Early last week, Ri-Karlo Handy—executive producer, director, and editor of the documentary Hope Village—made an attempt to connect with other Black film editors by posting in a private Facebook group. “Looking for black Union editors…please DM me [your] info!” the post read. He figured he’d hear from other Black film professionals, giving them a platform to seek out post-production work—opportunities that wouldn’t necessarily come their way otherwise. “Every company has its own culture; every studio, every network, and it comes from the top down,” Handy told Vanity Fair Thursday afternoon. “And either diversity is important to you or it’s not, and that’s just the truth. We live in a country that was designed and developed and controlled by white men from the beginning. These things aren’t just going to naturally happen, it has to be intentional.”
Instead, the post was soon flooded with comments written by white film editors who took offense to his words: “White people, it’s time to speak up vehemently against the anti-white racism so proudly displayed here and in the culture before it’s too late,” said one white editor. Their outcry spoke volumes about the obstacles facing Black editors and others who work in postproduction—a culture of deeply ingrained inequality.
Handy’s post and the response to it gained considerable traction once Nicole French, an actor and attorney for a nonprofit law firm, tweeted screenshots highlighting particularly upsetting comments—objectionable observations that were deleted after they were called out for being hateful or racist. Producers Matthew A. Cherry and Ava DuVernay were among those to retweet the thread, with DuVernay adding, “Everyone has a right to their opinion. And we—Black producers with hiring power—have the right to not hire those who diminish us.”
French, whose husband is a film editor and member of the Facebook group Handy posted in, thinks the vitriolic responses to Handy’s request are indicative of industry vets who would rather uphold a status quo in which it’s rare to find Black individuals working in postproduction than fight for change.
“It’s not saying we just want a free pass,” French said in an interview. “We just want equal access and opportunity to the same positions that are available for other people. The talent will speak for itself. But when you have people like some of the editors who were making comments on Ri-Karlo’s posts, to see them resort to, ‘this is reverse racism’ and name-calling—it just goes to show that there is a power structure in place, and it makes people who have benefited from that for decades a little uneasy when people are asking for equal opportunity.”
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June 23, 2020 at 10:54PM
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Behind the Viral Facebook Post That Illustrates Hollywood’s “Growing-Pain Moment” - Vanity Fair
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