The Examiner’s Ed Moy inquires Does Hollywood ‘white-wash’ the casting of Asian characters in movies? Then he proves it…
After doing some research, I discovered that “The Last Airbender” wasn’t the only recent movie that cast white actors in roles that were originally created as Asian characters.
For example, the character of Kyo Kusanagi will be played by Sean Farris in an upcoming live-action feature based on the video game “King of Fighters”.
There’s also the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal as Prince Dastan in “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” along with a British actress Gemma Arterton playing his love-interest Tamina. The movie was also based on a popular video game.
And then there’s the recent announcement that Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are starring in a live-action version of the Japanese anime “Akira.”
And finally, there’s the casting of Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in the live-action adaptation of “Cowboy Bebop.” (Although, I do admit that I think Keanu Reeves looks similar to the character.)
This all of course pales in comparison to the fact that last year, the producers of the movie “21″ took poetic license in rewriting actual Asian American card playing MIT students as white characters.
The movie “21″ was based on the best-selling book “Bringing Down the House”, about a real-life team of mostly Asian American students led by an Asian American professor John Chang and his teaching cohorts. (To read about the real “21″ students and their professor click here.) MORE
21. Oh 21. See, 21 was when I first became aware that Hollywood was full of thieving, cultural appropriating assholes. This is a case where the fuckup is as bad as Avatar. It was Racialicious that brought this to my attention:Trans-Racialization in ‘21′
Six MIT students band together to hoodwink Las Vegas casinos for millions. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie — and it is. But before Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe), Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishbourne were cast in 21, Ben Mezrich wrote a non-fiction book called Bringing Down the House, upon which the film is based. In that book, Mezrich documents the infamous MIT Blackjack team, which was led by Asian American — not White — students.
Huh. Let me make that a standalone link:By the time Senor Kevin Spacey was done, the only Asian Americans were playing supporting roles, one being the goddamn girlfriend! (Pics at link) And as it turns out when you read that link, they fucked up the story too. For one thing, there was no romance in real life. For another:
Was an MIT professor really the leader of the Blackjack Team?
No. In the movie 21, an unorthodox math professor named Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) leads the team. The 21 true story reveals that the real MIT Blackjack Team was led by three individuals, none of whom were professors. Arguably, the most notable is Bill Kaplan, a Harvard Business school graduate who had also done his undergraduate studies at Harvard. John Chang and J.P. Massar were also very much the basis for 21’s Micky Rosa. “While [author] Ben Mezrich has been quoted as saying that Micky Rosa was a composite of myself, J.P. Massar, and John Chang, the fact is there is little, if anything, that resembles either of us except that he started and ran the team and was focused on running the team as a business,” says Bill Kaplan. John Chang graduated from MIT in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering. An influential member of the original team, Chang would later re-team with Bill Kaplan as a co-manager in the early 1990s. J.P. Massar (”Mr. M” in the History Channel documentary Breaking Vegas) was an MIT alum who had helped Kaplan manage the original team in the early 1980s, shortly after the first casinos opened in Atlantic City. -Bill KaplanMOAR things they got wrong
Basically, Kevin Spacey decided that he wanted a star vehicle, and decided to completely erase the people whose story it is in the first fucking place!
Oh and the response to the concerns raised about this?
Several organizations such as Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) protested the movie and “Boycott 21″ and other anti-”21″ websites sprang up on the Internet.
According to MANAA, after the “white-washing” issue was raised on Entertainment Weekly’s website, movie producer Dana Brunetti wrote: “Believe me, I would have loved to cast Asians in the lead roles, but the truth is, we didn’t have access to any bankable Asian American actors that we wanted… If I had known how upset the Asian American community would be about this, I would have picked a different story to film.”MORE
No bankable Asian stars. And dammit, the Asian American population didn’t just sit down and take it, they protested!! Shock!horror! And instead of fixing the problem, I’m just not going to film anymore of their stories. See how they like that!!!! The article goes on to list the many bankable Asian stars. And to point out the fact that Jim Sturgess was not exactly a big name Hollywood actor. They have no trouble making films off unknown or not too well known white actors either.
(By the way. Please don’t read the comments. There be idjits bringing in Asian anime and claiming that the characters thereof all look like white people. Nobody needs head exploding at 9:20 in the morning.)
In the meantime, we go to Avatar:
Racebending links to the first in a series about how and why POC are placed in advertising: why and how People of color are included in advertising:Including people of color so as to associate the product with the racial stereotype.Part1
They also pose the question Is racebending legal?
The costumes have been whitefied Roman and Greek armour. Roman and motherfucking Greek armour. With a bit of samurai on the side. Lovely. JUUSSSST LOVELY. More carrying through of teh myth that only goddamn Europeans had any innovations.
In the same vein:Chinese calligraphy cut from movie, replaced by gibberish language Perfectly interchangeable, gibberish and the CHINESE LANGUAGE.
