So to say that film was racist misses the point. Film was capitalist with all that entails.

Something never mentioned in the "film was racist" arguments (be they video, podcast, soul-searching article or slideshow) is that black & white film was also capitalist (or racist, if you insist): simply put, the darker you are, the more light you need to get a decent exposure of you. Human eyes adjust the same way to face tones as we do to sunsets; we mentally composite the image through post-processing. Film didn't just render black faces poorly; it rendered everything poorly. The giant color extravaganzas of the 50s weren't recorded on one camera, they were recorded on three - a red one, a green one and a blue one - because the chemistry just wasn't good enough to deliver a decent image. Thief of Baghdad? That sound stage used as much electricity as the rest of Los Angeles because the color chemistry required so much light.

Yes. Shirley cards had white women on them. But there's more nuance to the situation than these discussions would lead you to believe; the actual aspect of those images that mattered was the color chips. Those would actually be compared when printed. Shirley herself was there for QAQC. Not only that, but once you had the dichros set right, you wouldn't mess with them that often - it's not like you printed a Shirley every time you had a roll of film.

And let's be honest - the guys buying the processing equipment were white. Their customers were probably white. And there's nothing saying you needed to use the Shirley cards. If you had a lot of black clientele, you probably figured out a balance that made black families look better. They're only dichros.

It's disheartening to me that this is always a tale of how racist film was, as if the film industry were somehow more racist than the rest of the country. It's also disheartening to me that they always talk about chocolate and wood as the reasons Kodak started formulating better stock... without pointing out that neither Ilford nor Agfa bothered (not a lot of black folx in England or Germany). And I've never understood why we whip out the Philips comparator as if it were a bad thing, rather than pointing out that a major multinational corporation designed an entirely new optical block so that black people wouldn't look like shit on camera.

I used to run lights in clubs. We had a lot of reggae bands, a lot of rap bands. And you know what? Those yellow and orange gels you had for the jam band last night? Pull 'em down 'cuz black performers are well aware of how awful they look under yellow light. So is it racist to run yellow lights? Or is it racist to not run yellow lights?

Or is it silly to talk about "racism" in terms of technology when the evidence generally supports a bunch of good intentions changing with the times, just like everything else?