Whose Prejudices Are Being Catered To?

I stumbled across this post by Gillian B. White at Atlantic. In the post Ms. White remarks on a study of the lack of diversity in the casts of Hollywood movies:

Venkat Kuppuswamy and Peter Younkin, business-school professors at the University of North Carolina and McGill University, respectively, took a look at data on the film industry in order to measure how diverse casts went over at box offices.

For their study, Kuppuswamy and Younkin took a look at 723 mainstream English-language movies released in major theaters between 2011 and 2015, and determined the number of black actors in lead roles in each film. In nearly two-thirds of the films, there were no black actors cast in any lead roles. In 23 percent of the films, there was one. Only in 11 percent were there two or more black principals.

What was found was that U. S. box office isn’t much affected by cast diversity, “diversity” being defined as “the number of black actors in lead roles in each film”. While I agree with her conclusion that we shouldn’t blame Hollywood’s choices on U. S. audiences, I don’t think that tells the whole story.

Based on the abstract of the study (which is paywalled), they’ve limited it to U. S. box office receipts. The business school profs are perhaps not aware that Hollywood movies are shown to a global audience and that many movies, particularly the blockbusters where a lot of the profits are made, make 2/3s of those profits in the overseas market. The issue may not be that black principal casts reduce domestic box office but that they reduce overseas audiences. My suggestion: ask the studios.

And this observation of Ms. White’s:

One additional factor that Kuppuswamy and Younkin’s investigate is the gatekeeper theory, which says that part of the reason there are so few black actors in lead roles is because there isn’t enough diversity among directors, who help make hiring decisions.

is just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t just look at principal casts and directors. How many producers are anything other than white? Indeed, look at the entire motion picture industry, most of which is in back of the camera rather than in front of it. That’s where the real action is.