LOS ANGELES: Hollywood is failing to adequately depict the increasing ethnic diversity of the US on the big screen, according to a new study. Latinos are the most under-represented, with African Americans also sparsely depicted, though the latter group is slowly gaining more screen time.
The study, carried out by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, looked into racial make-up of 3,932 speaking characters from the top grossing films at the US box office between 2007 and last year. In 2013 alone it found that just over a quarter of these parts were played by people from ethnic minorities, despite 37 percent of the US population hailing from these groups. A staggering 74 percent of the total characters across six years were white. Latinos, who comprise 16.3 percent of the US population and are regular filmgoers - they buy 25 percent of all movie tickets - only made up 4.9 percent of characters.
Despite a sense that more movies about the African American experience, such as the Oscar-winning race drama 12 Years a Slave and political biopic The Butler, are hitting the big screen and doing well at the box office, the study found the number of people from non-white backgrounds did not radically improve between 2007 and 2013. There were no African American speaking characters in 17 percent of the studied films, despite black people making up 12.6 percent of the US population.
Black women were the least likely group to find their way behind the cameras. In five out of the six years studied, there were no female African American directors in charge of any of the top-grossing films.
The Guardian
