A Colourful Proposal

[morgan_dhu]

I am getting so bloody sick of mainstream North American entertainment deciding that I, as a white person, am so empathy-challenged that I can't possibly identify with a person who is not white.

I assure you it's not true. I've watched dozens of movies (I'd watch more, but they're not all that easy to find) where the characters aren't white, and you know what - I've understood the characters' motivations, I've felt that I could identify with their struggles and their triumphs - in fact, I've enjoyed all those movies just as much as - and sometimes even more than - movies with all-white casts that are supposed to - what? reassure me? make me think "my people" run the universe? protect me from seeing difference?

And I bet you have, too. Even those of you who are also white like me.

So why do things like this keep happening? Who decides that if the source material, which is popular enough that you want to make a movie out of it in the first place, happens to have most or all of the characters be people of colour, that has to be changed for a North American audience?

When are we going to start having real-life casting? When will the people doing their thing in the movies and television shows I watch look like the streets of the city I live on, where there's more than just one black person, one Asian person, and maybe one Aboriginal person at a time?

I've got an idea.

Why don't we decide that for just one year, no movies or TV shows will be made that have white actors in them unless you can "justify" why the person playing the character is white. Let's have people of colour as the default, and only cast white people because it's a major plot point and there's no way to avoid it without making the piece meaningless, or because, well, you have to have one token white person. Who is, of course, either the sidekick or the mentor, and who of course sacrifices hirself heroically to save the non-white hero. Oh, maybe we'll allow two or three big-name white actors to make a movie, just to prove we aren't racist.

Let's see what our most popular forms of entertainment look like to those of us who are white, once we're the ones you hardly ever see. It might actually, you know, teach us something about being the person who's defined as the Other.

Comments

[frightened.livejournal.com]

AAAAAAAARGH, WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!

And Avatar isn't even anime! It's American! So if Americans can cope with a cartoon full of non-white people in a non-white world, why the hell is it assumed they couldn't cope with a movie? Or is it as simple and as horrific as wanting to give money to white people instead?

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I can't figure this one out, any more than I can figure out why Ged (and everyone else in the Earthsea movie) was white, or how Heinlein's Juan Rico, a native speaker of Tagalog living in Buenos Aires, got to be played by the whiter-than-white Casper Van Dien in the Starship Troopers movie. Just to give you two examples.

The source material in both cases is American and was hugely successful with non-white characters. But oh, no, when you make them into movies for the masses, you have to whitewash.

[(Anonymous)]

Hear, hear. I haven't lived in North America for fifteen years but if you still have to write a post like this, it sounds as if it ain't changed as much as I thought.

I am so tired of watching movies set in New York city that still feature the wisecracking Italian American cab driver, and people on the street who are predominantly...white. It's not the NYC I remember, and that's just for starters.

Some kind of denial seems to be going on, and it's disturbing.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Yup.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

What I really don't understand is why.

Because if nothing else, I'd have thought that the success of actors like Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Jet Li, Lucy Liu, Angela Bassett, Jackie Chan, Halle Berry, Queen Latifah - all of whom have carried film projects - would be some kind of indication that white people will pay to see actors of colour.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Because the rich white guys who own things in Hollywood don't want to see more POC--it's why they doggedly hold that everything needs to be marketed to the 18-35 yr old straight white male audience despite all evidence that says that there are other markets to mine--it's the world as they want to see it and that matters even more to them than making money--which is scary, because they love them their money. You won't see more older women of any color there, either.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

You don't see many older white women either, not in the top ranks of the major projects. As soon as they look like they're over 30, they're mostly playing someone's mother, no matter what their skin tone.

I know that the studios remain convinced that all the movie-going money in the world is controlled by the 18-35 yr old straight white male audience, no matter what the evidence to the contrary - I just don't understand why they don't see that it's not true. Why it matters to them so much. It's irrational.

You can consider this a rhetorical question, I guess, along the same lines as why don't we - the people of the wealthy industrialised nations - actually do something about global warming, or make generic AIDS drugs available to everyone, everywhere.