Art, History, and Race

If you saw the movie Oppenheimer (reviewed by me in the Aug. 4 issue), you probably noticed that there was just the smallest sprinkling of people of color in the cast. That generated a fair amount of criticism from critics and Hollywood progressives that have been promoting the idea that casting directors should be following a quota system in their hiring. A quota that roughly equates with the percentage of the general population that a particular minority group represents. In the US, that’s about 14% African American, 19% Hispanic, 7% Asian, and maybe 10% Irish and 2% Jewish.

“Let’s start with the painfully obvious,” Dan Gardner says in his essay titled Art, History, and Race. “America in the 1940s and 1950s was a far less diverse, tolerant, open society…. For us today, it’s a monotonous ocean of white men. But that was elite America in that era.”

Read the entire essay here.