I'm tired of seeing white people on the silver screen.

First, let me note that I am white. I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, a white woman who readily consumes TV shows and series and often blogs/tweets about them. I love film. I love what Hollywood could be, but I must say that I don't love what it is, and that is a machine generating story after story in which the audience is asked to root for a white (usually male) hero over and over and over (and over) again. I'm tired. I'm tired of directors pretending that white actors are the default and that people of color are a distraction when it comes to filmmaking. I'm tired of black women in Hollywood being relegated to roles of slaves and "the help" over and over again. I'm tired of films convincing themselves that they are taking on something fresh and new, the likes of which the world has never seen, but in actuality adhering to tired tropes and stereotypes.

One example that comes to mind is Avatar, a "groundbreaking" film about aliens and humanity, which, underneath it all, is the same old White Savior story. But more recently is Lucy, the film starring Scarlett Johansson in which a woman named Lucy evolves and is able to use 100 percent of her brain's capacity after she unwittingly ingests a massive amount of drugs.

Lucy is about what humankind could be -- it's about possibilities. As Lucy's brainpower grows stronger and the volume of knowledge she is able to access increases, she delivers monologues about how little humans understand about death, existence, and the universe, mediating on time and history. The film likes to think of itself as reimagining everything that we think we know about humanity, and presents to us their vision of what the most evolved woman on earth looks like:

A blonde white woman.

See, I just can't get right with that.

You see, I was an anthropology major in high school and by the time I was 16 I'd learned all about Lucy (Australopithecus), the collection of bones found in Hadar and thought to have lived 3.2 million years ago, one of the oldest hominids we know of. Lucy the film doesn't try to hide how cute they thought they were being by naming the supreme evolved being in their film "Lucy" -- they show an ape-like creature crouched by a stream to illustrate just how far human beings have come, and say as much in the opening lines, depicting vast cities built up to show our progress. The original Lucy was not really an ape, though. She had small skull capacity like apes, but her skeleton shows she was bipedal and walked upright like humans. Hadar, by the way, is in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia.

So I guess what's sticking in my craw is the assertion that while human life originated in Africa -- a detail the film neatly skims over, placing the ape-like Lucy that Johansson sees in North America -- somehow the way we imagine the most evolved human being is blonde and white. Even more, when Lucy gets surges of knowledge in the film, her eyes flash brightly blue. Because blue eyes, we all know, are the universal symbol of superiority, right?

How is it that in a film whose premise rests on the idea of reimagining the past, present and future, we still end up with a blonde white woman with flashing blue eyes as the stand-in for what personifies evolution and supremely fulfilled human potential? At one point the Ape-like Lucy and Evolved Lucy meet face-to-face as Evolved Lucy does a bit of time-traveling. Their fingers touch, and we see them deliberately posed to mimic the famous Creation of Adam painting, and in that moment I saw what I suppose we were supposed to see: humanity at its beginning, and then humanity at its end, at its most perfect. Blonde, white and blue-eyed.

I can't accept that. I can't accept that there was only one black woman in the entire film, who delivered one line and who we never saw again. I can't accept that the bad guys were Asian and that although in China, Lucy's roommate says, "I mean, who speaks Chinese? I don't speak Chinese!" I can't accept that in Hercules, which I also saw this weekend, there were no people of color except for Dwayne Johnson himself and his mixed-race wife, whose skin was almost alabaster. I can't accept that she got maybe two lines and was then murdered. I can't accept that the "primitive tribe" in Hercules consisted of dark-haired men painted heavily, blackish green, to give their skin (head-to-toe) a darker appearance, so the audience could easily differentiate between good and bad guys by the white vs. dark skin. I can't accept that during the previews, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a story about Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, where not a single person of color is represented, casts Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton to play Egyptians. I can't accept that in the preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service, which takes place in London, features a cast of white boys and not a single person of Indian descent, which make up the largest non-white ethnic group in London. I can't accept that in stories about the end of the world and the apocalypse, that somehow only white people survive. I can't accept that while my daily life is filled with black and brown women, they are completely absent, erased, when I look at a TV or movie screen.

I can't accept that. And I can't accept that when we think about the potential of humankind and what our brains are capable of doing and thinking and feeling, that people of color would be absent from that imagining. I can't accept that. And I won't. I'm tired of seeing people that look like me crowding screens both big and small: I am not what the world looks like. Hollywood, stop whitewashing characters. Give us more films like this year's Annie. I'm no Lucy -- like everyone else I'm only using a tiny amount of my brain's capacity. But you don't need to be a superhuman logic-machine to see that Hollywood has a major problem with depicting people of color, and it's time to actually reimagine what the world can and should be.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5627318

Insightful piece.

Most of my all time favorites have blacks, maybe some backyard productions just decided to do something for their limited audience.

We don't need to shout much about it before someone would suggest that we need to see whites in our Nollywood movies. Nah!

I smell racism!

Well,we will always have to contend with racism so long as we have black tires attached to a car painted white.

Guykhena: This woman is straight confused,
What's she trying to sound like? A black messiah?
She's a fvcking racist,cus everyone didn't go into a racist thinking when watching these films,but this confused white woman is trying to start a race war in the movie industry!
What this tells us is that she see blacks as a lower race and that blacks should be treated differently,specially(Tho such situations have already been passed and resolved,decades ago ).
She's a coward joor,

Omo. see mentality.

First, let me note that I am a 'fillage somborri'


Any article that starts with "First, let me note that I am white/black" is going to be 'dumb' & most probably 'racist'

Can't remember when I last read an article as daft as this!! What a load of crock.

Rubbish!

I remember a cartoon: A Native American Indian kid is seeing his first Cowboy & Indian film, depicting an Indian Brave raping and stabbing some innocent White woman, and his eyes are bugging out with shock.

This old Indian standing by him says comfortingly:

"Not to worry, my son- one day Red Man will own Movie Studio!"

As a reader of Sci-Fi since I was a kid, I have wanted to write Media for myself for a long time.

I was happy to see that our own people were going to be able to produce their own movies- I facepalmed with horror, when I saw what they were producing.

Every Movie is about things which functional illiterates can easily understand.

What is wrong with that? Well, every movie is like that!

Some "Storm-in-a-Teacup" sort of affair, that anyone with the IQ of a shoe-size could understand!

There is nothing that challenges the mind!

The heroes and heroines only handle problems that affect them.

There is no villain out to destroy the whole city! Or take out all of Africa.

You don't even have movies where the Bad Guy was going to take out an entire village!

What about "whodunnits?"

Where are the movies where someone turns up dead at a party, and they have to figure out who the culprit is, before daybreak?

Where are the Computer Hackers breaking into Banks and leaking State Secrets?

Where are the writers who have any depth-of-intellect at all?


If Black people scraped together money to produce their own movie in America, then they could put a Black person as the hero.

Wesley Snipes did great, but the average Black guy is not going to stick his neck out to save White Civilization, like he did.

If a Black woman had Lucy's powers, if she wanted to spend the rest of her life helping Mankind, then the drug must have certainly been shacking her brain!

A movie about what happened to Lucy happening to a Nigerian girl would be really funny, when compared to LUCY!