The Mona Lisa Smile controversy

A few years ago when Mona Lisa Smile was in production, there was a controversy over the race of the extras used for the film.

The casting director stated she didn't want people who were "too tan" to be in the extras. This created an upset for non-whites.

The rationale behind this was that they were trying to match the racial demographic of the 1950s, not the current demographic of the 2000s.

But one problem noted was that Asians were being overrepresented seeing that there were only 3 of them enrolled in 1953. Yet blacks were underrepresented with only 1 black extra when there were 12 enrolled in 1953.

Obviously, the chances of coming across 12 black students throughout the movie would be unlikely.

But was this a controversy?

The casting director used a poor choice of words, but had a very good point. When you are doing something in relation to history, you can't just ignore the realities of that history to conform to our modern ideas and views.

Watch the movies A League of Their Own and Iron Jawed Angels. Both movies have very small brief scenes where it showed how black women were having to fight the racial struggle on top of the gender struggle.

The directors of both of these movies could have as easily left these parts out and pretended such problems never existed. But they both new that the truth was, there were racial problems in the fight for gender equality (and there are still problems).

Of course, this doesn't excuse the over-representation of Asians in the movie. Remember, having one minority group represented that isn't black, doesn't excuse not having black people. Minority groups are not the same.