Ok, can we be real (and obvious) here? I am a white woman. My last post was about race and I'm sure that my bringing up race relations could inspire some skepticism from people who personally face racial prejudice regularly. But I went to school in Newark, which for anyone who is not familiar with the area, has a predominantly black population. The school which I attended there has been ranked for over a decade as the most diverse school campus in the country, and it is a place wherein race and gender relations are discussed openly on an everyday basis. It is a place which I love dearly and which I went to straight from a public high school in a town with about a 1.4% black population (no exaggeration). It is also a place where minds are continuously expanded and improved not just by the classroom curriculum but by the vast range of attitudes and ideas which come along with rampant diversity. My point so far is this: I may not be the first image you think of when you think about racism, but I have definitely experienced it in some less traditional forms, and I am always offended by racial prejudice, even (and especially, since I often share a race with the offenders) when it is directed at a group to which I don't belong. One of the most consistent offenders in this area, to me, is the entertainment media industry and particularly the film industry.
Case in point (and my current case of contention): No Good Deed, an upcoming Screen Gems film starring Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson. In some ways, it is encouraging that a major production company is releasing a big movie with not one, but TWO black characters in lead roles. To anyone paying attention to race in major films, this is kind of shocking. Take, as evidence, this USC study from a couple of years ago which looked at race prevalence in 500 popular movies over a five year span. What the authors found was disconcerting, if not surprising. When considered as a group and when looked at as individual films, black speaking characters are few and far between, holding just 10.8% of these roles. This number increases significantly (to over 50%) when a black director controls the reins of a film, so it might not be shocking to see two lead roles filled by black actors if this were the case, but No Good Dead was directed by white British director Sam Miller. Its writer? Aimee Lagos (also not a black person).
This film is a bit of a statistical anomaly: a movie written and directed by white people, starring black people. How exciting! What progress! What is the movie about!? "Terri (Taraji P. Henson) is a devoted wife and mother of two, living an ideal suburban life in Atlanta when Colin (Idris Elba), a charming but dangerous escaped convict, shows up at her door claiming car trouble. Terri offers her phone to help him but soon learns that no good deed goes unpunished as she finds herself fighting for survival when he invades her home and terrorizes her family." Oh, that's ... cool? So, basically, a black actor gets a lead role in a major motion picture crafted by white people and he plays a "dangerous escaped convict"? Pardon my French, but wtf is that!? Come on, Hollywood, do better. How about instead you take the other bad-ass looking movie coming out, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and switch the lead actors so Liam Neeson is the "dangerous escaped convict" attacking a black family and Idris Elba is the private investigator tracking down the seedy low-lives that killed a woman?
