• Hollywood History Is So White
• Ronny Regev (bio)

“Well, I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the white people’s choice awards. You realize that if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job.” This is how comedian Chris Rock, the host of the 2016 Oscar ceremony, kicked off his opening monologue. His pointed remark underscored the fact that no Black actors were nominated for any significant award for the second year in a row, a snub that prompted a social media campaign to boycott the Academy Awards under the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Despite the outrage, this was actually business as usual in Hollywood. A similar but longer nomination “whiteout” occurred between 1975 and 1981. As might be expected, Oscar nominations are indicative of broader employment trends in the movie industry. According to the 2014 census, minorities comprised 40 percent of the population in the United States, in contrast, they remained underrepresented on every front of the film industry—at the level of 3 to 1 in film leads, 3 to 1 among film directors, and 5 to 1 among film writers.¹ Where there are few employees, there can hardly be many Oscar nominees.

The uproar over minority representation is just the most recent episode in what is a long history of exclusion and discrimination. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s, following the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. Hollywood flourished in tandem with a new and invigorated form of racism, one that was more self-conscious and more systematic. After all, the film that symbolized the potential of the medium—The Birth of a Nation (1915)—was also an affirmation of this new form of white supremacy. In such a pervasively racist atmosphere, African Americans and other ethnic minorities found few opportunities to work in the film industry. Among the mainstream companies, there was no serious attempt to portray themes related to Black life or to recruit African American creative talent. Moreover, until the late 1920s, the limited number of Black film parts were predominantly performed by white actors in blackface. As African American journalist Geraldyn Dismond commented in 1929, Black people mostly entered the studios “through the back [End Page 70] door” as servants of white stars. When employed, Black actors were usually relegated to minor, one-dimensional roles such as waiters, maids, laborers, musicians, slaves, janitors, and servants, all of which served to confirm and amplify negative cultural stereotypes.

Justin Gomer’s new book, White Balance, provides a rich, detailed, and insightful survey of another important episode in this ongoing history of racial discrimination in the American film industry. Covering the three decades following the civil rights era, Gomer reveals the central role played by Hollywood in the formation, triumph, and persistence of colorblind ideology. Offering equal measures of historical synthesis and film analysis, the book argues that Hollywood movies not only reflected colorblindness, but “fundamentally constituted the ideology,” as they were central to its articulation (p. 5). Gomer draws attention to the “symbolic relationship” between the “sociopolitical project” of colorblindness and its “cultural and aesthetic” counterpart (p. 6), suggesting that Hollywood’s mobilization in support of colorblindness was self-serving. The themes and images conjured to convey and promote this ideology proved useful in attracting audiences to theaters and helped the industry reinvent itself in the years following the collapse of the studio system.

Colorblindness as a political concept has been a popular topic of inquiry for historians, cultural theorists, as well as legal scholars, and Gomer demonstrates an impressive command of the existing literature. While the idea of a society in which skin color is not a significant category has been around for over a century, the current discourse traces back to the 1960s and the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr., who, during the 1963 March on Washington, proclaimed that he dreamt of a nation in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character...

• 好莱坞历史是如此白
• 罗尼·雷杰夫（生物）

“好吧，我在这里获得奥斯卡金像奖，也被称为白人选择奖。您意识到，如果他们提名了房东，我什至不会得到这份工作。” 这就是2016年奥斯卡颁奖典礼的主持人喜剧演员克里斯·罗克（Chris Rock）揭开开幕式独白的方式。他的尖刻言论强调了这样一个事实，即没有黑人演员连续第二年获得任何重大奖项的提名，这种冷落促使社交媒体发起抵制以#OscarsSoWhite为主题的奥斯卡金像奖的运动。尽管感到愤怒，但这实际上是好莱坞的日常事务。1975年至1981年之间发生了类似但更长的提名“泛白”。可以预见的是，奥斯卡提名表明电影业的就业趋势更为广泛。根据2014年的人口普查，¹在员工很少的地方，几乎没有很多奥斯卡提名人。

少数群体代表权的骚动只是长期的排斥和歧视历史中的最新事件。电影在重组结束和吉姆·克罗（Jim Crow）的崛起之后于1890年代诞生。好莱坞与崭新而充满活力的种族主义齐头并进，这是一种更加自我意识和系统性的种族主义。毕竟，象征媒体潜力的电影-《国家的诞生》（1915年）也肯定了这种新的白人至上形式。在这种普遍存在的种族主义气氛中，非洲裔美国人和其他少数族裔在电影界工作的机会很少。在主流公司中，没有认真尝试描绘与黑人生活有关的主题或招募非裔美国人的创意人才。此外，直到1920年代后期，数量有限的黑色电影部分主要由白人演员以黑脸表演。正如1929年非洲裔美国记者杰拉尔丁·迪斯蒙德（Geraldyn Dismond）所说，黑人大多是“从背后进入制片厂的。[完第70页]门”作为白星的仆人。在受雇时，黑人演员通常被降级为较小的一维角色，例如服务员，女佣，劳工，音乐家，奴隶，看门人和仆人，所有这些角色都有助于确认和扩大负面的文化定型观念。

贾斯汀·高玛（Justin Gomer）的新书《白平衡》，对美国电影业这种持续的种族歧视历史中的另一个重要事件进行了详尽，详尽和有见地的调查。在民权时代之后的三十年中，戈默揭示了好莱坞在色盲意识形态的形成，成功和持久中所起的核心作用。该书提出了对历史综合和电影分析的同等衡量标准，认为好莱坞电影不仅反映了色盲，而且“从根本上构成了意识形态”，因为它们是其表达的核心（第5页）。戈默提请注意色盲的“社会政治计划”与其对应的“文化和美学”之间的“符号关系”（第6页），这表明好莱坞动员支持色盲的人是自私的。

色盲作为一种政治概念已成为历史学家，文化理论家和法律学者的一个热门话题，而戈默尔对现有文学的掌握令人印象深刻。尽管社会上肤色不是主要类别的想法已经存在了一个多世纪，但目前的论述可以追溯到1960年代，以及马丁·路德·金（Martin Luther King Jr.）的演讲，他于1963年3月在华盛顿举行的演讲中，宣布他梦想着建立一个这样的国家：在这个国家中，“人们将不会根据肤色来判断，而是根据人物的品格来判断...