Go Chris Rock! Chris Rock covers the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter, and boy, does he read Hollywood the riot act. And honestly, they need it. Chris is one of the few black men in Hollywood that has literally built his own brand, brick by painful brick. He wasn’t handed anything on a silver platter, unlike many of his white contemporaries. He had to work extremely hard to get where he is today, and as such, takes the opportunity to call Hollywood out on its institutionalized racism.
Chris explains, “It’s a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is. And the black people they do hire tend to be the same person. That person tends to be female and that person tends to be Ivy League….. But how many black men have you met working in Hollywood? They don’t really hire black men. A black man with bass in his voice and maybe a little hint of facial hair? Not going to happen. It is what it is. I’m a guy who’s accepted it all.”
See what he does here? He says the truth, but he does it without judgment or anger. It sucks, he’s saying, but it is what it is. But you know what? It’s NOT what it is. We shouldn’t accept this lying down, and we shouldn’t have to. Audiences have proved over and over again that they’re willing to watch movies led by women, by black men, and really, by anybody so long as the film is GOOD. It’s unfortunate because Hollywood IS run mostly by white men, and so they almost always put people like themselves in charge of everything they do.
A middle-aged white man runs a studio? Well, he’s probably going to greenlight a movie about another middle-aged white man fighting terrorists, and then hire a middle-aged white director to shoot the film – and so on and so forth. It’s a chain of racism that will never change unless these men REALIZE they’re discriminating, which many, many of them don’t even realize they’re doing. And until that changes, I’m sorry to say, but this industry isn’t going to change. There’s extremely slow progress being made right now, but all in all, we’ve still got a ways to go.
Image credit to FameFlynet
