SPECIAL REPORT: "THE N-WORD IN CINEMA"

Behind the camera in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, you would have been able to hear the n-word being thrown around with abandon. Onscreen, however, things were more complicated, as the history of the studios’ Production Code shows. 

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was established by the industry in 1922, just as early movie studios and theaters faced possible local and state censorship for portraying risqé morality and for losing the public’s trust due to Hollywood scandals. The MPPDA set up a Production Code for the industry and began applying it aggressively in 1934.

Hollywood’s first Production Code was set up in the mid-1920s and was initially just a list of “Be Carefuls” and “Don’ts.”

Media historian Ellen Scott argues that it would have been “logical” for the MPPDA to simply ban the n-word, this “most direct insult to Black people.” However, the MPPDA’s self-censorship bureaucracy didn’t do that for decades, and then only half-heartedly.

Instead, the industry had a “surprisingly variable regulatory policy [that] more closely mirrored the generative censorship strategies used with sexuality and was only sometimes motivated by concern about Black spectators.” In other words, no hard-and-fast prohibition applied, and Black movie fans’ desires counted for less.

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