This latest Economist piece has data to suggest that, numerically at least, Blacks aren’t actually severely underrepresented in Hollywood and that it’s Latino, Asian and other minority actors that suffer the brunt of the under representation.
That doesn’t mean there’s not discrimination on non-numerical basises but the evidence appears to show no large dearth of black actors over the most recent 15 years.
Thank you for providing an example of the Red Herring fallacy so stark I’m going to use it in next semester’s Critical Thinking 101 course.
Freudian typo? 
Is there a public leftist who hasn’t been dismissed as the left’s Rush Limbaugh? I did a quick Google search for “the Rush Limbaugh of the left” and Rachel Maddow got a higher page rank that Bill Maher. The other usual suspects, of course, are Michael Moore, Keith Olberman, John Stewart, Al Sharpton. Even as big an asshole as Maher is, it’s rank hyperbole to compare him to Limbaugh. Maher doesn’t work just the echo chamber – his viewers are leftests, but he does let opposing views get a word in, and not just as a set-up to being kneecapped. His show isn’t merely indulging animosity, nor is it meant to whip up his base. His show talks about the issues, and as host he gets to privilege his own spin. Fault him for that if you like, but if you really want to claim Limbaugh’s no worse than that you’re pissing into the wind, and that wind is coming from Rush Limbaugh.
+1
As to whether or not Maher deserves respect,
What they said.
If we are seriously going to consider this, then Maher needs to get to the real root of the problem. Who exactly MAKES those decisions to put a specific actor in a role? That would be the industry itself. And who exactly runs the industry? What are their motives?
Here’s a clue. They are the same people that pull Bill Maher’s strings.
It’s all about the money. If the studio moguls wanted to, they could make movies that starred the, you know, best actor for the part.
If there is any racism going on, it is being done by the people making the movies and doing everything they can to squeeze the last dollar out of the movie.
Blaming the asian market is a nice deflection, but the dirty little secret is a bit further back in the decision-making process, Billy.
That sounds like a very over-simplified interpretation of racial bias in casting. I suspect (though I don’t know how it could be tested or proven) that a lot of racial imbalance in movie casts is due simply to overwhelmingly white male makers of movies having their “people-like-me goggles” on.
Your “people-like-me goggles” refers to your natural human tendency to take it for granted that people-like-you are the default for ordinary human beings to look like and act like, and that a generic scene of ordinary life looks “normal” when it has people-like-you in it.
One commonly cited example is that the average crowd scene in movies has only 17% female extras and 83% male extras in it. Is this typical of your average real-life crowd? When you go to the beach or to a fireworks display in the park, are only 17% of the people around you female? Most likely not. But thanks to the “people-like-me goggles” of the mostly male crew and executives behind the cameras, that heavily male-skewed population automatically looks “normal” to them (and to most male viewers as well).
So I’d be willing to bet (though, as I said, I could probably never collect because I don’t know how one would determine this empirically) that most racial (or gender, for that matter) imbalance in Hollywood casting isn’t due to deliberate discriminatory exclusion, or to hard-nosed accountancy about balancing diversity with catering to prejudice in domestic or overseas audiences, or any fully conscious choices at all. I suspect it’s mostly the natural, unconscious result of mostly white, mostly male decision-makers wearing their “people-like-me goggles”.
I, personally, loathe Rush Limbaugh and have never voted R in a state or national election. If there is a long list of lefties who have been likened to Limbaugh it is because they, cumulatively, don’t influence their target audience as well as he does. We’ll pat ourselves on the ass here and chalk that up to lefties being wicked smart rather than our media personalities being ineffective.
No, nobody on the left has the hearts of their audience to the extent that Limbaugh has. But I’m not talking about popularity. More importantly, Limbaugh is simply more extreme than anybody on the left who’s getting attention. I mean, back when they had Air America there were some people on there who might have been in the running for being Limbaugh’s match in terms of intensity of vitriol and contempt for reasonable discourse, but I can’t even remember most of their names. The lefties most people have heard of are not even in the same league as Limbaugh, much less the same ballpark. But people really want somebody to be the Limbaugh of the left, so they keep comparing apples to fucking hand grenades.
Say what?
While there is sometimes tension when Asian storekeepers set up shop in predominately black American neighborhoods, I seriously doubt this is the basis of the typical Chinese guy or gal’s prejudice against black people.
