Race at the Movies: Color or Lack There of in Films

by Shaebaun "Suge" Benjamin

In 1916, D.W. Griffith made history and broke ground on the art of film making when he directed and released Birth of Nation. The film was a loose a interpretation of the Reconstruction Era that took place after the American Civil War in the southern U.S.

It took the time to carefully make fun of blacks and northern republicans will making the vile Ku Klux Klan seem like The Avengers.

Although freed slaves were featured as sex-crazed and violent towards whites, basically making them the antagonists of the film, the main villains were played by white actors in black face.

In 1963, the love story of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony was released featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. At the time it was the most expensive film ever made. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was the director.

The Egyption Cleopatra was played by the very much Caucasian Elizabeth Taylor.

On December 12, 2014 acclaimed director Ridley Scott will release Exodus: Gods & Kings which will tell the biblical tale of the Hebrews escape from Egypt and the Pharoah Ramses led by Moses.

Based on the trailer I can tell this will at least be a decent film that displays the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea.

Moses is played by the Welsh actor Christian Bale and Ramses is played by Joel Edgerton, an Australian actor.

Edgerton is fine actor whom you may know from The Great Gatsby and Warrior.

My problem with this is that in the 150 years of film making, we still have white actors playing the parts of people of color.

Perhaps in 1916 the idea of having an actual black man chase a white woman to her death might be too much for society to handle at the time.

And in 1963, it may have been too much to hire Diahann Carroll or Dorothy Dandrige to play Cleopatra when making a film with a then "unheard of" budget.

But here in 2014 there is no good explanation as to why an Egyptian character is being played by a white Australian actor with a spray tan.

There are plenty of Eastern African or Middle Eastern actors that may have made names for themselves while playing Ramses. As I said before this is no knock on Joel Edgerton, but this should have been an opportunity for ethnic actors to play a main role in what seems to be an epic film.

Race in film is still very much an issue, not as big of an issue in the past, but surely still an issue.

In early 2014, a reboot of the Fantastic Four films was announced to include Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, played by Michael B. Jordan. Storm is usually portrayed as white and will now be played by an African American. This was met with harsh criticism by staunch fans of the comic book. It also happened with Idris Elba playing Heimdall in both Thor films. But there is hardly any uproar when characters of color are played by whites.

No longer are African Americans constantly portrayed as domestic servants or submissive characters as in the early eras of film nor as pimps or drug dealers in the blaxploitation era.

A few years ago a film named The Help was released and met with plenty of critical acclaim. I was not too happy at the idea of a film about black maids in the 1960's and being able to overcome only with the help young white news reporter. As I saw the film, it was just as I had thought.

A joke made in Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle stated that black actors would always have jobs as long as they continued to make "slave movies."

Another issue of race in film is the portrayal of romantic relationships between races.

Zoe Saldana is phenomenal actress. In most of her films she is involved romantically with white actors even when she plays aliens in films such as Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy. As far as I can remember, the last film she was in opposite a black actor was Drumline with Nick Cannon in 2002.

It is very rare to see a major film with an black actor being romantic with a white actress.

In the film Hancock, a romance between Will Smith and Charlize Theron is only displayed by her telling him they were alien lovers for over 200 years but they never get intimate, kiss, or even hug. In an earlier film featuring Smith, the love interest in Hitch was meant to be played by a white actress but replaced by Hispanic actress Eva Mendes.

Even in the 1980's the portrayal of white actress and a black actor was an issue film makers had to work around. Originally Beverly Hills Cop was to star Sylvester Stallone as Axel Foley and included a romantic relationship with Jenny Summers. When Stallone left and was replaced by Eddie Murphy the pairing of the two was dropped, likely because the Jenny role was already cast with a white actress. The relationship only goes as far as Jenny sitting on the bed of Axel's hotel room as he tells her his plan of busting her boss for murdering their friend.

Yet, Rae Dawn Chong was the "go-to black girl" to pair with box office stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger throughout the decade.

We have gotten to the point where we have an African American president and interracial relationships aren't as much of an "oh, look at them" thing anymore.

We ought to give people the chance to play their own race on different forms media rather than hiring someone and saying "let's get him a tanning bed and makeup" and as much as there ought to be a few relationships with two people of different races in film and television.