Choabunny’s Guide to Casting Failis in Hyphen Magazine Blog. Which also has the headline of the day in And you shall know us by the trail of whitewash Goddamn! I cannot believe that I have been missing this mag! *heads off to subscribe and link website to blog*
And I just saw a review… GI JOE? The good ninja is actually…white? And is a street rat in Tokyo? And somehow gets taken in and treated as a favorite over his Japanese classmate? ANd said Japanese classmate then murders master in retaliation? Really?
As an aside: District 9 needs to go up in the hottest fire known to man. And I am freaking done with Peter Jackson. In the meantime, I noticed one blog call it “progressive.” Alien cockroaches in the slums of Johannesburg are freaking PROGRESSIVE. Also, note the treatment of the actual people of color in the movie. Here, have a Cluex4. To wit…[IBARW] It’s not murder, it’s a metaphor.Abstract: If you’re going to argue about a text’s metaphorical or allegorical representations of race, you may want to take a look at how it treats actual people of color before forming your conclusions about the subversion of racial stereotypes.
Everyone should find some time to watch this. Reel Bad Arabs Documentary
via: Racialicious
If you want some new blogs, you could do much worse than these, by the way: Fiqah at Possum Stew rolls out an essay for the ages:
Jihadis”*, Skinheads and Film Representation In which Arabs are relentlessly evil, but white superemacists are not only 3 dimensional, they are shown as sexy and misunderstood, too.
Muslim Reverie. is the new blog of Jehanzeb, a Pakistani Muslim American who writes kickass essays, beautiful poetry and features astonishing art on his wordpress.
I had read his takedown of that vile, racist, waste of film, 300, when it first came out. He has updated the piece since then:
Frank Miller’s “300? and the Persistence of Accepted Racism
In the following essays, he focuses on the Hollywood penchant for whitewashing; this is…stealing our stories and retelling them with white people. Dressed in what our cultures. Which are then considered exotic.
What’s Wrong With This Picture? takes on Prince of Persia, a Disney movie based on a video game. The guy behind this one is Jerry Bruckheimer. You remember him. He did the The Pirates of The Caribbean. Which featured a rather…”interesting” portrayal of a lady named Tia Dalma who was supposed to be a Jamaican “obeah” woman. Except that according to Wikipedia she was originally the nymph Calypso from Greek mythology???? Sooooo, the character aint really black, just a white woman impersonating real Jamaican obeah women? What the … And then of course, there were the Caribs. Who were portrayed as savage Cannibals out to eat Jack Sparrow. Except that, well, they weren’t savages, and the cannibalism thing? Is something of a dispute. Naturally, Disney thoroughly ignored the Modern-day Caribs demands for accurate representation. Who gives a fuck about the movie’s reinforcing of stereotypes on Carib children? There are white people to give adventures to! And the trope is easy and familiar enough, escaping the primitive and savage POC for a laugh! *sigh*
Seeking Avalon saw the above link, and offers her own thoughts on the whitewashing of Sinbad. Like her, I find it astonishingly disturbing that I too, completely missed said whitewashing. Ai yi yi. They get you coming and going.
From IBARW comes:A night at the movies Which for a POC, is fraught with BS at practically every turn
and IBARW: On stereotypes and the use of racist terms.
and ibarw: visibility of indoctrination, particularly this comment
finally Digital Femme asks a simple question
No. Not finally. Not finally at ALL: Because tablesaw breaks down the main conceit of Warehouse 13 and does it with STYLE. Aztec bloodstones?!?!!?!? Oh Hollywood, how I hate you so!!!!
Moving on to comics turned movies: On the Green Lantern Movie casting
ANNNDDDD then we come to the problem of Non Native Americans being cast in movies. Seems lots of people wanna claim various fractions of Native heritage so that they can play Native characters on the silver screen. Friday, Tonto, Jacob Black, et al. The additional links there are pretty good. Meantime :Tinsel Korey, Ben Kingsley (my my my, he DOES seem to get around, doesn’t he? First Iranian father, now Half Native American), Johnny Depp (yeah, I didn’t know he had Native ancestry either.Funny that.) That Twilight annoyance are some of the non-Natives whom Hollywood has decided are better at playing Native than real Natives are. Speaking of Twilight both book, and by extension movie got it rather wrong about the Quileute tribe. Then again that’s not surprising. She admits to knowing nothing about the Quileute Tribe before she wrote the things. *eyeroll*
Hipanics in the movies:More roles, but more of the same
At the beginning of this article we promised some bad news, and here it is: With the exception of a handful of actors and actresses, Latinos and Latinas are rarely offered principal roles. And the roles they get typically portray the same fatigued and fatiguing stereotypes: Latinas as exotic, sexually hot, passionate “spitfires,” for example, or language-mangling comic relief. Beltrán says that, for the most part, Latinos seldom play fully realized characters. Although there may be more jobs available, they are basically the same roles that Latinos have assumed for the last 80 years.
“Look at Salma Hayek in ‘Fools Rush In’ (1997) or John Leguizamo in ‘Empire’ (2002),” Beltrán says. “Hayek plays the sultry girlfriend of Matthew Perry — she’s an ultra-sexed Latina like we’ve seen in Hollywood films for decades. And Leguizamo’s role as a drug lord hearkens back to bandito characters that first appeared in early silent films in the 1910s.”
