Hollywood’s lack of diversity in terms of both gender and race is nothing new. But if you had to guess how many minutes in, say, terrible Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan vehicle Wedding Crashers featured a person of colour, what would you say?
Luckily, someone on Tumblr has already done the work for you. Dylan Marron, creator of the “Every Single Word” project, has edited down Hollywood films to include only the lines spoken by non-white actors. And it turns out the results aren’t a matter of minutes, but of seconds: Wedding Crashers clocks in at 32 seconds (if you exclude Morran’s intro and titles):
The shortest clip Marron has made so far is for Into The Woods, which contains no non-white lines at all:
It’s not just their brevity that makes these clips so depressing – those lines that do appear are a parade of racial stereotypes and bit parts.
Cult film Frances Ha contains a grand total of three non-white lines:
Morran also creates a credit sequence for his clips. Frances Ha’s makes for particularly uncomfortable reading, as the non-white characters aren’t even named (the fourth character, “Home Friend”, has no audible lines as he appears in a group scene):
And here’s “physical therapist”, the single non-white character in Black Swan:
What a time to be alive.
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