Julian Torres’ eyes sparkle with enthusiasm and his shoulders quiver with energy as he speaks. He’s in his first year at UT, excited to be on campus and asking which student organizations he should join. He’s a Radio-Television-Film major who has his eyes set on it all, keen to build his future.

 

“I want to do every single thing I possibly can,” Torres said. “Including acting, producing, directing, maybe even sound engineering as well.”

 

Torres’ ambitions are high, but there is a thought holding him back: his ethnicity. Torres is Hispanic and hails from San Antonio, a city with a large Hispanic population. Though he aspires to work in Hollywood, he believes the lack of diversity in the industry will hinder his chances.

 

“There’s been a white power that’s been in position, and it’s still there,” Torres said. “When that starts changing, you’ll see roles start changing.”

 

Some may not call it white power, but the white race does play a huge role in Hollywood. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began trending on social media earlier this year when not one person of color was nominated for a major award at the 88th Academy Awards. This led to several actors boycotting the event, a series of jabs at racism during the show themselves, and an opening up to a bigger question of racism in today’s society.

 

Hard facts tell a similar story. According to research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, people of color only directed 13% of 414 films and television shows that came out in the 2014-2015 year. And in front of the camera, only 28.3% of all speaking characters came from ethnic minorities.

 

UT senior Jacob Barrios believes that at some level, the minimal minority representation in Hollywood is not an intentional choice.

 

“At the level of writers, lots of times people can cast minority actors and actresses but the script writers are all not minority, they’re white, and they’re still telling mainstream stories,” Barrios said.

 

Barrios is the co-director of the Native American Indigenous Collective, a group that provides a space for students to come and talk about issues affecting their communities. At their meeting on March 1, they asked attendants to spend 5 minutes writing every movie they remembered that had a native American character in it, and got interesting results.

 

“We realized the type of roles that were around and the depictions it put people in…you realize there aren’t a lot of movies [with Native Americans] and in the movies the portrayals aren’t good, because people have Pocahontas and Peter Pan in mind, and depictions in that movie aren’t nice.” Barrios said.

 

Negative depiction of other races has a long history in Hollywood, primarily through racebending. The term refers to a media content creator changing the race or ethnicity of a character, and resulted in a pattern of minority roles being played by white actors instead of actors of that ethnicity. This has been shown in media as early as Al Jolson in the Jazz Singer (1927) to as recently as Ashton Kutcher’s 2012 Pop Chips commercial where he played a Bollywood producer named “Raj.”

 

According to Indian-American film producer Saurabh Kikani, it’s Hollywood’s belief that diversity won’t have significant financial results that prevents the success of minority actors.

 

.”The belief that films with diverse casts can't make money tends to get perpetuated, not because the industry is filled with a bunch of racists, but because it is a myth that keeps getting repeated and eventually accepted as conventional wisdom.” Kikani said.

 

While strides have been made in getting minorities to the stage and to award shows in the latest decades, African-American actress and Richland Collegiate High School senior Lina Mohammed acknowledges that the equality minorities deserve is not yet present.

 

“My success and accomplishments will never be as equal as other non African American actors,” Mohammed said. “African American women are entirely absent in the best actress, best director and best screenplay and someone needs to change that.”

 

Barrios believes change is possible, given the talent in the industry.

 

“There are a lot of people [who are minorities] producing movies and who are writing scripts and making their own films, they just don’t have the access to the big studio process that other mainstream actors tend to have access to.”

 

And in a world where Alejandro González Iñárritu and Aziz Ansari are making progress, Kikani believes accurately representing diversity onscreen is possible with continuing talent.

 

“We live in a world that is far more global and interconnected than the art we see on screens would have you believe,” Kikani said. “That's changing, but we need to keep driving that change.”