In 2015, writer and actor Dylan Marron created a series titled ``Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in” in which he edited popular movies to see how many people of color had speaking roles in said films as well as how long their lines were. In this incredibly eye-opening project, he showed that the entire Harry Potter franchise, a series that has a running time of 1180 minutes or 19.6 hours has BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color) speaking for less than 6 minutes total. People of color rarely have speaking roles in movies and if a movie happens to have a BIPOC as the main character, the movie is usually directly about that person’s race. Black people specifically are not allowed to simply live their lives. Hollywood continues to reinforce that we exist only for the consumption and commodification of our trauma on the big screen. This is a phenomenon that only occurs with movies about BIPOC, as movies with white actors as leads are never about the whiteness of those characters. It has now reached a point where Hollywood would rather lose money ($10 billion to be exact according to a report by McKinsey and Company) than hire more BIPOC executives and filmmakers.

My research will examine the many discrepancies that are leading to BIPOC not having a place in Hollywood as it stands today, as well as whether or not representation in media has been getting better over the years or worse. It will also explore the effects of this, why it even matters, and how filmmakers of every race have a role to play in making a change.