History Was Mostly Written By White People About White People — Hollywood Actor Tom Hanks

Academy award-winning actor Tom Hanks has called on Hollywood filmmakers to make more movies about racism in a bid to tackle it, saying that Black history is underrepresented in the industry as it was written by mostly white people.

The Forrest Gump star bared his thoughts on the issue in an opinion piece he penned for the New York Times recently, disclosing how the few Black people in the history books he has read are those who accomplished much in spite of slavery and segregation at the time.

Hanks says history was "mostly written by mostly white people about white people, while the history of Black People... was too often left out." While bringing the massacre of Tulsa 100 years ago to the fore, the actor stated that the violence perpetrated then was "systematically ignored."

Tom Hanks

He said, "By my recollection, four years of my education included studying American history. Fifth and eighth grades, two semesters in high school, three quarters at a community college. Since then, I’ve read history for pleasure and watched documentary films as a first option.

"Many of those works and those textbooks were about white people and white history. The few Black figures — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were those who accomplished much in spite of slavery, segregation, and institutional injustices in American society.

"But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens, and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.

Hanks being decorated by former US President Barack Obama/Image Source: The New York Times

"My experience was common: History was 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.

"Until relatively recently, the entertainment industry, which helps shape what is history and what is forgotten, did the same. That includes projects of mine."