Is an anti-black Hollywood a myth?

In the past five or six years, film appreciation on the internet has become inseparable from advocacy for three main causes: Visibility for the LGBT, women’s and POC. This has affected the Oscars (the various “Oscars so White” movements), film criticism and bizarre hit pieces. I have previously written on this plenty but I still end my title with a question mark because it’s not that I have an answer. I simply reserve the right to discuss the answer.

While this is in no way an attempt to deny the experiences and voice of black people in Hollywood, there is a need to be critical of whether black struggles in the industry are unique and the degree to which this is a problem.

Various authors have spoke of wokeness as an industry to discuss how various stake holders must keep pushing forward the idea that racism is America’s biggest problem (even if it statistically falls below some other problem like public health or immigration) in order to keep their economic, cultural, or political capital alive.

So with that in mind, here’s a recent exchange I had on the internet with someone who has echoed a talking point often that Hollywood rarely gives black film makers the same chance as white film makers:

“Bad Black films don’t “get a free pass”; just look at the drubbing Will Smith takes every team he’s in a bad one.

It’s just that Hollywood doesn’t make nearly as many Black films, so the quantity of bad Black films is much lower. For every bad Kevin Hart or Martin Lawrence movie you’ll get in a month, there are like ten Eurovisions, War With Grandpas, Tags, Unhingeds and Dolittles.

Black artists literally aren’t given the luxury of making a revolving door of big-budget garbage every week. So the ratings just seem higher because there isn’t 1 mediocre Black horror movie, 1 mediocre Black comedy, and 1 mediocre Black action movie coming out of Hollywood every week like we see with white films.”

All I can say is that my response to posts like this is pretty evident to anyone with a cursory familiarity with the box office:

“A star is a star and the fact that Kevin Hart, Martin Lawrence, Will Smith, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Tiffany Haddish, Taraji P Henson and Eddie Murphy can still make films after they fail is just like anyone else.

In 2016 there was Hidden Figures, Moonlight, Race, Free State of Jones, Birth of a Nation, Living…