Racial stereotyping and whitewashing in films and movies is a major problem. Films attempt to be diverse by casting people of colour, but rarely will they ever be the main leads in anything – but rather, the peripheral cast of token characters who have the purpose of making the film or show seem more “diverse”. Those roles will often have them falling into stereotypes to make up for subpar writing for the sake of comedy, making them a caricature of a character rather than an actual honest-to-God human being.
Racial Bias and Whitewashing
Whitewashing specifically refers to the tendency for films to be dominated by white actors and also have white characters. Sometimes those characters will not be originally white in the source material and be rewritten as “white” for the film. It’s done most often because we’re looking at the American film industry, which is aimed at white audiences, giving them something they can relate to by giving them white people for the roles of their heroes and heroines.
Therefore, there is an implicit racial bias when it comes to casting in films or movies. The default casting is always going to go back to white actors unless the role cannot be played at all by white actors – such as in movies like 12 Years a Slave.
Or in some cases, it’s done anyway.
When it’s possible to get a white actor in a role, it’s most often going to be done in some misguided attempt for the target audience to relate to the character on screen.
Diversity and Stereotyping?
Along with a similar train of thought, this means that “diversity” in casting when there is a side character who’s non-white, they’re most often going to be a gross stereotype, such the depiction of that Asian person who’s the fierce ninja warrior/martial artist with no real character development.
Or as Aziz Ansari has a joke about in his Netflix show, Master of None in the episode Indians on TV: his character doesn’t receive a callback for an audition because he doesn’t use a stereotyped Indian accent.
Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar) has actually cited this as a common practice where being brown means you’re essentially type setted into a select few roles, including for one of his first commercials, as a “25-year-old Pakistani computer geek who dresses like Beck and is in a perpetual state of perspiration”. He describes the look that they had to use as, “The makeup people would use Vaseline to get the sweaty unwashed look going”.
When there’s diversity, people are going to talk about it and celebrate it, despite the fact that it should be more common, and despite that diversity only occurring when it comes to having a non-white side-character (usually stereotyped), not the main character, and definitely not the hero or heroine of the show or film.
Whitewashing and Mistaken Assumptions of Commercial Success
This isn’t fully based on explicit racism, but a mistaken assumption that filmmakers and financiers have about how they’re going to bring in the most money for their film. They’re extremely risk averse and operate under a mistaken assumption. An implicit bias and misguided assumption about how the world works.
But in reality, most people just want to be entertained and we can see from numerous box office failures that whitewashing controversies can actually hurt box office success (along with them just being bad movies, of course).
It doesn’t even matter if the directors aren’t even white. We’ve seen this with that really bad Avatar rendition by M. Night Shyamalan who is Indian. Literally, none of the characters in the original cartoon were ever meant to be white, so it was a little bit jarring to see that Katara, Sokka, and Aang suddenly turned white when they were Native Indian and Asian inspired. They were also the “main characters” given the most screen time, while Zuko was not. Zuko was played by Dev Patel. That movie was also a complete failure, and took a lot of heat for their casting choices, on top of the fact that the script was awful compared to the cartoon.
Even when directors aren’t white, there’s still an implicit thought that putting white actors out there will somehow earn the film more money when that isn’t true.
That happened now with The Ghost in the Shell which was based on a Japanese movie. There is a slight argument for the fact that Scarlett Johansson’s character doesn’t actually have to be Japanese because she’s a cyborg, but then why is the default they return to white if her character is meant to be somewhat racially ambiguous? Furthermore, the setting is clearly Asian-inspired, yet the Japanese are the minority. Regardless of if it counts as whitewashing or not, or whether they’re just going to say it’s because Scarlett Johansen is a big bankable star (or the most logical assumption, both), it’s true that Paramount has admitted that the whitewashing controversies hurt their success in domestic markets.
Exodus also didn’t succeed precisely because of its own whitewashing controversies, and Gods of Egypt had the same problem. Prince of Persia also had issues with Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton playing two Persian characters, and even the Social Network had a guy who, in real life is Indian, played by a white actor. And now there’s Death Note, which is fully Americanized, with renamed characters, and the whole thing moving to Seattle, despite the fact that there are some characters there who could arguably even be white – just, they’re not the main characters so everything else had to be changed too.
Conclusions?
Filmmakers operate under a mistaken thought that putting white actors there all the time is actually going to make their film more money when doing it under especially sensitive circumstances like whitewashing the source material is actually going to hurt their box office success. Unfortunately, there is a cyclical argument here: Hollywood wants bankable stars and uses that as the go-to excuse for whitewashing, but then how are you ever going to get more bankable stars of other nationalities if you’re not willing to take a risk on them when people would actually appreciate you doing it?
Attitudes may take a long time to change, and hopefully in the future, we’ll see more things that are true to their source material or at the very least, that people are more willing to assign main character roles to non-white actors since all we want to do is be entertained – we don’t care what the person’s skin colour is when they’re acting, and actually get angry when things are changed to a default mode of “white”.