Food for thought

[pez]

While I totally agree that The Last Airbender is one goddamn whitewash (and Prince of Persia more forgivable since they have mixed race actors at least), it has made me wonder what'd happen if it was the reverse - if a film was made based on a game/anime/cartoon that featured mostly people with white skin, featuring lots of actors who are not white.

Maybe it'll be a mix of the following:
- Yay, diversification!
- Uh, WTF this is wrong. That's just colourwash, political correctness gone mad.
- I think this is wrong but I'm not going to say it because people'll call me racist.
- I don't care either way, as long as they can act.

There is a whole load of other issues in this, of course. Such as what do you classify as "white" - is it just the skin colour? Are Italians and Spanish white to you, for example? How about second generation Jewish? And mixed race people? If second gen Jewish are white, then how about second gen Asian, born in a white country?

They used a Chinese rather than Japanese woman for Memoirs of a Geisha. Is that okay? If it is, why? Is it because as long as they LOOK the part it's all right? Does that mean if a white person plays a person of colour, as long as they made themselves look like they have a different skin colour, that's all right too? Or should they have cast a POC into the role instead?

Would you more readily accept a yellow-skinned southeast-Asian Dante for a Devil May Cry film? How about a west-Asian Dante? How about a Jewish Dante? How about an Afro-Caribbean Dante? Is it okay because Dante's supposed to be half human and the game doesn't specify the country he lives in, or is it not okay because he doesn't look anything but white in the game?

And say, if there was a southeast-Asian actor for Dante, would you expect him to have makeup to make him look more Dante like... and would you expect him to change his hair/wear a wig that's like Dante's hair? Is that covering up his ethnicity or just professionalism? Is it okay because no race really has white hair? Now, what if the original Dante is blond? Would changing the actor's hair to suit be ethnically bad because blond generally indicates white people, or is it just being professional?

So yes, I realise there are many questions and issues. I have no answers, just some views, and some of them make me go "but I wonder what if..."

Comments

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

That's true, and applicable to other places as well (the college application process for one), but at the same time... it /is/ harder for a those groups to get a job, period. So the people not in those groups can more easily (and I'm not trying to say they can just snap their fingers) get a job.

There's a study (will find the link if you're curious) that showed that people who identify as not racist (I'd imagine most hiring people who belong to this group) will chose both black and white applicants who are overwhelmingly qualified for a position, and reject both black and white applicants who are clearly not qualified. The difference is, for those people who lie in the middle, the whites are given the benefit of a doubt, but the blacks are not.

...I'm not exactly trying to defend the diversity target though. I think that it's an issue (the higher difficulty faced by PoC//females) that needs to be addressed, but not that way.

I'll be honest and say I've /never/ heard of one of those cases.