It also happens to be the only genre that can credit women of colour as "Slave Girl", "Field Slave (Big Daddys [sic] house)", or "Negro Woman" without scrutiny.
Slaves of colour were also much more likely to be manumitted by their owners [ 28].
While film scholars have been wringing their hands trying to decide whether Blue is the Warmest Colour or 12 Years a Slave better captures the truth of the human condition, everyone else has been watching a whooping man-mountain make cars explode with his head.
A nationally known figure, he shocked his listeners at the 1843 national convention of free people of colour when he called upon slaves to murder their masters.
A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829, for a male slave "of a yellow colour" who "is not in the habit of running away".
Nine films from 2013 also featured, including 12 Years a Slave and Blue is the Warmest Colour.
I was struck, watching her films, by the fact she looked like me and that someone of colour was not playing the maid or the slave but being the star and no one was commenting.
I very much lean on past experiences in which I felt like I have actually been a different class, and a slave, in situations just because of my colour," she says.
Forever Amber has obvious plot similarities to Gone with the Wind - a civil war, a dashing blockade runner, a tigerish heroine named for a colour, the contrast between a corrupt society and its slaves and servants.
Last year, when the major Oscar categories also failed to feature nominees of colour, industry insiders cited big wins for 12 Years a Slave the year previously, and spoke of something called "racial fatigue".
Many children of mixed ethnicity were manumitted (obtained their freedom), creating an intermediate stratum of free "people of colour" (persons of mixed ethnicity) and free ''blacks'' (manumitted slaves of African descent).
