 were Black and 1, Lebanese. It was the same for actresses in leading roles: 3 women of colour and all of them Black. Of the top 250 films of 2014, women made up only 6.8% of the directors - to put it plainly, that's 17 out of 250. In 2011, researchers at UCLA looked at 172 films and found similar patterns. 

Whether this indicates more about that movie-going public or the kind of films that are being made in Hollywood at this point in time, I can't be sure. I have only looked at a very small portion of data but I would guess that the answer is that it says something about both the kind of films we watch (or at least pay to watch on the big screen) and the kind of films that are being made. What all of this does indicate is a clear need for greater diversity in filmmaking. 

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Here is the list of top 25-grossing films of 2014 on December 16, 2014. The list has since changed and an updated version can be viewed here.

1. The Lego Movie ; 2. The Inbetweeners 2 ; 3. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ; 4. Guardians of the Galaxy ; 5. X-Men: Days of Future Past ; 6. How to Train Your Dragon 2 ; 7. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ; 8. The Wolf of Wall Street ; 9. Gone Girl ; 10. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 ; 11. Transformers: Age of Extinction ; 12. 12 Years A Slave ; 13. Maleficent ; 14. Captain America: The Winter Soldier ; 15. 22 Jump Street ; 16. Godzilla (2014) ; 17. Interstellar ; 18. Neighbors ; 19. Rio 2 ; 20. Mrs. Brown's Boys D'Movie ; 21. Lucy ; 22. Mr. Peabody & Sherman ; 23. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) ; 24. The Fault in our Stars ; 25. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Why I Tell Stories About Black Girls

We do not tell stories about Black girls. When I say this, I mean "overwhelmingly, we as a society ignore Black girls." We do this at a detriment to the wellbeing of Black girls, as individuals and as a group. By relegating representations of a marginalised group of people to a non-priority status, we tell the group that their experiences - and by association, they themselves - are not valuable. This is why I tell stories about Black girls. We are valuable and we should know it. 

A common rule of writing, especially if you're starting out is: "write what you know." Since it is well-documented that Hollywood is a diversity desert both onscreen and off, this might explain why Hollywood doesn't put out many stories about ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, poor people, non-Westerners and people who identify within the LGBTQIA+ community. (And why some of the industry's highest-paid executives like to make disparaging, racially insensitive comments.) Except, it doesn't explain anything. I am a writer and a woman of colour, but when I was a little girl, I wrote stories about white people. Chimamanda Adichie discussed a similar experience in her TED talk, "The danger of a single story."

“I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.”

— Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie

Like Adichie, I wrote stories about white people because I read books about white people. When we would read The Magic Key series in school, there were sometimes non-white characters, the friends of the protagonists who had been permitted to tag along. At four-years-old, I didn't care about these characters. I didn't start to root for the non-white side characters until I was much older. People do not aspire to be sidekicks. We are all the heroes of our own stories and that is what I aspired to be: the main character. I could not identify with a solitary brown face and a two-liner. That is not a character; that is a plot device. So I wrote stories about white people because white people were the main characters in the stories that I was told: in books, in television, in film, in art and advertising. What I knew was that I was a little black girl. What I learned was that little black girls do not get to be the hero. 

This is why my film, The Mountain, is about black girls. Who better to tell a story than the person it's about? Where I do not see myself represented, I will lovingly and painstakingly carve out a place to call home. This is the same reason why I read stories about black girls and why I promote the black girls who tell them. I want black girls to know that they are valuable. We are not less important or less interesting. Representation in media is not the cure for institutional racism, but as we demand respect for our rights and freedoms, we realise better futures and stories for ourselves, in life and literature. The more we create, the more we raise our voices, the harder we become to ignore, to routinely relegate to the role of supporting character. This is why I tell stories about black girls.

A Review of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Last night, I went to the cinema to watch The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. I like going to the cinema alone, only the strangers down the aisle will judge me for drinking two glasses of wine before curtain and tearing up at the cute dogs in the Volkswagen commercial. I've been meaning to go for a while, but I kept forgetting. I have been preoccupied with grand juries justifying the murders of Black people in America, police brutality, 43 missing students in Mexico, the Cherokee nation denouncing Black citizens, the fresh wave of victim-blaming rhetoric in light of the accusations against Bill Cosby. This is the tip of the iceberg. I am beginning to notice that the world is in a constant state of turmoil and in the midst of it, I forgot to go and see the new Hunger Games film when it first came out. I was reminded a couple of weeks ago, when I saw posts on Tumblr claiming, with a tone of surprise, how the world was becoming like The Hunger Games. I saw one image on my Tumblr dashboard several times: a defaced freight train boxcar in Mexico, with the words IF WE BURN, YOU BURN WITH US spray-painted on the side. The world is not becoming The Hunger Games, it already was. 

Before I launch into my critique, let me tell you that I enjoy The Hunger Games. Honestly, I do. I like the books although I dislike the author's style and feel that in many ways the books fall woefully short of doing justice to the stories and experiences of the real people that it borrows from. But then, it was probably never meant to. I like the story, despite being wary of its similarities to other stories... I like that Katniss Everdeen is strong but awkward. I like that it calls oppression by name, I like that its characters fight for freedom. Often, where the characters and action fail, the story in The Hunger Games is forced to tell itself. This is why I like the film adaptions better. Where the books lack the detail required to build a vivid world beyond the tunnel-views and narrow concerns of its main characters, the films make up for it - nearly - with visuals. We get visuals of scenes left entirely to our imaginations in the books, or otherwise left out. Maybe some of these pros sound like cons, but this is what I like about The Hunger Games.

