“What’s the matter with you, boy?!
Shooting up that man’s henhouse!”
“I’ll shoot any chicken try to follow me home!”
“Well, why don’t you get a job and go to work?
“Yahhhhh, I almost had me a job this morning!”
“I can’t believe you people!”
“What do you mean, ‘you people?’”
America was founded on the physical
exploitation of ethnic Others,
from enslaved Africans to
Chinese immigrants.
But while their physical bodies were valuable,
early American cinema was not in the habit of
seeing them as fully human.
The history of cultural appropriation and
whitewashing in western media --
essentially, treating other cultures like a
grab bag of Dollar Store toys --
has it roots in blackface, yellowface, or brownface
-- that is, white actors darkening their
skin and affecting stereotypical accents
and behaviors to denote some other
ethnicity.
Some of the most iconic examples
of early American cinema feature horribly
racist portrayals of black folks,
Native Americans, or Asians by white actors who
exist purely to highlight the supposed
savage, animal-like characteristics of
non-white peoples.
“You want us to kill you.
That’d be a sweet death, wouldn't it, Massai?
A warrior’s death.”
“Oh, darling, I am sorry,
but I lost my key!”
“But that was two weeks ago!
You can not go on keep ringing my bell!
You disturb me!
You must have a key made!”
Early cinema trafficked in a ton of these
kinds of two-dimensional characters,
and depending on the genre,
most ethnic minorities got “the treatment.”
Westerns were rife with white actors playing either
noble savages, demure Indian maidens, or
vicious “redskins;”
while the spectre of the
“yellow peril” brought us a number of
thrillers predicated upon the perceptions of
Asians -- usually Chinese -- as duplicitous,
conniving, and malevolent.
Add some makeup meant to suggest
“slitted” eyes, and white
actors were good to go.
“Oh, won’t you come in Mr. Chan?”
“Thank you so much.
Most charming apartment. “
“Thank you.”
“Can only stay moment.
Have found missing pearl?”
“By whose leave do you cross my lands?”
“The chief’s lands are those his men can
hold with arms, Temujin.”
‘The market chief comes to dispute them?”
“Were we alone it would be easier,
Targutai.”
“Blood brother speaks in riddles!”
“Okinawa very fortunate!
Culture brought to us!
Not have to leave home for it.”
One of the most insidious tools of white
supremacy is its insistence on whiteness as
the racial default,
or as an ethnic “empty” category.
White people manage to exist in a
kind of invisible zone, where they are`
assumed to not have a race or ethnicity.
This allows whiteness to wear
the cultural, religious, or social
signifiers of other ethnic communities as if
they were merely accessories to be purchased
at the mall.
Oh, wait: they are!
It’s no surprise that a country founded upon
the exploited labor of racialized others,
would feel a divine right of ownership to
both those bodies and their cultures.
If you exercise total control over a human being,
body and soul, then it’s not a great
stretch to believe that you own their
stories as well.
Cultural difference had to be repressed,
denigrated, or contained. Part of this
containment was accomplished by ensuring
that opportunities for ethnic minorities in
early cinema remained few and far between.
“Pop! Hey, Pop! Pop!
Gosh, I almost missed ya!”
“What are you doing in New York?”
“Got stuck in a cross-town traffic jam.”
“Inspector Vance, this is favorite
offspring, Jimmy.
Without whose assistance,
many cases would have been
solved much sooner.”
100 years later, and it’s no longer rare to
see an actual POC on screen --
“Oh, Han, Max and I have to do press for my
movie, so we can’t work tomorrow.”
“Well, can you at least tell people not to put
cigarettes out on my family photos?
There's a giant hole in my grandma!”
-- but it’s also no surprise that the roles
they get offered still often conform to
31 flavors of outdated, problematic
archetypes:
the pan-Asian martial arts expert;
the inner-city thug;
the spicy Latina --
and everyone’s current favorite:
the Muslim terrorist!
“No games, Mr. Lockhart!
“Oh, no, no!”
And the truly, utterly absurd thing is that
it’s tempting to think of even those
problematic roles as a small step up.
Because things used to be,
and sometimes still are ,
so much worse.
“I’m not letting you go!”
So it’s 2017 and we’ve moved away from many
-- not all, but many -- of the most overt
racist representations that clouded our
media landscape, right?
“Everyone around me, they feel connected to
something I’m...not.”
Huh. Well, let’s just say that old-school
blackface or yellowface are not quite so
prevalent as they used to be.
You would think that the race to cast white actors in
roles that call for a people of color would
have died a long-overdue death.
But no.
It’s still alive and kicking, and
folks almost seem to be more and more
insistent about keeping it afloat.
And depressingly there are so many more.
Seriously -- what’s so hard about, you
know, actually casting people of color in
stories that are, at least nominally,
about them?
“You make me happy every time you smile.
We’re going to create a beautiful world
together.”
“If I can ask you to dinner...
you do eat, don’t you?
“I thought you said you hit a guy?”
“Yeah, he’s the guy.”