Ergh, this thread. Mostly just unsubstantiated Bill Maher hate (What did he say anyway that is so bad?), and not much real adressing of the issue.
Have any of you people been to china? In my experience, they definitely are racist. Not necessarily in a discriminatory way. But the Chinese population is very homogenous. Black people are very rare over there, and are often viewed as “extreme”.
Also, haven’t you seen the Chinese Star Wars poster, where they made John Boyega tiny. Do you really need more proof than that?
Chinese in China. I taught for a year and a half in Jinan. I watched Black American teachers (women especially) wash out and leave early, men less so. Most of the Black folks I met in Jinan were students at Shandong U. and were African nationals.
Korea was almost as bad. Schools recruiting American teachers were weirdly upfront about not wanting Black teachers, and a few bars in Seoul and Daegu sometimes had signs up asking Black GI’s not to come in. (Some places asked non-Koreans in general not to come in, but this was really rare and never any place I had an urge to visit anyway.)
I can’t vouch for Maher’s conclusions, but I’m not surprised by them.
Here’s a recent article from Cracked: [URL=http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-china-hollywood-are-teaming-up-to-ruin-movies/]Six Bizarre Ways Chinese Movies Alter Movies You Watch/URL]. It doesn’t mention race, but i can see how some of the points made could negatively effect the box office of films starring black actors and actresses. For example, the requirement that U.S imports must be able to be shown on 3D/Imax screens and the failure of anything comedic beyond broad physical slapstick.
I protest the omission of Michael Moore from the list of lefty Limbaughs.
Well I can only say my experience of living in China has been very different. Black people tend to just get lumped in the foreigners basket. They don’t tend to know enough about the history to discriminate…the only blacks they encounter are generally wealthy and from some european country, america or canada.
I have plenty of chinese friends who are fans of black stars (Kobe Bryant seems to be very popular, for reasons unknown), and most of my black male friends have no problem getting dates (black women generally don’t have such a great dating experience but that’s true of expat women in general…but that’s another topic).
With regards to the OP, there is another kind of racism, that’s somewhat more subtle.
Much of the developed (and to a lesser degree, developing) world looks much the same: you can find posh suburbs, run-down inner-city areas, many of the same chain stores, and a mixture of lots of different cultures and ethnicities.
But that’s not what we want to see in film. We want to see all the different places as different as possible, as if they are stages in super mario.
So, for example, often the ethnic majority is the only kind of person you see, even if they only account for, say, 60% of the population in reality.
I mention this because my home country, Britain, has been very successful at exporting a particular kind of image, with many tropes and stereotypes including often being very white. But then if you want to make a film set in Britain now, you almost need to educate the audience first that their image of how Britain looks is very inaccurate. And people don’t want to learn that; they want to continue to believe in England Land.
He’s an anti-vaxxer for one. That right there makes it impossible for me to take him seriously.
Does ‘anti-vaxxer’ mean that you are against all vaccines, such as those against mumps or measles? If so, I am not familiar with Maher being an anti-vaxxer. I have heard him express scepticism with flu vaccines. Which you may or may not agree with, but I definitely don’t think it makes him a crazy person.
But Britain is very white, isn’t it? If anything with so much stuff set in London, you’d get the impression that Britain is more multicultural than it is. (Googling the 2011 census shows 92% white)
I’m surprised how many people assume that Asians who would be racist against black people would also be racist against white people. I’ve known many American servicemembers who have been stationed in Korea and Japan and the general consensus is that those societies are either neutral or positively disposed toward white people, but racist against blacks. This also conforms to what I remember hearing from the American-born children of immigrants from South Korea, China, and Taiwan about their parents’ feelings (much to their chagrin).
I currently live in England and yes, overall it is still very, very white. I was baffled by that, too.
I did mention him:
I seem to have left off Al Franken.
There was a time some years ago when Limbaugh and Moore had both used the excuse “hey, I’m just an entertainer” at around the same time. That’s bullshit because Limbaugh knows damned well that he’s taken as a serious political commentator, and Moore knows damned well that people were using his staged and otherwise misrepresented shenanigans in arguments. But Moore is at least funny, and it turns out you could buy him as an entertainer if you know better than to assume he wouldn’t put it on film if it wasn’t true.
A Salon writer is taking him on