Do not tell me “not everything is a race issue.” Or rather, do not waste my time. The year is 2016, and yet I am still expected to keep my mouth closed every time this situation repeats itself.

For the second year in a row, all 20 acting nominees for the Oscar awards are white. To say that this is not a race issue, is like feeding me a handful of garbage and insisting it’s candy.

So, what? Suddenly, there are no impressive actors or actresses of color? Did they all just simultaneously disappear and we all need to pretend they never existed in the first place?

Please, give me a break.

After the announcements of Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith, stating that neither of them will be attending the Oscar’s due to lack of diversity, the media lit up like a torch, and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was reborn.

The fact that the hashtag had to be reborn is, itself, proof that something is wrong within this establishment. According to an article and video produced and published by screencrush.com, in the entire history of the Oscars only 14 African American actors and actresses have ever actually won the award. That’s more than two years of lack of diversity, it is 88 years of lack of diversity.  Or, again, am I expected to believe that talented people of color just don’t exist?

But why stop there?

According to timesofindia.indiatimes.com, only five people of indian descent have won any sort of Oscar award. In addition, in an article published by the latimes, the acting category features only four latinos and three people of asian descent as winners.

Yet, it is still being argued that the Oscar awards base nothing on race, and instead base their decisions on the actors ability to carry out the role. While this seems to make sense, the idea that people of color are not playing any significant roles because they lack the ability to add depth to a given character is absurd. Instead, we should consider the possibility that people of color are picked for very specific, very rare parts; potentially limiting them from being “Oscar-worthy”.

This can be seen in all elements of cinema. A post-apocalyptic wasteland, a mystical fairytale, a sappy RomCom; what do they all have in common?

People of color don’t exist.

So, there, at the root of all evils sits the fact that people of color have such limited access to ‘desirable’ roles, preventing them from taking home that little golden man. According to a study conducted by the University of Southern California, “Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8% of speaking characters are Black, 4.2% are Hispanic, 5% are Asian, and 3.6% are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities.”
The ladder of success is hard enough to climb, but for people of color that ladder is riddled with traps and decoys made to ensure you never reach it to the top.