Here is an incomplete list of things that I do not like about The Hunger Games books, films and franchise. I do not like that the series borrows from, to put it politely, the discourses of marginalised people. I do not like that it warps these discourses to bend them away from the present and to suggest that the dystopian society of The Hunger Games does not directly parallel our own. I don't like this positioning of the present-day as a shining beacon of justice and democracy. I don't like that Katniss Everdeen follows in a tradition of Young Adult lit heroines who are awkward, not at all personable, yet highly desired. I don't like that when casting the role of Katniss Everdeen, the casting call specified that the actresses applying for the role should be Caucasian, as in White. I don't like that the rest of the cast is overwhelmingly white despite that the United States is headed towards a future where, in the words of Broad City, everyone is "caramel and queer." I don't like that The Hunger Games puts a White face to scenarios that reflect the suffering of Black Americans, Native Americans and marginalised groups across the globe.

The Hunger Games presents everything in abstract. It takes stories that we know well, that some of us have lived, and rends these stories and ideas from their original meaning and purpose. That Panem is the dystopian future of the United States of America, although it is not detailed how the country reaches that point, suggests firmly that the events described in these stories are what we have to fear if we as a society should stray from the path of freedom. Arguably, all the stories we tell about the future are either a wish or a warning. The Hunger Games, then, is a warning. When Effie Trinket makes an offhand joke about old things coming back into style, "including democracy", the democratic time of freedom that she suggests a return to is this one, the present. The solace in The Hunger Games is that everything presented is a fiction; we can close the book or turn off the film and return to the world in which children do not die for no reason, in which the people are protected by the state, in which labourers see the fruits of their labour and are compensated fairly. Except, we don't live in that world.

What strikes me is how closely scenes and images used in the film mirror historical and current events in ways that I am not certain were deliberate. I am not sure what would be worse: if these choices had been intended to conjure images of real suffering or if they had not and the imagery was only for show, fragmented ideas plucked from the public consciousness. At several times throughout the screening, I was moved to tears. Not because the story or the actors moved me, but because I could not bear the ways in which what I was watching presented real experiences as entertainment, as abstract, as unreal. How glamourised it was. I sat through the film always aware that I was watching an installment in a billion-dollar franchise.

The films present children dying, people living in fear of their lives: every 28 hours a Black person in America is murdered by police or vigilantes. The people in the districts are starving, dying, and when they fight back, they fear annihilation from the Capitol: communities of First Nations people in Canada are charged exorbitant prices for basic necessities; the state of Israel endeavours to commit genocide in Palestine and justifies their actions by claiming self-defense against Palestinian liberation efforts. In one scene, President Snow authorises his Peacekeeper task force to publicly execute people in each district while a televised presidential address plays in the background, warning the people of Panem that violence is not the answer. The parallel is striking, yet I doubt that the filmmakers were trying to make a comment on President Obama's reaction to the protests in Ferugson, MO.

There is little discussion in The Hunger Games of what it takes from a person to see children murdered, other than that it is "scary" - there is no lingering on the darker aspects of the story. Instead, there is #TeamGale or #TeamPeeta. It frightens and disgusts me that millions of people can walk into a screening of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 unconcerned with the implications of a film franchise that capitalises on the oppression of real people, not while but because it puts a White face to it and ignores historical precedent and current events. The franchise relies on the ignorance and cognitive dissonance of White moderate audiences to make money. Would they still pay for a ticket if they remembered the images of carnage from this summer's news cycle when they saw the remains of District 12, littered with charred bodies, ashen limbs reaching towards the sky? Would they enjoy it as much if when Katniss sang The Hanging Tree, they heard Billie Holliday singing Blood on the Leaves?

It is an act of violence when the experiences of oppressed people are torn from their roots and introduced into the mainstream consciousness without precedent, without context. What we went through, what we are going through now, is not material for the next popular Young Adult novel, especially not when we try to tell our own stories with our own voices and face resistance at every turn. The wider discussion that the books, however inadvertently, are begging for is smothered by adoration for the protagonist, whose personal triumphs and struggles reduce the depiction of systemic oppression to background noise. It makes me sad and it makes me angry that people can sympathise with The Hunger Games and with Katniss Everdeen, but not with #BlackLivesMatter or Mike Brown or Eric Garner or Aiyana Stanley-Jones or Trayvon Martin or Renisha McBride or Islan Nettles or Tiffany Gooden. The fact is, and remains, that The Hunger Games does not care about oppression or paying homage to what is happening in the world right now. Lift those catchy, quotable lines - spray IF WE BURN, YOU BURN WITH US on every wall. But do not confuse a story about oppression with a story for the oppressed. The Hunger Games is not for you. 

But we have the #MillionsMarch in New York City. We have ever-increasing awareness about global and domestic social issues. We have the resources to organise and co-ordinate movements around the world. I am tempted to quote the film, to tell you that fire is catching, but that much is clear. I don't need to borrow the words of a global franchise to tell you that what we need is for our voices to be heard, not erased, our experiences honoured, not appropriated. We are making our voices heard, we are honouring and valuing our own lives. And frankly, we don't need a mockinjay. We don't need a figurehead that doesn't represent or serve us. We have ourselves.