Latinos Work To Change Stereotypes In Hollywood
This despite the fact that In 2007, Nielsen EDI estimated that Hispanics accounted for 33% of all moviegoers. That is more than double what Hispanics represent to the national population.
To understand the scale of this, Hispanics purchased 297 million movie tickets in 2007 compared to 150 million for African Americans. Hispanics also go to the movies more often purchasing 10.8 tickets per person vs. 7.9 for the general population.
In fact, here’s a Nielsen article breaking down the Latino movie habit
Is Zoe Saldaña The Mainsteam Latina Star We’ve Always Hoped For? Related: Yes Virginia, Black Latinos exist. In fact:Black, Latino and Gifted in Hollywood
So Zoë Saldaña Wasn’t the Only Latino Actor in the Star Trek Movie
Finally, Mixed Hispanic and Native American Actors & Actresses
Have a good weekend!
*Collapses in exhaustion*
And now a word from our sponsor…
| Your ad could be here, right now. |
I watched 21, taking a particular interest in it as you might think. Suffice it to say that it would be pretty much impossible to make a movie about anything that happens at MIT without including people of Asian ancestry – not just Americans of Asian ancestry but also people who are Asian nationals. I think that the two categories combine for somewhere around 27%+ of the undergraduate population.
No bankable Asian stars? What’s “bankable” mean? Set aside the roles of the adults involved. I have developed no competency in who’s who in Hollywood, so I have to ask, were there “bankable” actors employed in the student roles in this film? Or were most of them people you never heard of? It’s my guess that they thought that employing Asians at all was not “bankable”.
I hadn’t really thought of this:
I saw this first-hand when I accompanied a bunch of Venture Scouts to Japan for two weeks a few years ago. Now, about 1/2 of the kids were from my area, near Chicago, and thus have been exposed to aspects of Asian culture. But many of them were from all over the country, such as in the middle of Idaho or Nebraska. For a lot of these kids this was their first trip outside their State. At one point I had to work with a few kids because they were having a very hard time adjusting. Take a growing 16-year old American kid from Nebraska and feed him nothing but stuff like pickled sea urchin and rice wrapped in seaweed and no four-legged animal protein, make him sleep in a bed 6 inches shorter than his body for a few days and see what happens.
European cultures also speak a language you can’t understand, but while there are cultural differences there are also a lot of common cultural touchstones. But Asian cultures are foreign to the bone. Americans who don’t live in or near coastal cities – or in a few major internal cities such as Chicago – just are not going to see Asian cultures much. And that’s not their fault! But it does mean that you’ll get the phenomenon glockgal describes.
Having said that, I’m not so sure I like her tone. One does not have to have had exposure to Asian cultures – or Central or South American ones, or African ones – to have rich, complex and fufilling lives that are meaningful to others. I find her comment a bit condescending.
glockgal’s comment is an interesting and perceptive one; I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I suspect Americans are fairly likely to have that happen, largely because of the characteristics of the US. We’re so damn BIG (see this handy US- Europe size comparison map, this comparison between the US and Japan, ) , and we have so few neighbors, that it’s not unsurprising folks have less knowledge of out-of-US stuff.
Keanu Reeves is also part-Asian, in some sort of mixed-up Hawaiian way.
I can’t access the “Is racebending legal?” post.
Looks like that’s a locked “community only” post on the LiveJournal Group.
A minor nitpick (because it’s my own little baileywick) – just because Calyspo is a nymph from Greek mythology doesn’t mean she’s a white girl. In fact, Calypso has been portrayed as Black on more than one occasion. Her island was, in ancient times, believed to have been off the coast of Libya and so has always had African associations.
Doesn’t really change your point, and the movie is still awful on the issue. But it’s important to rememebr that the Greeks were better, in many ways, at this shite than we are.
from armond white:
“It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates—yes, that’s the word—Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let’s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9’s mangled anthropology.
District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane “realism” of a mockumentary to show the South African government’s xenophobic response to a global threa
This contemporaryset dystopic, sci-fi flick never becomes fun. (Michael Bay bashers who stupidly complain about the cultural-status of the twin Autobots in Transformers 2 should park their rectitude here.) Instead, District 9 illustrates the strange new state of racial and political identity. It suggests some lingering Afrikaans’ fear or, possibly, how Jackson really thinks about the Maori and Aborigines”
and this interview with the director(the av club, sadly, has kind of promoted the shit out of this) makes him come out as a rather subtly racist cunt: http://www.avclub.com/articles/district-9-director-neill-blomkamp%2C31606/
I mean he made bloody fucking aliens look repulsive.
What?? Where did she imply otherwise? All she said was that people who don’t have exposure to foreign cultures won’t recognize elements of that culture when they see them. There was nothing that even hinted that such people can’t live rich, meaningful lives.
It’s a private post in the racebending LJ community. You’d have to join the community to see it.
