You may have read something like this over the past few weeks, in the run-up to this year's hotly contested Academy Awards ceremony:
"The fact that there is an absence of African-American nominees at the awards this year is something I'm less concerned about than how that reflects on what's happening within the industry," [the film producer Preston Holmes told a reporter].
"We need more opportunities for African-American filmmakers and crafts people. There needs to be more of an African-American presence in the various unions and guilds."
Thing is, Holmes, who is black, said that way back in 1996.
Holmes gave that interview amid calls to boycott that year's Oscars for being devoid of nominees of color. The whiteness of that slate of nominees even made the cover of People magazine. Jesse Jackson asked black folks in Hollywood not to attend the ceremony.
Even that wasn't the first time black folks tried to protest an alabaster Academy Awards ceremony. The Oscars' trouble with racial representation feels like a fresh, contemporary controversy, a product of the social media megaphone, but it goes back almost to the beginning. At the 12th Academy Awards ceremony in 1940, Hattie McDaniel won a statuette for her role in Gone with the Wind, becoming the first black actor to win one. But before that happened, she was almost literally shut out of the ceremony, as strings had to be pulled to let her into the venue, which had a strict no-blacks policy. She wasn't allowed to sit at the same table as her co-stars, and was instead stashed away in a corner.
[For more of this story, written by Gene Demby, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/co...arssowhite-forsolong]
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