There Was No Systemic Racism?

 In Film Comment's Hiding in Plain Sight by Mayukh Sen I could not help but noticing this passage:

But the paper’s speculation wasn’t far from the truth, revealed only after Oberon’s death in 1979. In reality, she had been born into poverty in what is now Mumbai to a 12-year-old mother of Sri Lankan, Māori, and white ancestry, whom Oberon grew up believing was her sister; the identity of her biological father remains unclear. Raised by her grandmother (whom she thought was her mother) in what is today Kolkata, she had an interest in acting early in life and performed with the city’s Amateur Dramatic Society. A boyfriend offered to introduce her to the director Rex Ingram, so, while still in her teens, she pooled enough money to travel to France to meet the filmmaker. Ingram found Oberon’s appearance so entrancing that he cast her as an extra in a film of his, The Three Passions (1928). From there, she went to Britain, where her career took off. As she pursued fame abroad, though, Oberon deliberately concealed two truths about herself: she grew up poor, and she was (at least in part) Brown.

These were taboos in the era during which Oberon labored against impossible odds to become one of Old Hollywood’s brightest stars. Once in America, she would star in Sidney Franklin’s wartime romance The Dark Angel (1935), which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Though the public had no clue about her mixed-race parentage back then (stories in gossip mills were pure conjecture), she is, to date, the only actress of known Asian descent to be nominated in that category in the 20th century, an embarrassing indictment of the Academy’s institutional blind spots.

For all its historical significance, though, Oberon’s sterling performance in The Dark Angel is rarely mentioned by critics today, along with her art more generally. Consider how casually the critic David Thomson wrote her off as a “renowned beauty with a graven face and the legend of mixed blood” who was nevertheless “often a dull actress” in his canonical The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. There’s been far more interest in Oberon’s off-screen torment. She inspired the character of Margo Taft (Jennifer Beals), an actress in the studio era who tries to suppress her biracial identity, on Amazon’s 2016-17 series The Last Tycoon; she was the subject of an episode of the You Must Remember This podcast in February of last year. The segment detailed painful stories of how Oberon bleached her skin, passed off her dark-skinned grandmother as her maid, and nearly sued a family member who sought to divulge her ancestry in a book. The ongoing fascination with Oberon’s inner turmoil is understandable in the present-day media landscape, where the history of racial discrimination in entertainment has begun to command greater scrutiny. Yet, as with many actors of color, it has eclipsed her actual work.

The article goes on to reconsider Ms. Oberon's career and concludes:

 Oberon’s achievements in such a racist milieu are remarkable. It is easy to pity her as a tragic figure haunted by shame, silencing parts of herself to survive an inhospitable era in Hollywood. But maybe it’s possible to also celebrate her as a pioneer of the screen, one who left a lasting impact on an industry within which her success did not allow her a life true to her identity.

It was the strength of Oberon’s work before the camera, combined with the singularity of her beauty, that first captured the film establishment’s attention, after all—not her parentage, not her upbringing, not her trauma. “Merle Oberon in private life is delightful, but Merle Oberon of the screen is magnificent,” that early Screen & Radio Weekly article concluded. “She must be kept that way.”

And what might it have been without racism? That's the question that needs eliminating.