Your friend Seeking Avalon, who doesn’t take comments, thinks that Persians are Arabs. What the heck, all brown people are the same, right?
I just saw District 9. It’s not as bad as that linked blog post and LJ entry make it out to be, but yes, there are some real problems.
The main character is definitely *not* MightyWhitey. It’s simply incorrect to say that he uses the alien technology to save the aliens when they couldn’t do it themselves – they were about to do it themselves until he messed things up. However, the portrayal of the actual PoC in the film definitely invokes some of the worst racial stereotypes. (Not that the white characters are any nicer, or less stereotyped.) As an allegory for the actual forced removal that took place in District 6, which inspired it, it doesn’t work very well, but I don’t think it was really intended to be read as an allegory for that specific event anyway.
wha? Read between the lines man
And what’s with the double post?
Doug — I’m not sure why the double post error sometimes happens. Thanks for pointing it out; I deleted one of the posts, and moved all its comments to this post.
@ RonF
Talking about tone in discussions about racism is not helpful. I’m going to assume you haven’t seen this argument before (but bear in mind that this is something that has been discussed to death and beyond in fandom circles, so I really would not reccomend following it up on racebending)
Have a look at:
http://community.livejournal.com/racism_101/29935.html
http://community.livejournal.com/racism_101/50397.html
http://uppitybrownwoman.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/i-dont-like-your-tone-missy/
http://zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com/429092.html
http://zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com/429727.html
http://inalasahl.livejournal.com/149900.html
http://www.derailingfordummies.com/#angry
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1647840.html
http://wildeabandon.livejournal.com/234258.html
Fadib,
It was my understanding that Persia (Iran) was part of the Arabian Peninsula and contained Semitic Peoples and thus the terms Middle Eastern and Arab or Arabic applied. If this is wrong, I apologize.
I’m currently trying to look up what terms I should have used instead and when I find them, I will correct my post.
As for contacting me in the future, my email address (and a mailto) is on the blog.
Fadib,
My previous post may or may not be in the spam blocker. Just as this post may or may not enter into the spam blocker. I’ve updated/adjusted my essay and noted my – hmm, ignorance isn’t the right term – my monolithic mindset (perhaps that term fits better).
My apologies, sincerely, for not taking the time to look up the differences in Middle Eastern cultures and what each group calls itself.
a few more reviews that aren’t crowning district 9 as a masterpiece. some are recieving vitriol for even mentioning the racial and ‘othering’ aspect
http://newsblaze.com/story/20090807123235mill.nb/topstory.html
excerpt
http://blogs.bet.com/entertainment/whattheflick/movie-review-district-9/
here you can see some of the comments about his review
and http://dcmoviegirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/early-review-district-9.html
excerpt
she’s been getting hate filled comments that she hasn’t put up despite stating that it might be good as a rental for some and that the people in the audience loved it. it doesn’t seem to matter in these fanboy/girl minds and when racebender comes out the same thing will happen again (even more than it is now whenever the bs that is the yellowface airbender casting is brought up)
Avalon’s Willow, I’m sure there’s link upon link about this, but understand that Persians (essentially Iranians) see themselves as distinct from Arabs and would take being described as Arabs as incorrect or even insulting.
Persians/Iranians and Arabs are completely distinct peoples. (Well, as completely distinct as any two groups within the same species can be.) Persia as a geographical and political entity is separate from the Arabian Peninsula, with Iraq and the Persian Gulf buffering the two places. Different languages, cultures, homelands, etc. Some shared religion, but not as much as is assumed.
Ronf:
The distinction is something I discovered with the very first return when using a search engine and inputting both terms; making it clear to me why Fahid was frustrated/upset/insulted (which are all just my guesses anyway).
I’ve done my best to not equate the two in the linked essay and noted my mistake.
If there are still errors, I will go through it again. I’d hoped I’d caught everything.
Just saw District 9. I really enjoyed it, and I think it was a very useful and honest perspective on racism. I think the review you linked went into the movie wanting to see racefail, and so she did. I saw it more as saying “This is how we would actually treat aliens – look how easily we dehumanize humans, how hard would it be for us to see creatures that look like cockroaches as real beings deserving of rights”. I think they were made more disgusting looking in order to make the disgusting way in which the humans treated them more believable, and to keep the audience from sympathizing with them right off the bat. But the brilliant part of the movie is that we do sympathize with them in the end, and then we, like the main character, realize how easy it is for us to dehumanize someone without a second thought.
White people don’t like to think about racism. We have to be tricked into it. The cockroach aliens in this movie do that, and, in my opinion, do it damn well. If they aliens were cute and cuddly there would be no effect, because we’d be rooting for them right from the start.
Nathan, you don’t get it: he wants the audience to view the aliens(read: blacks) as ugly and repulsive at first, but then they turn out to be OMG Nice and repressed! And what about the protrayal of human Africans in the movie, you read the reviews above didn’t you?
The Nigerian arms dealers were pretty disgusting. The rest of the black Africans in the movie were no more evil than the white people (most of whom were pretty evil.)
