Stereotype and Racism in Hollywood film

Racism has been in Hollywood movies for quite a long time since the early Hollywood industry in the 1900s. In these articles, the reader can understand more about how Hollywood movies represent different characters in a way that lets the viewer recognise the group of people the way they are.

Asian characters

In the early days of Hollywood, Asian characters appeared mostly in the form of racist clichés, either as mysterious, threatening villains, or as ridiculous caricatures. For example, Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast At Tiffany, played by Mickey Rooney, a white actor, parodyed Japanese person, such as speaking English with a stereotypic Japanese accent, acting as a stupid and hot-headed person to portray Asian people in white people’ s perspective

The term “yellowface,” is an act of white actor who depicts East Asians in American film, theatre, and other Western media by cloning and dressing up like a traditional East Asian stereotype. The media depictions of East Asians represented the popular view of the Americentric rather than the realistic and honest images of real cultures, traditions, and behaviours. This pattern has been really popular in Hollywood. Production teams did not use any other racial actors, but chose instead to use white actors. This practise has been self-replicating: sociologists have found that stereotypes break down when people from different ethnic groups communicate more directly with one another .

“Even today, most images of Asians and Asian Americans on screen aren’t created by Asians or Asian Americans, but by people who don’t know much about them,” (www.dw.com), 2021) says Kent Ono, who studies media representations of a race at the University of Utah. This misappropriation of Asian racial by people who have never seen any Asian people. It gives rise to a very confused and disconnected relationship between Asians and Asian Americans and Hollywood, so they cannot identify themselves with this strange representation.

Madame Butterfly by Puccini is a clear example of orientalism by someone who has never been to Japan and is mostly performed by western singers. It’s a controversial libretto because it shows that the abuse of hopeless women is being sold to westerners looking for pleasure.

Katherine Hu, a writer in New York Times, said “Page Act of 1875, which banned immigration by Asian prostitutes, effectively barring Chinese women from the country. The stereotyping of Asian women as submissive and exotic sex objects persists in American cultural works. Operas, while fantastical and fictional, still affect the way we perceive the people portrayed in them.” (“Opinion | Classical Opera Has a Racism Problem (Published 2019)”, 2021)

Today, Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America, generally reflect on the “amazing success stories” of Asian Americans and extoll their hard work and family orientation. Stereotypic Asian people as a “model” of minority, believing they are excellent scholars, families and economic backgrounds. While this stereo tends to be a positive attribute, it is believed that the hard-working Asian people can be viewed as unnecessarily violent, and the silence can be translated as sly or cold.

Black characters

Same as the Asian characters, they were barely black actors in the early Hollywood period because of racial discrimination in the 19th and early 20th century, Hollywood industry tend to not use African-American actors and actresses. The Hollywood industry often uses the notorious technique, “Blackface,” played by white actors, depicts Black people with their own perspective. Let’s begin with the first 12-minute film Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a film about Black people in 1903. A simple, short, silent film began an unforgettable media journey for Black people, but it was a bitter start. The person who played the first infamous character of Uncle Tom wasn’t a Black man at all — he was simply a nameless black-faced white star. Uncle Tom is a slave to the Black Estate, loyal to the service of his white master. It is known to be one of the “first positive black characters.” This character can be seen in the film For Massa’s Sake, in which the Uncle Tom character sells himself back to slavery in support of his master’s financial affairs.

Another example would be a film “The Birth of a Nation”, which is considered the most racist film ever made, Ellen Scott, writer of Cinema Civil said “This film actually depicts lynching as a positive thing,” she says. “The politics of the film was essentially to say certain black people are worthy of being lynched. In that sense it’s extremely racist.” Also, Paul McEwan finds the basic narrative to be profoundly faulty. He said that “The film argues that giving black people rights was a terrible, terrible error, that they did all sorts of horrible things that actually they didn’t do, and that the noble Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was this wonderful saviour that saved America,” he says. “It couldn’t be any more wrong.”(Brook, 2021)

The film honored Ku Klux Klan as a protagonist, even though the KKK organisation ended in 1915, a big achievement of The Birth of a Nation, the KKK began to reunite. In the 1920s, it became a huge body at the height of the nativist fervour of the United States.

Summary

In my view, the media plays a major part in stereotyping and bigotry. They prefer to repeat the same myths over and over again. If the main characters were going on adventures and changing as characters, those left as other racial characters had no time to adjust, so they were left as one-dimensional characters. Since these characters don’t need to change, they have stayed basic, and the easiest place to portray a character is by stereotyping. This means that the audience can realise exactly what type of person this character is, simply from the way they dress, the way they talk and what they do.

I would like to say that everyone is born differently and not everyone is aligned with a traditional stereo. Not all Asians know martial arts, and not all blacks are mean. Importantly, do not let the stereo in the movies lure us and there are many sides of people in the real world that we have not seen before. Also, racist people, whether or not they are based on these prejudices, are still inhuman. Not everybody needs to be a clown in someone else’s eyes.

Bibliography

(www.dw.com), D. (2021). What Hollywood movies do to perpetuate racial stereotypes | DW | 21.02.2019. Retrieved 27 February 2021, from https://www.dw.com/en/hollywood-movies-stereotypes-prejudice-data-analysis/a-47561660

Brook, T. (2021). The Birth of a Nation: The most racist movie ever made?. Retrieved 27 February 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150206-the-most-racist-movie-ever-made

Opinion | Classical Opera Has a Racism Problem (Published 2019). (2021). Retrieved 27 February 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/opera-racism-puccini.html