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Yet, these developments focus on the most visible signs of change. A recently published book by Maryann Erigha, titled The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, offers a provocative lens for understanding how entrenched the industry’s racial imbalances are—and how the lack of people of color in top studio roles only perpetuates this inequality.

Now an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of Georgia, Erigha was a graduate student when she attended the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. There, she was struck by the realization that African Americans were virtually nonexistent on the screens meant to showcase some of the year’s most groundbreaking international movies. This experience birthed the earliest kernels of thought for what would become The Hollywood Jim Crow.

The title, which echoes that of Michelle Alexander’s landmark 2010 book about mass incarceration, raises questions about the extent to which Jim Crow persists in entertainment today. Erigha acknowledges that Hollywood’s racial hierarchy isn’t identical to the system of legal segregation that existed in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. But she believes that many of the same principles apply. “That Jim Crow was a legally enforced [system] that affected everyone—their mobility, their bodies, their ability to find work,” Erigha told me. Yet, she underscored the fact that the “Hollywood film industry” (by which she specifically means the six major studios that make most of the country’s big-budget films for a global audience) flourished during this period of immense violence and segregation.

Because overt racism was the law, it was perfectly normal to see black Americans depicted in the crudest of stereotypical movie roles: as servants, rapists, and unintelligent slaves. It wasn’t until the 1930s that many black actors were able to find onscreen work in Hollywood; when they did, it was mostly in the song-and-dance genre. In 1940, when Hattie McDaniel received her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (the first Oscar awarded to an African American actor) for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind, she had to sit at a different table from her white co-stars, because the Academy had picked a venue that didn’t allow blacks into the building. (The hotel made an exception for McDaniel.)

The vestiges of that racial hierarchy are still at work today, Erigha argues in The Hollywood Jim Crow. The author’s most compelling claim is that the supposedly color-blind language of economics has allowed the contemporary movie industry to justify its long-standing racial biases. “Hollywood decision makers view movies with black casts as being economically risky … and for that reason they restrict them to small budgets,” Erigha told me in a recent interview. In other words, producers and studio executives generally see these films as having limited marketability.