And I don’t see why “don’t judge people by what they look like/ your initial reaction to them” is a racist message. It seems like the opposite to me.
Not that “they’re ugly and icky but wait, they have inner beauty and are worthy of rights!!!” is the most original or awesome storyline ever conceived, but it’s a pretty morally beneficial storyline IMHO. I grew up with the kind of racist-by-inheritance yokel white people who are likely to see this movie, and they are likely to walk out of it with bona fide come-to-Jesus sentiments about race churning around in their heads. I’m sure you could make a great art-house liberal-minded film which would do a much better job of advancing people already well along the path of non-racism – but that film would be (worse than) useless as anti-racist propaganda for the masses.
And anti-racist propaganda for the masses is clearly what the creators of this film set out to achieve. (Personally I’m excited to see it; I’ll watch liberal propaganda of any variety if you set it in or around a giant spaceship and have aliens.)
I fail to see how depicting poor(?) black Africans as being terrible human beings is problematic, unless it is being presented as some kind of innate characteristic unshared by other races – and the protagonist of the film is a white species-supremacist helping out with the alien genocide, so it’s pretty obvious that the film is clear on the whole “Everyone is a shit, not just this particular group” concept. Most human beings are pretty terrible, poor black Africans among them – and although it would be nice if every time one oppressed group meets another oppressed group, they got together and sang filksongs about how great diversity was, in actual practice they tend to start killing each other over who gets the best scraps from the master’s table. It’s human nature. Would the movie be better if it portrayed Africans as noble philosopher-kings who stroll the plaza in robes and dispense interspecies tolerance wisdom? It might be more comfortable, but it would also be absurdly false to fact for a film that is obviously supposed to be set in something much like the real world.
THIS COMMENT CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT DISTRICT 9. I DON’T BELIEVE THESE SPOILERS WILL RUIN ANYONE’S ENJOYMENT OF THE FILM, BUT BE WARNED.
1) I didn’t mind the ugly-aliens-turn-out-to-be-good plotline, in principle.
That said, there are major problems with using aliens as a metaphor for race — especially in this case, when the writer/director was deliberately making the aliens objectively less capable and smart than humans, in most cases. (There were two intelligent aliens — all the others were supposed to be drones, insect-like beings who lose all initiative now that the Queen bee is dead.)
The thing is, there really aren’t any important biological differences between white people and black people and asian people and indian people and native american people and so on. We’re all one race, and although we have cultural differences, racism remains wrong in part because we are all essentially alike. People who say that the Jews lack morality as a race are simply wrong.
I think stories about alien contact are interesting — but they’re very problematic when used as metaphors for racism. Because when people treat Jews as if Jews aren’t human, they’re objectively wrong. But when they treat insect-creatures from outer space as if they’re not human, that’s not objectively wrong. It might be evil — but it’s not the exact same sort of evil as racism, and to say it is, doesn’t seem well thought out.
2) The problem, Robert, wasn’t that they failed to show all blacks as noble philosopher kings. (Sheesh. You must think very little of us if you think that’s our objection.)
The problem is that the large majority of blacks shown in this particular movie were tribal thugs who were verging on cannibalism. It wasn’t just “everyone is a shit”; it’s that the large majority of black characters were shits in a way that converges with a common stereotypical presentation of threatening black savages that goes back decades in genre fiction.
In the musical “Rent,” Benny is basically a shit person (although he did get a tiny bit of redemption in the last five minutes), but I’ve never heard anyone complain about it — because he wasn’t a shit person in a way that’s a racist stereotype, and because he wasn’t the sole important person of color. In contrast, in “District 9” there are only three types of black characters:
1) Inconsequential NPC-types.
2) Savage gangs threatening to eat the protagonist. (Really.)
3) A bland co-worker guy who gets almost no screen time, but who is apparently morally perfect (he turns in the bad guys at the end) and who doesn’t say a single interesting line or get a single good scene. In other words, a non-character who practically screams “TOKEN BLACK MAN WHO IS NOT A SAVAGE SEMI-CANNIBAL!!!”
I don’t want POC characters to be perfect. I want them to avoid longstanding hurtful stereotypes, and I want them to be real characters, and I want them to not be tokens. That’s not too much to ask — there are certainly books, movies, TV shows and comics that have managed that. But “District 9” didn’t manage it.
I don’t want POC characters to be perfect. I want them to avoid longstanding hurtful stereotypes, and I want them to be real characters, and I want them to not be tokens.
Well. The more real characters, the better. So I’m with you there.
“Token” is an artistic judgment call, but I agree that there’s a reality to what you’re objecting to on that, and I don’t much care for it myself.
Hurtful stereotypes is a bit more problematic. Can you create great art while avoiding hurtful stereotypes? Sure. But it limits the scope of what you can do. You must avoid certain areas of reality. The objectionable thing about stereotypes isn’t that they don’t have seeds of truth – they often do. (Certainly the stereotype about Italo-Scots being exceptionally handsome and brilliant people is true.) What’s objectionable is the assumptions and prejudicial treatment that result.
