Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism by Nancy Wang Yuen .

When Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor Oscar for Lillies of the Field in 1963, minority actors and filmmakers had much reason to be hopeful about the future. But, in 2016, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fielded only white nominees for all the acting categories, it shined a spotlight on the limited progress made by Hollywood in addressing racial inequities (popularized by the “OscarsSoWhite” hashtag on social media). Notably, over the entire history of the Oscars, actors of color have received only 6.2% of the nominations and won a measly 7.8% of the awards—far below their share of the population. In the aftermath of the controversy, a few prominent industry figures triggered further public outrage by suggesting that white actors faced reverse-racism and that perhaps underrepresentation was the result of a meritocracy in action. For instance, Michael Caine argued that he could not say to himself, “I am going to vote for him. He’s not very good, but he’s black.” It appears that far from finding solutions, the industry is in denial about the problem itself. Why has Hollywood, an industry that wears its progressive credentials on its sleeve, failed actors of color in such spectacular fashion? In Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, Nancy Wang Yuen maps the cultural and economic mechanisms which limit the opportunities and outcomes of minority actors. She argues that minority actors find themselves systematically slotted into racially defined roles. Such racial categories are associated with fewer and stereotypical roles, attenuated career development, limited mobility, and poor affective outcomes. In contrast, white actors are afforded more roles, a broader range of creative expression, and the opportunity to crossover to other racial categories in their portrayals. In incisive chapters which encompass key elements of her structural argument, Yuen articulates the ways in which industry norms, assumptions, and practices combine to (re) produce racial inequalities. Most memorably, she persuasively demonstrates that minority actors work under conditions that would be considered untenable under Equal Employment Opportunity regimes. For instance, African American interviewees state that they are routinely asked to act “more black” [p. 42] during auditions and can lose out on roles based on the color of their skin being