THE year has begun with much controversy in the entertainment industry. The film industry has always been accused of overt racism and fomenting stereotypes of minorities.
In fact when one looks at various box office movies, our brothers and sisters’ roles have been typical.
The parody franchise of Scary Movies made things even more obvious when they had a character they identified as ‘the token black’.
The Oscars are an annual American awards ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognise cinematic achievements in the film industry as assessed by the Academy’s voting membership.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honourary organisation, maintains a voting membership of 5 783 as of 2012. In 2012, the results of a study conducted by the Los Angeles Times were published describing the demographic breakdown of approximately 88 percent of AMPAS’ voting membership. Of the 5 100+ active voters confirmed, 94 percent were Caucasian, 77 percent were male and 54 percent were found to be over the age of 60. Thirty-three percent of voting members are former nominees (14 percent) and winners (19 percent).
For the second time in a row all the 20 acting nominations for the Academy Awards (Oscars) went to white actors. Now, actors like Jada Pinkett Smith and directors like Spike Lee have called for a boycott of the award show. It is being reported that executives behind the Oscars are struggling to find prominent black celebrities to present at the upcoming Academy Awards.
A look at some of the black entertainers who have won achievements in the entertainment industry also highlights the racial undertones within the industry, that are reflection of how the American establishment conditions the masses to accept racism as nothing out of the ordinary.
In 2001 Denzel Washington won an Oscar (Academy Award) for Best Actor, for the movie Training Day. The movie follows the day of Washington as a highly decorated LAPD narcotics officer who is evaluating a white officer. Washington’s character, Alonzo, not only forces the white officer at gun point to take drugs, he robs some black men of their money and ‘crack’ after the white officer stops them from assaulting a black woman. Alonzo also conducts a fake police search at a drug dealer’s residence in order to steal his drugs. Later on in the day, Alonzo pays off some other corrupt officials to obtain an illegal search warrant, which he uses to steal several millions of dollars from another drug dealer’s home. Alonzo pays some drug peddlers to kill the white police officer because he has refused to go along with his antics. In the end, the white officer confronts Alonzo and leaves him at the mercy of the community he has been abusing.
There are several things, very wrong with this narrative. It creates the impression that the brutality and abuse black communities face is at the hands of black police officers. It also reinforces the notion that the only successful blacks in the ‘hood’ are drug dealers and other criminals. What is even worse is that the community has to be ‘saved’ from this corrupt black police officer, by a white officer.
That same year, 2001, another African-American, Hallie Berry, won the Oscar for Best Female Actress for the movie, Monster’s Ball. In the movie, Berry plays the role of a Southern widow who finds comfort and love in the arms of a white Deputy Prison Warden who supervised the execution of her husband (Sean Puffy Combs). It goes without saying that Berry was critically lauded for her performance which included a rather graphic sex scene with the white prison warden.
It is noted that in the South, white slave owners forced themselves on black women, to breed and because of their fascination with their bodies. These women were raped and the children who were a result of these crimes were taken from them and also enslaved. Now here is Berry depicting a Southern woman, although not of the slavery era, who is enjoying sex with a white man. Does this not emasculate our black men?
In 2006, Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for Best Actor in his portrayal of Idi Amin in the movie The Last King of Scotland. The movie follows the story of a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who travels to Uganda and later becomes the personal physician to President Amin.  When they first meet, after an accident, President Amin, fond of Scotland as a symbol of resilience and admiring the Scottish people for their resistance to the English, is delighted to discover Garrigan’s nationality and exchanges his military shirt for Garrigan’s Scotland shirt. Later, Amin invites Garrigan to become his personal physician and take charge of modernising the country’s health care system.
Eventually, Garrigan begins to lose faith in Amin as he witnesses the increasing paranoia, murders and xenophobia in expelling South Asians from the country. Garrigan has an affair with one of Amin’s wives, Kay, which results in her getting pregnant. Amin replaces Garrigan’s British passport with a Ugandan one to prevent him from escaping, which leads Garrigan to frantically seek help from Stone, the local British Foreign Office representative. Garrigan is told the British will help him leave Uganda if he uses his position to assassinate Amin, but Garrigan refuses.
Kay later goes to a village to have an abortion and is apprehended by Amin’s soldiers who dismember her. Garrigan finds her dismembered corpse on an autopsy table and falls retching to his knees, finally confronting the inhumanity of Amin’s regime and decides killing him would end it all. Garrigan plots to poison Amin, under the ruse of giving him pills for a headache. However, the plot is discovered, Garrigan is beaten by Amin’s henchmen before Amin himself arrives and discloses he is aware of the relationship with Kay. As punishment, Garrigan’s chest is pierced with meat hooks and he is hanged by his skin.
A fellow doctor, Junju, rescues Garrigan and urges him to tell the world the truth about Amin’s regime, asserting that because Garrigan is white, the world would believe him. Junju gives Garrigan his own jacket, enabling him to mingle unnoticed with the crowd of freed hostages and board a plane. When Garrigan’s absence is discovered, Junju is killed for his aid in the escape while the plane departs with Garrigan on board. Amin is informed too late to prevent it, while Garrigan tearfully remembers the people of Uganda.
This is yet another classic case of the reinforcement of the stereotypes the entertainment industry feeds its consumers. Amin is presented as the typical dictator, as we know the continent is run by dictators according to the Western media.
Not only that, the people are primitive and are suffering. It has to take a white man to see and expose their suffering. This white man, as the saviour, is a narrative that is played over and over again. Some of the films that have carried this narrative include, Blood Diamond, which features a then young Leonardo DiCaprio helping a victim of the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone not only escape from rebels but travel to the west to tell his story about the illicit diamond trade in that country.