Posted: Aug 04, 2018 10:09 pm
by Thommo
I'm With Stupid wrote:How are stars made in the first place? For the most part, by someone taking a punt on them in a lead role and them doing well. The reality is that in the vast majority of film roles, the character's ethnicity is irrelevant. Scarlett Johansson is a big draw because she's been offered leading film roles consistently for 20 years. The fact that you can barely name a black or Asian woman with the same profile is exactly the problem and entirely the fault of racist hiring practices.


I think this is a good point. I'm perhaps not 100% certain it's entirely due to racist hiring practices, but it's a problem worth highlighting.

One of the factors in the Scarlett Johansson example though is that the proportion of Americans who are ethnically Japanese women is actually miniscule (around 0.25% of the female population). We wouldn't expect to be able to name more than 5 of the top 100 female film stars as asians even if they were proportionally represented (among Americans) and getting exactly the same opportunities as everyone else, and the question of whether someone ethnically Korean (for example) should get preference for playing a character of Japanese origin is a rather different one in the first place, especially with the implications that the lack of roles which originate from asian cultures would have for asian actors and actresses if geographical conformity of casting became the norm.

It is also complicated by international film stars working in Hollywood and the demographics of the audiences that are being sold to.

African Americans seem to fare rather worse, mind you.