Study fails to find Hollywood racism, but claims to anyway!

Study fails to find Hollywood racism, but claims to anyway!

They claim that minorities are underrepresented, because they represent 37.9% of the population, but only 28.3% of speaking characters. If you look at the details, however, you'll find that their claim is completely bogus.



Here's the breakdown from the study: "Of those speaking or named characters with enough cues to ascertain race/ethnicity, 71.7% were White, 12.2% Black, 5.8% Hispanic/Latino, 5.1% Asian, 2.3% Middle Eastern and 3.1% Other."



Now let's compare that to the US population:

	percent of population	percent of roles
African-American	12.3	12.2
Latino	17	5.8
Asian	5	5.1
other	2.7	5.4

You can see from the chart that Asians and blacks are represented exactly correctly, and "other" are actually overrepresented. (I suppose this is because so many evil characters are Middle Eastern.)



The only ethnic group truly underrepresented is Latinos. So the question is "Doesn't that means Hollywood is racist against Latinos?"



No. It only means that the study was designed to produce that result. The people who assembled that data did not include Univision or Telemundo, which use exclusively Spanish-speaking Latin actors to appeal to Latino audiences; but it did include the cracker networks like CW, which use almost exclusively white actors to appeal to white audiences; and it did include BET, the casting for which is designed to appeal to black audiences. They did this despite the fact that Univision's ratings are far higher than BET's and slightly higher than CW's. (And Telemundo is not that far behind.) About half of America's Latino families are Spanish-dominant. Univision and Telemundo are the two most-watched networks among first generation Latinos, and employ vast amounts of Spanish-speaking actors.



Ultimately, the study is misleading in two ways:

1. Excluding those networks from the study assured that the researchers would produce the results they sought regarding Latino representation.
   
2. Then, when the bogus 12% Latino underrepresentation was lumped in with all the other minorities, it produced an alleged 9% "total minority" underrepresentation, even though every other non-Latino group was either correctly represented or overrepresented!
   

If I were to use their own illegitimate trick of adding the groups together, I can claim that all non-Latino minorities were "as a group" OVERrepresented. (That's probably thanks to those ubiquitous Middle Eastern bad guys, although that explanation is just a guess on my part.)

To be fair, the study seems to have some legitimate points about gender underrepresentation, but they really got the racial and ethnic data bollixed up.