But these are personal (or social for all you red diaper types) moral issues, not artistic considerations. What might be objectionable behavior in my behavior in the dining room is required of me, for the sake of artistic integrity, in the writing room. Consider: I grew up in the South. Were I to write a novel, it would undoubtedly be a novel about growing up in the South. (I do believe in tradition, after all, and writing novels about one’s childhood is a tradition. And a Southern one, to boot!)
Growing up in the South, I met and saw a lot of people. Many of those people were POC, if I must use that term instead of plain language. Some of the people were good, some were bad, blah blah blah. But many of the stereotypes about rednecks are, in fact, based on realities. There are white people who live(d) in leaky shacks they wouldn’t fix because “I can’t fix it when it’s raining and when it ain’t raining it don’t leak” – and black people who did the same. There are white people who work on the local farm day by day until they have $87.50, because it costs $50 for their weekly flop and $35 for whiskey and cigarettes and $2.50 for a lotto tickets – then they come back to work when the flop kicks them out, they run out of smokes, and don’t hit the lotto. And there are black people who do the same.
I could go on for pages. (That would be the novel!)
These are hurtful stereotypes against both black and white rednecks (two groups with far more in common than most people realize). But if I write my novel to make your heart feel all warm and fuzzy about the POC by avoiding these hurtful stereotypes when they apply to black people but not when they apply to white people, then I’m writing either
a) a huge lie
or
b) half a book, because POC are at least half of the story of the south
or
c) a different book altogether
I find none of those options artistically acceptable, and in my own conscience my creative freedom must trump your sensitivities. You don’t have to buy my novel.
All of that said, I don’t have to be an asshat about it, either. I don’t have to write books full of drooling black idiots shuffling down small-town sidewalks out of malicious hatred for blacks. The idea is to create art that talks about reality (among other things), not to crap on people for no reason.
So – is this movie crapping on black people for the sake of hearing the splat? You make some cogent points. I’ll have to see the film for myself to judge those points, since right now I’m going on media reports and buzz.
That’s true. Black people are indeed savage cannibals who eat people all the time.
For fuck’s sake.
You’re not responding to this movie. You’re not responding to the arguments being made. You’re making shit up.
Leave this thread.
This is probably not a comment that will add much to the discussion, but does racebending/whitewashing of Asians apply to the Indian subcontinent? I was mainly thinking about Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Ghandi, until I remembered that Ben Kingsley’s father was from India. (But wasn’t Ben Kingsley cast as a Persian in Prince of Persia?) Not that there are many recent Hollywood movies with Indians in them – I can think of Naseeruddin Shah as Captain Nemo in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance, but OTOH Fisher Stevens played Ben Jahrvi in Short Circuit.
Mandolin,
I think Robert’s “seeds of truth” was meant as “there are some people from the group that do this, and what’s evil about the stereotype is projecting from the ‘some’ to the ‘all.'”
Some Africans have practiced cannibalism. So have some Europeans. So have some of practically everybody, I expect. Animals eat animals, including sometimes animals of the same species. My college roommate was traumatized to wake one morning and find that one of her pet rodents not only had died in the night but also was slowly being eaten by its former mate. The trouble is that attributing cannibal behavior ONLY to Africans, even in a movie where everyone is bad, is like having only the Jewish character demand a pound of flesh to satisfy a debt, even in a movie where everyone is greedy. Cannibalism is Africans’ version of the blood libel.
Robert,
The other failure of your analogy is that in your novel, there would be a shared failing of BOTH the black and white characters that seems to be based on a confluence of socioeconomics and geography. While classism is itself dubious, it’s not nearly as bad as attributing someone’s failings to race. At least with your novel, you can show how some of the black AND white kids who grew up with “shiftless” parents could go away and make something better of themselves. If you ground someone’s failing in his race, it will never change, even unto the seventh generation.
Original Lee,
Kingsley’s father was of Indian ethnicity but technically born in Kenya (there are large populations of ethnic Indians in several former British colonies in Africa; Gandhi himself began his career as an activist in South Africa). Kingsley’s birth name was Krishna Pandit Bhanji, which he changed because he feared that sounding so foreign would impede his ability to get acting roles. As for South Asians getting roles in Hollywood movies … Kal Penn? I got nothin’ here.
Don’t Iranians and South Asians share a fair number of ethnic/racial links? Not that that’s an excuse to not bother looking for an actor with actual Iranian heritage (for example, Omid Djalili?? Oh wait: they’re too busy casting him as assorted sleazy Arabs), but at least it’s better than casting an obviously European actor.
Crys T,
I think “Persian” is more of a cultural descriptor than an ethnic/genetic one, but all of these are sort of contested. Until a few years ago, my “group” (Dravidians, i.e. South Indians — my sister likes to distinguish us from North Indians by saying “No sweet lentils”) was thought to be racially closer to West Europeans than East Asians (which might be plausible if you went by something like eye shape), but now the consensus seems to be that we’re actually fractionally closer to our Asian brethren than to the Europeans. If you go by the theoretical genetic trees, we’re about as close to Iranians as we are to Basques — all part of the “Indo-Aryan” family.
