Ethnic Minority Media (EMS) held a news briefing on August 25th on diversity in Hollywood. In recent years, the Hollywood film and television industry has produced many films and TV series featuring ethnic minority actors and producers, such as the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” with Asian casts, Latin Does the DC Comics superhero movie “Blue Beetle” with a predominantly American cast prove that racial diversity in Hollywood movies has increased.
Michael Tran, co-author of the “Hollywood Diversity Report” and a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology of UCLA believes that the Hollywood film and television industry has not yet achieved racial diversity.
He said that the formation of diversity in the Hollywood film and television industry is slow and has multiple results. In contrast, the TV drama industry changes faster than the film industry because the latter has less investment & risk.
With the rise of streaming media platforms, the diversity of film and television dramas is developing faster. Different races have equal opportunities to express themselves in the Hollywood film and television industry. Latinos are one of the largest groups in the American audience today, and Asians are the fastest growing minority in the United States, but their proportion on the screen is very small.
Takashi Cheng is executive director of ChimeTV, America’s only English language, AAPI Entertainment Network. Chime stands for Creating History in Media Entertainment, believes that ethnic minorities in the United States should present their stories in English, because movies and TV dramas in ethnic minority languages will make English-speaking audiences stereotyped as “foreigners”.
“We’ve been struggling for a very long time to gain traction and progress. Despite the success of films like Crazy Rich Asians, which raised the profile of Asian producers and their stories, there’s just very little progress and it’s slow in coming, he says.
Adargiza De Los Santos, an Afro-Latina actress and director, originally from the Dominican Republic and currently living in Los Angeles, says that it is “imperative that our stories are told by those who are living here for us.” She continued, “For such a long time the narrative has been something else. We’ve been given the narrative. We have to take the narrative back.”
Vidya Sethuraman
India Post News Service
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