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Notes -
Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.
There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.
If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.
So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.
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