African American director backs test to monitor racial diversity in Hollywood
Ava DuVernay, who directed Martin Luther King film Selma, supports idea of a 'DuVernay test' for films to ensure actors from ethnic minorities 'have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories'
A new test designed to challenge Hollywood’s record on racial diversity has received backing from its inspiration, the award-winning African American director Ava DuVernay. Dubbed the “DuVernay test”, the initiative was first posited by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in a review of this year’s Sundance film festival .
The long-established Bechdel test, first proposed by the US cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip , requires two women to talk to each other about something other than a man to prove its egalitarian values. Dargis said her “DuVernay test” would merely require “African Americans and other minorities [to] have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories”.
While the critic appears to have used the term as a light-hearted framing device for a piece on diversity in Sundance movies, the concept may have legs. DuVernay’s name symbolises the ongoing battle by African American film-makers to get movies made in Hollywood, given the furore over the Oscars’ decision to limit her acclaimed civil-rights drama Selma to just two nominations (for best picture and best song) in 2015.
After the feminist film blog Women in Hollywood tweeted about Dargis’ coinage, DuVernay posted: “Wow. Floored. What a lovely cinematic idea to embrace. What a thrill to be associated with it. Absolutely wonderful.”
The idea of a Bechdel test focused on racial as opposed to gender diversity has been proposed before. In 2013, the author Nikesh Shukla suggested the “Shukla test” , requiring two ethnic-minority people to talk to each other for more than five minutes about something other than race.
In the wake of the ongoing row over the all-white lists of Oscar nominees, bloggers Nadia and Leila Latif proposed a more complex test for racial diversity in film. In a piece for The Guardian, they suggest films should feature two named ethnic-minority characters with lines of dialogue, who were not romantically involved with each other and did not talk about comforting or supporting a white character. The bloggers also said neither of the two main black characters should conform to the hated “magical negro” stereotype.
The Guardian