I have thought about writing another post dealing with some of the issues, as I see them, with racism in the US many times over the past few months as riots have broken out in St Louis and Baltimore, and more and more news reports of deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police surface (at least a few of which seem to very, very clearly show an officer behaving entirely the wrong way). I never could decide quite how to go about it, or what of the myriad of things in my head to put down in one little blog post, and I do not want to necessarily repeat the same things being said over and over by so many (though I am sure this post will also rehash what at least some have said, I am not vain enough to think my thoughts on this are totally unique).
It was a conversation over dinner with my kids tonight that has finally given me a starting point for something I want to say and that I think is limited enough in scope to cover in a blog post. So I hope you do not mind if I jump on another soapbox and rant today, instead of posting pretty pictures.
It all started innocently enough with my teens obsessing over the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as they so often do. Disney, who owns the rights to make and distribute films involving The Avengers and several other Marvel characters, has recently obtained the film rights to Spider-man as well. And so it was that tonight my kids were discussing who they would like to see play Spider-man in a reboot. None of us had any trouble naming many young male actors who might be considered for such a role.
Then Marika said she'd love to see a reboot center around Miles Morales, rather than Peter Parker--which has been done enough already. So we started trying to think of young male actors who might be cast in that role, which is of a black, hispanic character. WOAH! it is a dang lot harder to think of anyone. There simply are not that many very well known actors who qualify. Even trying to think of just a hisapnic or just a black actor of the right age who is known was tough. Jaden Smith was the only name we could confidently come up with (and none of us think he is really all that right for the role). It just feels wrong that there is such a lack of diversity in the big names in Hollywood, doesn't it? Gina Torres was the only actor at all, of any age or gender to quickly spring to mind otherwise when thinking of a black, Hispanic name that appears on the big screen. And it is about as hard to think of young actors of Asian decent as well. Not that there are none, but so many fewer overall, much less than makes sense given our population as a whole.
This got the kids to wondering why is it that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe all of the major characters, all of the big time super heroes, are white? There is plenty of diversity in the supporting cast (and among the villains), but the top players are all one color, hardly representative of New York City, where many are from and most of the action takes place. (or so I understand from listening to the kids tonight). Funny thing is, the Marvel cast is considered diverse when compared to DC, which doesn't even have one female as a major lead in one of their motion pictures (there is a lot of fan desire for a Wonder Woman film, but so far that has not happened).
I doubt that anyone, at any point, made a decision to intentionally portray all of these heroes as only white or even as mostly male. Similarly, I doubt anyone in Ferguson intentionally decided to create a police force that was much whiter than the population it represented. We, as a culture, are just so very used to that being the picture we see, to whites guys as the good guys and as the leads and the main characters, that time and time again we continue to cast movies, and hire police officers and teachers, and so many other things with this slant in favor of one race, that the story just continues to be slanted and this insidious and almost unnoticeable and mostly unintentional racism is allowed to stay put and keep festering.
Yes, yes, of course I know many of these comic book characters have been around for decades and were from a time when white heroes were the only heroes that would sell. But we do not live in that time any more, and it is well past time that our movie heroes, our police officers and our CEOs reflect the full diversity of our nation. In an ideal world this would happen without thinking about it. It would just be natural to cast a range of characters with no bias (for or against any race or gender or sexual orietnation at all), but in practice it does not occur. At this point we have not moved far enough along the continuum to simply not think about it and have things work out as they should--which means we (all of us) need to consciously watch out for this and work at balancing things out, until it DOES become the norm.
This is not the only solution to many of the problems (especially as they relate to high incarceration rates and police brutality) but I think it would go a long way--and it is something that every single one of us can do to be a part of the solution.
--Hadley
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