People of color make up more than one-third of the American population, but despite their numbers, they remain dramatically underrepresented in many major motion pictures. Critically-successful and racially-sensitive movies like 12 Years A Slave and Selma may mask Hollywood’s race problem to a degree, but a new Tumblr blog and YouTube channel is out to show us just how white our movies really are. Dylan Marron is the man behind Every Single Word, a project that compiles every single line spoken by people of color in well-known films.
Marron, who is a contributor to the podcast Welcome To Night Vale, began posting Every Single Word videos to his YouTube channel on June 17th. Since then, he has pointed out the singular (re: white) racial makeup of a dozen films, and has received several hundred thousand views and widespread media attention along the way.
Some of the more egregious examples, such as Noah, have no lines spoken by people of color at all. Most of the films Marron highlights, however, throw a few token lines to Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern characters.
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As Marron told BuzzFeed, the under-representation of people of color can have an effect on non-white cultures:
“I read The Fault in Our Stars and cried my eyes out. I love that book. But nowhere in John Green’s exceptional novel was any character’s race ever mentioned. So why is whiteness the default? The story is not about whiteness, it’s about love and loss and mortality. If Hollywood keeps using white actors to tell universal stories then it is suggesting that people of colour don’t fit into the zeitgeist of human emotions.”
We expect Marron to put together a lot more Every Single Word episodes as his project becomes more popular. He certainly has no shortage of fresh material.
