National Review Online | Print:
"On the Difficulties of the Movie Star"
"...The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic.
It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.
...The problem for the proponents of minor diversity, meaning black and Latino Americans, is the emergence of major diversity in
Hollywood, which is a fully global enterprise.
African Americans may constitute 12 percent of the U.S. population, but Academy Award nominees are drawn from
the population of the entire world, of which African Americans constitute something less than a rounding error.
If we were to assume a random distribution of Academy Award nominations, then we would expect to find no African American nominees in many years, just as we would expect to find no Ukrainians or Comorians in many years.
If African-American actors, writers, and directors are nominated in numbers lower than their presence in the industry would suggest, it reflects the fact that
black Americans, like white Americans, are wildly overrepresented in Hollywood.
But that fact is changing.
No one will admit to being annoyed by it, but more global diversity in Hollywood will mean less local diversity, which is a problem if you want to define “diversity” in such a way as to include two ethnic groups instead of . . . well, there are 213 different ethnic groups identified in the New Zealand census alone.
There are many more ethnicities on earth than nation-states.
The convolution of thinking necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial.
If excessive whiteness is the offense, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart.
But Hollywood has in fact been pressing in precisely the opposite direction,
insisting that Latin Americans must not be considered white.
...When they get around to
casting the lead in The Barack Obama Story, they’ll probably just cast Harry Lennix.
But if they don’t, what is the ethnically correct thing to do?
Find a half-Luo, half-daffy American-hippie actor?
Tell every actor from each of Africa’s 3,000 ethnic groups that they’re all interchangeably black in the eyes of Hollywood liberals?
In fact, a film about the Obamas’ early courtship has just been released, with Parker Sawyers of Zero Dark Thirty as the future president.
His professional material identifies him as generically “African American.”
Close enough?
The activists will never be satisfied, because being unsatisfied — being outraged — is their business. It’s a good business:
Universal Studios’ “chief diversity officer” holds the rank of executive vice president.
The money in the diversity racket is big:
Google is spending $150 million to increase the diversity in its work force, in which whites are slightly underrepresented while Asians are dramatically overrepresented — again, if we’re using U.S. demographics for our point of comparison.
And it is by no means clear that we should: Google, like Hollywood, is global..."