“But you, you didn’t say you hit a guy and
brought him home with you.
“Are you Red Bird?”
“Are you sure you really know how to…?”
“What is the sound of one hand slapping?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand …”
“Wait. How did you--”
“You are the only one who can control all of
the elements...
and bring peace to our world.”
“The woman, Rebecca.
You will fill her with child. No?"
“What? No!”
“I need you to help me make a fake movie.”
“So you want to come to Hollywood
and act like a big shot
without actually doing anything.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll fit right in.”
No sense making things hard for yourself by
inviting actual people of color on-set who
might reveal that your entire story is
kinda racist, or, you know,
super duper massively racist:
a lesson learned by Adam Sandler
during the making of The Ridiculous 6.
“Morning, Never Wears Bra.”
“Good morning, boys!”
“You have no right to be here!
This Apache land!
“And what you gon’ do about it, Beaver Breath?”
“How he know my name?”
“That’s really her name!”
“Video posted online today shows what
happened when a group of Native American
actors walked off an Adam Sandler movie.”
“You trying to tell a Native what’s
disrespectful to them?”
‘It’s degrading women.
Because you know, as a Native American person,
we hold our women very sacred.”
“They said women had names like,
‘Wears No Bra' and 'Beaver's Breath.'"
“We don’t need to sell out our people, either."
“I understand completely.
But we're not going to change ‘Beaver Breath.’”
It’s ridiculous that audiences of color have
to keep raising their hands like kids in a
classroom and demand to be heard,
but here we are.
And it’s not as if the explanations for
whitewashing are ever new,
or particularly logical.
They essentially boil down to
three lackluster defenses.
Laid bare this way, every one of these
rationalizations is clearly absurd, but that
doesn’t stop directors, producers, and
casting agents from trotting them out every
time they feel like co-opting an ethnic
experience for the latest hot white actor du jour.
One: China Won’t Let Us
a.k.a international audiences and funders are not
as ENLIGHTENED as us, and won’t let us cast
all the wonderful actors of color we’ve been
just been dying to hire.
The argument that audiences won’t go see a
film with lead actors of color is just
factually untrue.
Audiences are smart enough
to know when they’re being served up a
counterfeit version of the real thing,
and by and large, they reject it.
The films that have been called out
the most recently for whitewashing
have also been critical and
commercial disasters.
Meanwhile, minority-led projects are killing it
on tv and at the box office.
“I ain’t never seen you like this before, bruh.
Meeting family and taking road trips...
Don’t come back all bourgie, man.”
“We need you to do an accent.”
“You mean like an Indian accent?”
“You know, Ben Kingsley did an accent in
Gandhi and won the Oscar for it, so…”
“But, he didn’t win the Oscar just for doing
the accent.
I mean, it wasn’t an Oscar for
“Best Indian Accent.”
Number two: The Best Guy Got the Job
a.k.a. Of all the white guys we auditioned,
this was the best white guy
First of all, whether you are explicit or
not with your casting calls, if you have an
overwhelming amount of white talent available,
it is your responsibility to widen the net.
Secondly, think about what
these creators are actually saying: that
that time and time again,
it just happens to be
the white actors who impress them more.
Is this because white actors are inherently
better than actors of color?
That they show more range?
That they disappear into a part more?
Of course not.
What is true, is that these directors,
producers, and showrunners, consciously or
not, have defaulted back to whiteness.
If a role calls for a lawyer or a doctor,
unless the casting sheet specifically calls
for a BLACK doctor, or an ASIAN lawyer,`
then they don’t even bring POC in to
audition.
The generic “every man” or “every woman” in
our culture is still assumed to be white,
and all positive characteristics they
possess are wrapped up in that
whiteness.
So, of course, when white actors
audition for a role, they seem like a more
“natural” fit.
So they cast the white actor,
and trust that the ethnic background or
racial heritage can just be an addendum –
something incidental.
Because that’s how
they always saw it, anyway.
And three: My Black Friend is Ok With It --
Your black friend?
Probably not okay with it.
Frankly, representations of difference have
been messed up for as long as we’ve been
telling stories -- it’s just that the
development of visual media makes those
representations more visceral and
potentially, more damaging.
There's whitewashing, sure -- but there’s also a
bumper crop of white savior narratives out
there, too-- and directors certainly don’t
seem to be taking a break from making
those.
And even though critical and commercial
reactions to these epics is usually of the
“thanks, but no thanks” variety, white media
creators continue to trot out the same,
tired hope that no one will notice that the
worlds they create are full of white
subjects, and racialized objects.
But we do notice.
And communities of color
have always noticed and spoken up -- but
increasingly, white audiences are responding
in kind.
Sadly, that’s probably what it’s
going to take for Hollywood power players to
stop recycling the same old tired projects,
with the same old familiar white faces.
It's going to take more white people speaking up.
So speak up.
Stop giving these terrible projects your money,
and stop writing people of color
out of their own stories.
Oh, and also, stop making excuses for your terrible
racist Halloween costumes.
Hey, Chad! I mean you.
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