opinion

Kaffer: Oprah's award won't erase decades of racism, sexism

I can never quite settle into an appropriate mood of celebratory glee, when someone who isn't a white, heterosexual man, gets some memorable distinction. Historic firsts are important. But I'm always left wondering why it took us so long to get there.

When Time Magazine named a group of women its person of the year, well, it's difficult to look at the long history of that award and not realize how pathetically few times its been awarded to individual women (just three: Wallis Simpson, Corazon Aquino, and Angela Merkel); on a handful of other occasions, Time has adjudged that a group of women deserved the honor.

When People magazine named a country music singer, who's mall hot at best, its Sexiest Man Alive, it's a reminder that the magazine has only seen fit to give one black man that admittedly frivolous designation.

It is absolutely fantastic that on Sunday night at the Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey became the first woman of color to win that organization's Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

But all the women, all the women of color, who weren't there haunt this award.

Outright bias plays some role in these decisions, surely. But more insidious is the structural racism and sexism that bars all women and men of color from the kinds of careers that lead to big-deal awards.

Women and people of color are most often presented, in TV and movies, as accessories to the lives of white men. A test proposed by cartoonist Alison Bechdel asks viewers or readers to consider whether any work of fiction has at least two female characters, who talk to each other about something besides a man. A comparable gauge can be applied to characters of color, or LGBT characters — are they present, and are they present as something other than an object lesson? Shockingly few entertainments pass the Bechdel test.

But if there's an on-screen problem, it's worse behind the scenes.

All of this year's Golden Globes best-director nominees were men, as presenter Natalie Portman noted. Industry wide, a new study found, only 4% of directors are women, a number that's changed little in the last 10 years. Just 5% are black, and 3% are Asian.

If I were a Hollywood investor, choosing which projects to back, I might make note that one of the most acclaimed mainstream, big-budget films of the last decade — "Wonder Woman" — and one of the most anticipated — "Black Panther" — show superheroes who aren't white men, in films directed by a woman and a black man, respectively. I might go on to infer that the excitement around these movies indicates that these are stories worth telling, by storytellers worth paying attention to, in part because they're stories we haven't heard before.

The structural barriers that keep women and people of color from fully participating in this industry — in political life — in the world of business — have to fall.

It's taken too long already.