Unless your name is D.W. Griffith and your next movie happens to be Birth Of A Nation, it's incredibly rare than a filmmaker will set out to render something that is purposely racist. Indeed, having a movie deemed to be racist by the critics and public alike is one of the worst things that can happen to a studio and its director, for reasons that are obvious. And yet, year after year, motion pictures in all genres are called out for being exactly that. In a lot of such cases, the perceived "racism" in cinema comes as a result of ignorance or a lack of understanding on the filmmaker's part, as opposed to outright hateful prejudice. Few folk in this modern era would make a conscious decision to produce a racist film, but humans are fallible creatures and sometimes contextual aspects are overlooked. Still, that doesn't stop most of these incidents from snowballing into disasters of the internet kind. There are an endless number of reasons why a movie might find itself tagged as "racist" nowadays, of course - everything from perceived "whitewashing" on Hollywood's part, an attempt at satire that fails to hit its mark and ends up offending everyone instead, or old-fashioned prejudices somehow working their way into the backbone of a motion picture. That's not to say that, from time to time, cries of "Racism!" feel unjustified or incidental. The most important thing, perhaps, is that incidents like these start a conversation...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
