James Gunn grew up less than an hour from the spot where Michael Brown was shot and killed on August 9, 2014. Eight days earlier, both sons of Missouri—born 26 years apart in the suburbs of St. Louis—celebrated monumental days in their lives.

On August 1, Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy—the biggest Hollywood production of his career—opened to mainstream critical acclaim and a weekend gross of $94 million. The movie, which he wrote and directed, begins in Missouri and follows a kid (much like Gunn himself) who grows up to become Starlord: the unlikely leader of the galaxy’s most unlikely band of superheroes.

For Michael Brown, August 1 was the day he graduated from Normandy High School in St. Louis, Missouri. He planned to start technical school two weeks later. But the following Saturday, as Guardians was climbing toward $700 million in worldwide rentals, Brown lay face down for four hours on the hot pavement in Ferguson.

Even before his tragic death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson, though, Brown’s chances of being seen—or seeing himself—as a hero were already limited. The image of a young black man, prostrate in the street, is one we’re much more accustomed to seeing in Hollywood movies than we are a black man working to save humanity.

Marvel Studios, the folks behind Iron Man and The Avengers, recently announced they’d be releasing Black Panther—their first black superhero movie—in 2017. It’ll be the kind of film Michael Brown saw very little of in his lifetime.

It’s hardly a surprise that many people of color were thrilled by Marvel’s announcement, or that the Internet recently erupted in jubilant conversation around the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer—which opens on a black man dressed as a stormtrooper. There are huge portions of society, including the more than 50 percent that are women, who are starved for this kind of representation in our grandest forms of entertainment.

Though more heartfelt than many recent blockbusters, Gunn’s Guardians

(which topped the 2014 box office) centers on the life of a heterosexual, able-bodied white man who saves the day. Other than the Jennifer Lawrence-starring The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 2013, the last time the number one film of the year didn’t have a white, male protagonist was 1996—when Will Smith starred in Independence Day. 

That’s the same year Michael Brown was born.

In 2013, according to a Nielson poll, the average person in the U.S. reported going to the movies roughly five times annually. In the 18 summers since Independence Day, only three films starring people of color have cracked the top five, in terms of box office receipts, in any given year: Men in Black (1997), Rush Hour 2 (2001) and Hancock (2008). (And this phenomenon grows even rarer if you consider that three of the four aforementioned movies star Smith.)

None of the top 15 live-action films of 2014 featured a protagonist of color.

Thus it’s entirely possible that many who saw the CCTV footage of Michael Brown allegedly robbing a convenience store shortly before he was shot, or the millions who watched Eric Garner’s horrific death at the hands of the NYPD on YouTube, did not see a single film in 2014 starring a black man. It’s even more likely that those people didn’t watch any film last year starring a black woman (or any woman of color, for that matter). So, when Darren Wilson described Mike Brown charging at him like some sort of inhuman “demon,” as revealed in court documents released after the grand jury proceedings, it wasn’t an image he conjured from thin air.

In 1939’s Gone With the Wind, which has still sold more tickets than any other movie in history, and regularly appears on lists of the “greatest” American films, black men and women living in slavery are depicted as simple-minded property in need of protection. Fifty years later, Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which made over $300 million worldwide, joined a long list of films featuring a white hero fighting absurdly grotesque brown-skinned villains. And in 2005, Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, about a monstrous black ape abducting a helpless white woman, did nothing to revise the racism of the 1933 original.

We may have less overt examples of the dehumanization of people of color on screen today as compared to 1915—when the viciously degrading The Birth of a Nation was the top-grossing film in the U.S. (and later a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan). But when we can point to a long history of demonization in cinema, the absence of inclusive representation becomes a cosign to that ugly past.

A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that three quarters of white people in the U.S. have no non-white friends at all. Accordingly, the fear of black people that a man like Wilson expressed (and the NYPD demonstrated in its reaction to Eric Garner) is partially the result of a lack of personal engagement with people of color.

Cinema has the power to make what is unfamiliar, familiar. It can take us to galaxies far, far away, and even there, amongst aliens and fictitious intergalactic battles, it can remind us of our own humanity—and the humanity of our neighbors. Yet as mainstream cinema continues to exclude people of color (especially women), it robs us all of opportunities to diversify our empathy.

The image of a young black man, prostrate in the street, is one we’re much more accustomed to seeing in Hollywood movies than we are a black man working to save humanity.