As far as Hollywood goes, though, I think they eyeball it based on what the casting director thinks you could be, which probably is as sensible a system as any. I’ve had Dravidian friends who were mistaken for everything from African American to Puerto Rican, and I myself once mistook a Mexican guy for being Indian. Jim Sturgess ain’t never gonna be mistaken for Jeff Ma, though.
Rather tangential to the post, but I thought Basques were not Indo-Aryan, that is, that the Basque language is thought to be the only remaining language from the language group spoken by the original Europeans, before the Indo-European invasion. And to the extent language migration tell you about migration of peoples (somewhat but not entirely), I was under the impression the Basques may be less related to Indians than almost any other European group.
chingona,
I don’t know much about this, but according to Wikipedia with a reasonable number of scholarly footnotes, “Since the Basques speak a non-Indo-European language and have the highest proportion of the Rh negative blood type of all the peoples of the world, they were widely considered to be a genetically isolated population, preserving the genes of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, until recent genetic studies found that modern Basques have a common ancestry with other Western Europeans.[35] The similarity includes the predominance in their male populations of Y-chromosome (Haplogroup R1b), now considered to have been spread through Europe by new arrivals in the Neolithic period or later.[36]”
Thank you so much for this epic roundup. I’m really disappointed about District 9–from the promotional materials it looked to me like a movie that was going to be really smart about race, and I was looking forward to it. A shamefully lost opportunity.
Tiny quibble: Keanu Reeves is indeed of Chinese and Hawai’ian indigenous descent, to my knowledge, as well as being half white. He’s just often whitewashed as an actor, similar to the treatment of Jessica Alba.
Regarding the supposed “whitewashing” of “21”, this is an Internet myth. To set the record straight, of the 100+ players on our team over the years, less than 20% were Asian and the founder and leader of the team was Bill Kaplan. Of course, Ben Mezrich’s story was a highly fictionalized portrayal of our business and the movie took so many liberties that it’s hard to find even one plot line or character that rings even remotely true. Nevertheless, both the book and the movie captured the essence, excitement, and success of our team while enthralling both readers and audiences. Kudos to both Ben Mezrich and Kevin Spacey for taking our story and putting us on the map.
Huh. If “whitewashing” means acting like they’re white, then I’m missing something: how is having Keanu and Jessica Alba go through the world in their “whitewashed” status a significantly different thing than having a native american in a suit pulling down a paycheck with no particular “NA-ness” involved, whatever that would be? I mean, it seems to be that way in your view but i’m not sure about the basis for it.
@36,
Mezrich acknowledges that the main character of the book, “Kevin Lewis,” is based on Jeff Ma. The fact that the “founder and leader of the team” was a white guy is irrelevant to the complaint being raised here, which is that Mezrich and then Spacey whitewashed Ma. If neither the book nor movie had claimed to be based on any real people, there would be no problem, but both used “based on a true story” as their draw.
I’d say that there’s a difference between an actor taking roles that portray him or her as ‘white’ when they’re not, and someone taking a job that has no reference to race or ethnic origin.
—Myca
Me too! I live in the UK, where the largest minority group is South Asians, and a friend & I were at a bus stop with one other guy, who we thought was Asian. We were speaking in Spanish & he introduced himself to us.
Their language is non-Indo-European, but they themselves are physically (genetically? whatever) quite obviously what we all think of as “white.”
Also, what Myca said.
Hmm.
Keanu’s big break was Point Break, IIRC, and he’s probably most famous for Matrix. neither of those AFAIK are especially good at establishing his background as white/non.
I agree that there have been other movies which cast him specifically in the role of a white character, but I think it is an unusual stretch to use the term “whitewashing” to complain about hiring a nonwhite person to play a major starring role in which the role to be played happens to be that of a white person. At least, it is if you are using it as a bad term.
Alba I don’t know anything about, really. I’ve seen her in I think three movies, maybe four. IIRC, in every single one she plays a similar character: 20-something cute person with no real backstory other than hip friends and a movieworthy job.
Using thos eexamples, can you explain (1) why they’re bad casting/whitewashing, and (2) why the nonspecified characters are being portrayed as white (if you think they are)?
Sailorman, I’m referring to a specific phenomenon. When Jessica Alba first began to get visibility as an actress, she had darker skin, dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and much talk about her mixed-race and Latina heritage. As she started to go more mainstream and successful and sought out more roles, she began consistently being presented with blonde hair, paler skin, and even blue eye contacts, and suddenly got many more major roles. Her heritage is almost never mentioned in stories about her at this point, and while she used to be cast as Latina characters, she is now more likely to be cast as characters with names like “Nancy Callahan.” It is rare to see her these days not presented as blonde and sort of de-racinated.
