An Academy Awards that looked like this—that celebrated the tremendous work of artists like Coogler and DuVernay—would be a better, more interesting celebration than the one that’ll take place on Sunday. But even so, it would be only the barest hint of progress for an industry that still systematically leaves so many people out. No Asian or Latina actress has won an Oscar in over 50 years. Latinos make up only two percent of the Academy’s current membership, while the U.S. Hispanic population tops 17 percent. Asians and Native Americans together make up less than half a percent. Native Americans and indigenous people barely take part in major films produced in Hollywood, let alone at awards ceremonies. Meanwhile, the financial incentives for movies to cast more women and people of color are more pressing than ever—a new report from UCLA found that Hollywood’s diversity issues could be costing the industry billions of dollars.

If the industry’s answer to #OscarsSoWhite stops at filling the roster of Oscar finalists with only African Americans, Hollywood risks swapping one form of tokenism for another, letting one dimension of diversity stand in for an audience that deserves so many more. The industry isn’t close to doing justice to the wealth of talented black actors, directors, and writers within its ranks. But that’s merely where the problem begins.

* * *

It’s worth rewinding for a moment to the 74th Academy Awards in 2002. Hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, the show saw Denzel Washington present an honorary award to Sidney Poitier, the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1964. Later, Washington became the second black man to win the Oscar for Best Actor, and Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the award for Best Actress. “This moment is so much bigger than me,” she said in an emotional acceptance speech, in which she thanked Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Angela Bassett. “And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

This is the significance of the Oscars, a television program of dwindling popularity that nonetheless functions once a year as a metonym for all of Hollywood. As such, it’s a convenient yardstick for measuring how well the film world has kept pace with the evolving values of the country as a whole. Earlier this month, Berry reflected sadly on her Oscar win in an interview with BET. “To sit here almost 15 years later, and knowing that another woman of color has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought that moment was bigger than me ... Maybe it wasn’t. And I so desperately felt like it was.”

The achievements of actors like Berry, Washington, and Poitier—as well as Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Barkhad Abdi, Jennifer Hudson, and films like 12 Years a Slave—may inform the diversity discussion’s focus on black actors and filmmakers, but the reason is also much broader. “Throughout the long history of Hollywood and the history of the Oscars, there has been an ongoing conversation about racism that has often been framed in terms of black and white,” said Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies race and pop culture. The current situation, he said, simply reflects that past.