Late last fall, director Ridley Scott was criticized for the casting of his latest film, Exodus: Gods and Kings—which tells the story of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. White actors play all the lead characters in the movie, while many of the “servant” and “slave” roles were given to people of color. Scott has asserted that he was simply navigating the realities of the industry when making these decisions, saying in an interview with Variety:

I can’t mount a film of this budget… and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.

On the surface, Scott’s statement is hard to argue with. It’s true that funding is most often dependent on star power and projected profitability. And in a market where films starring people of color are so rare, there are indeed fewer bankable actors who aren’t white, and fewer historical examples of films starring people of color that became major successes. That may be a logical tautology, but it’s gospel at the studios.

Yet, it would be misleading to portray Scott or Christian Bale—who plays Moses in the film, and who has similarly defended the film’s casting—as helpless in the face of these longstanding, self-perpetuating inequalities. Of course studio executives, casting directors, and many others play a role in how films come together. But writers, directors, and actors also actively choose which stories they decide to tell: especially those whose names we recognize.

In other words, there is no obligation on an Oscar-nominated director to make a film like Exodus, or on an Oscar-winning white actor to take the part of an Egyptian. While Exodus may very well be an extraordinary opportunity to explore and express one’s talent and abilities (though reactions from most critics suggest otherwise), it’s a perpetuation of the whitewashing of Hollywood. Whether the solution is to make smaller-budget films with more diverse casts, or whether it’s spending years raising the money to make the inclusive film on a grand scale, the hurdle is far from insurmountable for the rich and powerful. And we need to hold them to task.

Scott and Bale are, of course, just two figures in a vast tableau. But there are many more in Hollywood who similarly justify their own choices and, whether inadvertently or not, allow this kind of exclusion to persist. The lack of people of color in American cinema is as old as motion pictures themselves. But it pervades because of distinct choices made by men capable of thinking differently.

Would Bale or Scott be where they are today without decades of filmmaking centering heterosexual, able-bodied white men and othering everyone else? Are they not still benefiting from the decades in which audiences paid money to watch white men paint their faces black and playact like apes?

By moving forward with a project like Exodus, are they not choosing to perpetuate a racist system?

Ridley Scott and Christian Bale are still benefiting from the decades in which audiences paid money to watch white men paint their faces black and playact like apes.

White Americans like Darren Wilson are still far more likely to see films in which a person of color is the villain or background decoration, than one in which a person of color is the hero. And each new Hollywood blockbuster either does something to improve that ratio, or worsen it.

As the signs that protestors held up in the streets of Ferguson, New York, Berkeley, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere last November and December declared: “Silence = Consent.” It’s true in our courts, in Congress, on the streets—and in Hollywood.

The success of 12 Years a Slave at the 2014 Academy Awards—and Selma at the 2015 Oscars—while historic achievements, are not evidence of a shifted culture in mainstream cinema. The ascendency of Steve McQueen and Ava DuVernay [sic] does not excuse silence. Their films are still anomalies.

Rarer still are films about young black boys and girls growing up to become world-saving superheroes like Starlord. There are too few producers (to say nothing of studios) willing to put money behind blockbuster projects starring people of color, and too few top directors fighting for the chance to make those films. This results in a lack of black films that could be watched and loved by millions around the world, and might teach more Americans like Darren Wilson to see youth of color as inherently heroic—rather than innately demonic.

There are a number of documentaries in production inspired by the events in Ferguson. And a narrative, a la Fruitvale Station, can’t be too far behind (in fact, in this magazine we encouraged Ryan Coogler to extend his story about Oscar Grant into a trilogy, focusing next on Trayvon Martin, and ultimately on Michael Brown). Yet, as with 12 Years and Selma, whenever Hollywood manages to support a film about black or brown people, it’s almost always looking into the past from the safe distance of the ostensibly enlightened present.

Too often, even for the progressives in the industry, Michael Brown’s story only merits telling when he’s dead. If we’re going to break this self-perpetuating racism, we need to tell the story of how he lived, too.

Illustration by Louisa Bertman

Editor’s note: This article is presented online as it was published in print. When we went to press, we assumed it was a foregone conclusion that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would recognize Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo for their individual achievements. We are fully aware of the irony of our misprint; it confirms the very racism Mr. Siddiquee seeks to draw attention to.

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