The shows casting directors helped to not only creating a show in which the diversity among African Americans is displayed, but also a show in which the topic of racial color coding could be discussed. Other popular “black shows” during the 1980s and…
In the essay, “The Offensive Movie Cliche’ That Won’t Die”, the author, Matt Zoller Seitz argues that most films portraying good morals and positive attributes about an African American character may actually just be an illusion to the audience and that the strings controlling the puppet aren’t so friendly after all. He also mentions how the role of a “magical negro” shows up in real life. Throughout his text, Seitz exemplifies a number of cases where a “magical negro” exists in today’s popular movies. He mentions various instances where some of the most relevant actors play these roles of the “magical negro”, such as Danny Glover in Legendary, Cuba Gooding Jr. in What Dreams May Come, Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Laurence Fishburne…
Embrace Diversity, Hollywood Hollywood is American society’s guilty pleasure and the most frequent used source of entertainment. People rush to the movies in flocks for an opening premier of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster hit. Therefore the movie and television industry has become so much a part of American culture that society fails to question what is actually being broadcasted. People become sublimely oblivious and subconsciously record everything they watch on these theatrical screens, that any unrepresented ethics or morals are simply disregarded.…
Hollywood films featuring lead black characters have been in cinema for decades. In contrast, black character images that are portrayed in cinema was usually centered around traditional racial stereotypes of the past such as “Uncle Tom, “the coon”, “the brutal black buck”, and “the mammy”. In today’s contemporary films, the black protagonist is often represented as having super natural or magical powers. As a result of this portrayal, a new racial stereotype was created; the “magical negro” that which reinvents the traditional stereotypes aforementioned. One film that represents the “magical negro” trope is Frank Darabont’s 1999 film, The Green Mile.…
As soon as Forrest made a fortune with the shrimp business, he gave a share to the Bubba’s mom. Soon afterwards in a scene there is a White American working for Bubba’s mom. In the book, Slow Fade to Black, by Thomas Cripps, Cripps explains how African Americans were negatively portrayed by stereotypes rather than portraying the successes of many African-Americans in the northern part of the United States. “Especially for blacks who were unrepresented in the seats of power, this meant continuing grudging tolerance of a white man 's Negro on the screen, a tamed image having little to do with changing social reality…all the blacks who broke the old molds in Northern ghettos, were unseen on the nation 's screens” (Cripps) This explains how the cinema has negatively portrayed African-Americans in the past and continue to do so with old stereotypes.…
"Walter's Thing: The NAACP's Hollywood Bureau of 1946--A Cautionary Tale" The author’s main argument in this article is that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a better agency than the previous Hollywood agency whereas every institutional foundation made attempts to deny African American life and culture when on the scenes. The new agency made it fair in that the African American’s are not denied the opportunity of playing their roles in movie making. The author gives sufficient amount of support for this argument throughout this article.…
1.3 Racial Diversity It would be completely incorrect to assume that the problem with female representation has been resolved. One cannot be supportive of feminism if it is only seen in one dominant ethnicity. The casual racism that often appears on the Hollywood screen is not only politically incorrect but also unsupportive of female empowerment.…
In the 1970s race was rampant in communities and the common notion was that black people were beneath the majority (white) population. And the introduction of Blaxploitation films allow black people to see themselves as the hero and the desirables in film which was completely contrary to society’s belief. This idea is addressed in "He Is A "BAD MOTHER*$%@! #" by Matthew Henry, "Tryin ' To Get Over": Super Fly, Black Politics, And Post-Civil Rights Film Enterprise." by Eithe Quinn, and "The Trope Of Blaxploitation In Critical Responses To Sweetback." By Jon Hartmann.…
For starters, there is a lack of black representation on television shows and movies. Television shows rarely consist of a leading black character or family. Also, the shows that do have black casts often paint blacks in a stereotypical light. The characters are usually, “ghetto”, loud, negative, or a “thug”. That does not include every show with black casts, just majority.…
This shift in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, that involved an integration of African American roles into national television programs, was a reflection of what was occurring in reality. In Edgerton’s essay, he states that “prime-time television during the 1960s was always reflective of what was going on in American society and culture”(248). This new inclusion of African Americans into television was in relation to America’s values in the social and political world. The nation was changing as more people became interested in racial reform and activism. Large television networks tuned into this shift and responded by creating more roles for African American actors.…
The definition of a black film would seem to be an easy standard to mutually agree on. Films about the people and culture of the African diaspora would satisfy most definitions, but issues arrive when black people are poorly represented and stereotyped or when the definition excludes other cultures from discussing black culture when they could also give a fair and thoughtful representation in Black Cinema. Thomas Lott argues that it can be hard to identify what makes quality black films because there must be an analysis of the separate concepts blackness and cinema. In his article “ “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,” Lot provides a compelling reason why his no theory approach provides a satisfying and open-ended approach to defining Black Cinema. Lott references Thomas Cripps’ Black film as Genre, Cripps to discuss a proposed definition of Black films to be defined as movies produced, written, directed, performed by, and performed for black people.…
Hollywood: Truly a Land of Opportunity? From white actors portraying black men in classics, such as Othello, or even from white actress playing dark skinned women, such as Mariane Pearl, white actors portraying people of color in american films has been a tradition in Hollywood. Hollywood has historically made the decision to cast white actors instead of letting minorities play their own roles. While Hollywood is known for being a white industry, over the past years more noise, such as the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (8), has been made about the lack of diversity in their films.…
The lack of African Americans in The Jazz Singer becomes clear as Jack Robin (played by Al Jolson) appears on screen for the first time in blackface. The only African American representation in the film is through what is considered a racist imitation or caricature. Jolson’s use of blackface and its meaning has been subject to much debate by scholars. Rogin believes blackface was a vehicle for upward mobility, as Jack Robin ‘rises by putting on the mask of a group that must remain, immobile, unassimilable and fixed at the bottom’.…
“Hamilton” summoned a casting call requesting actors that are were only people of color. Many white performers got upset over this request. The notion of colorblind casting is supposed to produce an even playing field when auditioning for a role. Colorblind casting asks that the casting director to ignore race and concentrate merely on the actors ability to perform. The second notion is to end the racist custom of white actors doing blackface.…
The term for this is called, whitewashing. Whitewashing is defined as, the casting practice most commonly in film, in which white actors are cast as non-white character roles. In this paper we will be looking at both film and theater and the ideas of whitewashing, tokenism and color blind casting. Since we already have defined whitewashing,…