LogFAQs > #886323429

From the 1910s to the 1960s, we saw a number of westerns and period pieces which heralded Confederates as heroes and treated the pre-Civil War South as a golden era of civility and prosperity. It's one of the few times that history was written by the losers. And the roles of black actors were limited to jungle men, musicians, slaves, servants, cooks, and musicians.

I don't wish to pretend that the South was super-racist and the North was a world of enlightenment, but I think the struggles which black actors went through to get their films produced in the late 1960s and 1970s would have taken place decades earlier if the industry had originated from the North instead.

Even if the mindsets of producers of the past no longer affect the way that films are made today, it still has an impact with regards to the starting point for minority representation and inclusion. It also allowed the notion that white audiences don't want minority actors for their leads to go on decade after decade and continue to this day.


I can't say that a film like Ghost in a Shell would have been any better if New York had been the motion picture capital of the world, but I do believe the film would have gotten the protagonist's ethnicity right.