Similarly, Keanu Reeves’ status as an Asian/Pacific Islander American is almost never mentioned, not since Point Break, and to my knowledge he hasn’t been cast as an Asian person since then. (In the Matrix, after all, his non-Neo name was “Anderson.”) The more mainstream these mixed-race actors have gotten, and the more successful, the more their status as nonwhite people has been downplayed, to the point where the person writing the linked article didn’t even know Keanu Reeves was Asian or Pacific Islander.
They are hardly the first; the more mainstream Beyonce has gotten, the more she has been presented with straight/wavy blonde hair and paler skin than when she first hit the scene, for instance, and the singer Shakira went blonde when she started pushing for US success, downplaying her Latina and Arab heritage except when called on to bellydance or be “spicy Latina” in a music video. Christina Aguilera’s second album was in Spanish; there has been no real mention of her being Latina since then in her publicity, and she is blonde and light-skinned.
It’s not so much about specific casting choices in this movie or that as the pattern of mixed-race actors and actors of color having a peculiar correlation between their mainstream success/lead roles and there being mention in either roles or public appearances and magazines, etc., as nonwhite. They’re expected to be “neutral” and “normal,” that is, white–and it’s no surprise. Look at the casting of the “Avatar” adaptation–up against that sort of thing, it’s not a shocker that actors of color who can pass for white do what they have to do in order to get cast in anything.
“Nancy Callahan” or “Neo Anderson” or the like: what’s the problem there? Do no men named Callahan ever marry nonwhite women and have children? Are there no POC named Anderson? I have heard of a Stan Lee and I know a John Lee and a Timothy Lee; one is white, one is black, and one is Asian.
If you’re going to complain that Alba and Keanu get cast as “anderson” or “callahan,” then the read-between-the-lines part of your complaint suggests that Alba should mostly be cast as Mary Juarez and the like. Which seems like what we are trying to avoid, yes?
The real way that a character gets shown to be white in a movie is if they are shown to, you know, be white. As in “have two white parents” or “have white siblings” or “be a member of high society in Elizabethan England” or “refer to self as white” or “participate in “othering” of some class of people.
But you seem to be using “whitewashed” to mean acting white, by which you seem to mean having a name like Callahan or Anderson, or having blond hair, or being a computer geek, or dying one’s hair blond, or putting in blue contacts (most but by no means all blue eyed people are white,) or the like.
But those things aren’t “white.” They’re just things. I have white friends named Mark, just like Jessica Alba’s (Mexican American) father is named Mark. Lord knows I have met hundreds of people named Jessica, of all colors. Should she change herself to be “more ethnic” perhaps?
It seems like you’re asking for a very thin line. You seem to want them to be “nonwhite enough” to satisfy you, but I don’t understand why.
Sailorman,
most by by no means all blue eyed people are white
True (I have a half white-half Korean friend who has blue eyes, though I’m silently convinced that the Mendel diagram necessitates that she have more Caucasian in her ancestry than just her mom’s side). But why don’t we ever seem to see naturally blond, blue-eyed actresses dying their hair black and putting in dark brown contacts? Why does the blurring of ethnic identity and the and changing of one’s hair, eye and skin color all seem to move toward whiteness? It’s not “acting white” to take on the appearance of whiteness — it’s BEING WHITE, for all purposes except genetic testing. It’s passing. It goes even further than my changing my name to Maria Juarez and speaking with a Spanish accent when I have no Latino heritage whatsoever, but at least I have roughly the right skin, eye and hair color to “pass” as Latino. I couldn’t pass as even super-tanned brunette white without some toxic levels of skin bleaching (though there’s plenty of salons in India that would give it their best shot).
I dunno. Why do we see so many white people dying their hair blond and putting in blue contacts? It’s not as if they are trying to become “more white,” so I have to assume that it has a lot to do with societally-mandated standards of beauty.
I honestly don’t know how often, if ever, blonds dye their hair brown.
Because whites are in power, and a number of those powerful people have decided that they like blond hair, and everyone always tries to emulate the powerful, whether it be “eating with forks” or “having blond hair.”
Huh. If someone who is of mixed race and someone who is white are indistinguishable other than by knowing their heritage, why are both people acting “white” and not being of “mixed race?” It makes no sense to me to demand, openly or through implication, that nonwhites take on “markers” of their status, be it names (no “callahan for you!”) or hair (“I can dye my black hair blond, but you can’t!”) or culture (“are you sure you’re being ‘ethnic enough?'”) In my mind–and I realize this may seem simplistic–there is, and should not be, any particular connection to someone’s actions and someone’s parentage race.
Speaking of how Asian-Americans are represented in a white-dominated media, I thought this LJ post was quite good in its discussion about how Asian intelligence in a variety of fields gets boiled down to Math/Science robot. I think the author is half white, half Asian.
The current last comment on it (from mnmark on Aug. 14) is my very own example of RaceFail of the Week:
Miscegenation has created halfbreed monsters who resent whites! America belongs to us white people and you brown people don’t appreciate us!
I must comment though, Keanue Reeves is part Chinese and part Hawaiian – it doesn’t mean he should be playing a character that was meant to be 100% Asian, but he is Asian. That’s all.