Tom Hanks says movies and TV shows must ‘portray the burden of racism’

In an op-ed for the New York Times Friday, days after the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, Hanks wrote that history is “mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out.”

Hanks noted that the industry has begun telling a greater variety of stories, citing the TV series “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country” for depicting the Tulsa massacre.

A USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study last year revealed that 32% of top-grossing films in 2019 featured an underrepresented actor in the lead or co-starring role — a significant rise compared to the 13% figure recorded in 2007, the study’s inaugural year.

The Tulsa massacre, which took place over two days in 1921, saw a White mob kill 300 Black people and destroy a once-booming neighborhood in Oklahoma, in one of the worst acts of racial violence in US history.

During a speech, US President Joe Biden also highlighted the event’s erasure from the American historical discourse. “This was not a riot. This was a massacre — among the worst in our history, but not the only one,” he said. “And for too long, forgotten by our history. As soon as it happened there was a clear effort to erase it from our memory — our collective memories.”