From Dashing Lead to Underdeveloped Sidekick to Dashing Lead Again: What Happened to Minority Representation On-Screen Between the Silent Film Era and Today?
Written by Tiesa Green, Cornell University
It’s no secret that representation has been at the center of discussions involving media production in the past few years, especially on the valences of race, gender, and sexual orientation on both the big and small screens. Since the late 2010s, the American film and television scenes have exponentially diversified their casts of characters: not only has there been an influx in original characters that were not white, male, and/or straight, a new trend of reboots has emerged in which studios remake pre-existing media, but racebend or genderbend their characters, adding racial and gender diversity to originally all white and male-led casts, respectively. While conversations around “forced diversity” are directed at both original and rebooted media, the act of changing the race of formerly white characters–especially those of fairytale classics–has been both furiously scrutinized and defended by consumers globally. Alongside the debate if this racebending should be allowed, there has also been a parallel conversation about the inherent laziness of racebending pre-existing media rather than producing original media that was created with centering non-white voices in mind, and the implications of this action.
The practice of racebending is a hotly debated and complicated issue, made more complex by the fact that it has largely been poisoned by people who simply do not want non-white faces on screen. We all have our opinions, and my discussion of racebending will go no further than these introductory paragraphs. Rather, I bring it up to show the increasing relevance of racial representation.
If you are anything like me (maybe I’m just out of the loop?), you’ve assumed that minority representation on-screen has been somewhat linear, with the quantity and quality of non-white characters slowly increasing as racial attitudes in the United States have become more accepting of non-whiteness. For those who are also in this boat, I obviously can’t explain how you came to that conclusion, but I know that for me, I’ve assumed a steady-ish increase in representation based purely on observation. Movies that I have seen that were made in the ’80s have all white leads, with at most, non-white comedic side character or minor villain portrayed very stereotypically, ’90s and new ’10s movies typically have one non-white character–specifically black–as the protagonist’s best friend, but no major importance to the overall plot, and in the present, representation follows the pattern I’ve described above at the start of this blog post. Due to this, I was quite shocked to learn that not only were there notable non-white movie stars during the silent film era, but many of the characters they portrayed were not racial caricatures. Due to the racial demographics of the United States at the time, these non-white stars were overwhelmingly black, but there were also a handful of non-black non-white stars, like Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, as well.
Finding out about the relatively strong presence of non-white characters during the silent film era rendered me absolutely dumbfounded, leaving me with the following question: “What happened?!”. If there was good representation all the way back in the silent film era, why did we seemingly have to build it from the ground up from the 1950s to today? The short answer, which I will spend most of the rest of this post expounding upon, is that America desegregated without integrating.
I understand that this comment may initially bring more questions than answers, given that conventionally, desegregation and integration are synonymous, both denoting an end to racial segregation. For me though, desegregation is a passive action, while integration is an active one: where desegregation is no longer banning non-white customers from your bar, integration is making an effort to appeal to that demographic, specifically, by adding the music popular amongst these subgroups to the band’s roster.
The distinction between integration and desegregation, however, would not be at all relevant when the silent film era began in America in 1894. At this time, there had never been a non-white face on-screen, and very intentionally so. When silent film began its peak in the early 1910s, the first instance of black face ever being shown on-screen had only occurred ten years prior in 1903’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In short, “representation” was, quite literally, not a concept.
That is, until the Harlem Renaissance began in the second half of silent film’s peak in the 1920s.
As the name implies, the Harlem Renaissance–also known as the New Negro Movement–was a burst of black artistic expression geographically rooted in Harlem, New York. Rather than a common thread of a given artistic convention or mode of expression, the Harlem Renaissance was centered with a strong sense of black pride, with the “New Negro” representing the new educated black class, who, through artistic intellectualism, could successfully challenge the United States’ Eurocentric colonial social structures to bring forth racial integration and equality in America. As for what Harlem Renaissance creative development(s) I believe to be most directly consequential for racial representation on the silent screen, the race film is the clear answer.
Race films, produced outside of the Hollywood studio system, were films that, while sometimes produced, funded, and/or directed by white people, featured all-black (or, on the odd occasion, all Chinese-American) casts and were produced specifically for the black-American (or, again occasionally Chinese-American) audience. Unlike Hollywood films, whose black characters could, functionally, be unanimously categorized as either the ever-subservient Tom, the buffoonish Coon, the sassy, asexual Mammy caregiver, the hyper-sexualized, hyper-masculine threatening young male Buck, or the Tragic Mulatto–a mixed-race character deeply ashamed of their non-white heritage who tries desperately to pass as white–, many race films expressly avoided the usage of popular black stock characters, instead constructing characters that were educated, successful members of polite society. Yes, race films were imperfect in their posturing of white liberal capitalist values as the reference point of social correctness, and in the onus that their narratives placed on the black individual to succeed, rather than recognizing poverty, crime, and other forms of social decay as a direct result of white supremacy. That being said, despite this, the race films produced during the silent film era provided black audiences of the time with their first ever instances of aspirational representation on-screen.
Counterintuitively, it is at the beginning of the age of film and social integration in the United States that all nuanced non-white characterization vanished. In the early 1950s, after the strong participation of black people in World War II, American cultural racial attitudes began to shift more favorably toward them, resulting in the slow integration of non-white people into formerly all-white spaces, including cinema. Contradictorily, while full inclusion obviously begins with partial inclusion, the absorption of black actors into the film mainstream effectively killed independent black production companies, who could not compete with the salary rates offered to black actors by Hollywood conglomerates.
Representation became a paradoxical issue: while both black studios and black actors wanted the portrayal of non-stereotypical black characters on-screen, black studios couldn’t match the salary offers of mainstream studios, because of their independent nature, leaving them unable to afford names big enough to garner mainstream pull, but actors could not become big names in the first place if they did not exit the independent film scene. In short, when segregation was at its strongest, the narratives of non-white people were controlled by fellow non-white people, but when white Hollywood allowed non-white people entrance in front of the camera but not behind it, non-white narratives were left at the mercy of white people, exclusively. Important for context here is that non-white roles had long existed on-screen, just as caricatures played by white people in blackface, yellowface, or brownface. In other words, the beginning instances of racial integration in cinema simply involved swapping in real non-white faces to play caricatures typically played by white faces in costume. Here is the desegregation without integration: while non-white people were no longer quarantined away from white America, their bodies were used as props, but their humanity was still denied.
As briefly discussed in this post’s third paragraph, non-white representation in the subsequent decades were, in essence, increasingly subtle versions of the stock caricatures that initially constituted all of their representation, including — but certainly not limited to — the Scary Black Man, Noble Savage , Spicy Latina, Token Black Friend , Dragon Lady, and Asian Nerd. It is only quite recently, as blockbuster films with little-to-no white characters, like Black Panther (2018) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) have proven the profitability of narratively centering the stories of racial minorities without narratively centering their race itself that large film studios have deemed such representation advantageous.
At the beginning of this blog post, I brought up the increasing cultural relevance of representation on the film screen itself, but I think that the historical analysis of this representation makes evident the need for representation at all levels of narrative creation and expression — not just in the reading of the script. Otherwise, if representation is not as present behind the camera as it is in front of it; it is not representation at all, but costume under the pretense of diversity.
