In the last few years, Conservatives have constantly had their hair on fire over one thing or another. There’s been Critical Race Theory — which is not actually taught to anyone outside of Graduate or Law School — there’s been a backlash to Star Trek Discovery because the lead character is a black woman and several prominent characters are LGBTQ, there’s been a backlash against actor Brie Larson because before the premiere of her movie Captain Marvel she (accurately) stated that most Hollywood roles go to White men (and she brought receipts for that claim), and there’s been a backlash against the new Marvel Disney Plus series She-Hulk because it’s just “too feminist” and “woke.”
Too much ethnicism. Too many women. Too many gays. It’s just all too much for Conservatives to handle, all too much for them to take. Now the fictional animated character Little Mermaid is being played in live action by a black girl and they can’t find a fire extinguisher for their hair.
First, let’s have some common sense from Steve Shives.
“Why are these people so upset about casting decisions for a movie they are not going to even see?”
So that’s one perspective. How about another?
This is Matt Walsh, I don’t know if you know Matt Walsh — but he’s one of these conservatives who likes to make lots of false equivalence and pretends that he’s calm and relaxed and logical while the left is crazed and wild and out-of-control. He takes his time and points out that recently there have been several white or white-ish actors — in what he claims is “so-called White-Washing”— criticized for taking ethnic roles. James Franco as Castro, Emma Stone as an Asian woman in a Romantic comedy, Rooney Mara as Tiger Lilly, Hank Azaria as Apu and according to him a brown Actress for the live-action stage version of Alladin who apparently wasn’t “brown enough.”
Not surprisingly, Walsh calls all the people who have brought up the issue of “White-Washing” as being “Race Obsessed.” The drive to be ethnically correct in your casting is clearly *abnormal* to the way things are traditionally done, and for making an issue out of white people playing ethnic roles — you have to have some kind of “problem” with White people.
He then argues that people who’ve taken this issue “so seriously” as to claim that replacing ethnic characters with white actors is literally “genocide” seemed to be completely gleeful when black actors are put in place in traditional white characters. There’s a miniseries with a black Ann Boleyn. We have a black Cinderella on Broadway. A black Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. Etc. (Hey, just for the record — how many white guys have played Othello?)
And now we have a Black Little Mermaid in the upcoming new live-action movie project.
Walsh claims that this kind of casting is celebrated by the left and the media because it's “courageous” and “important” — but at the same time doing the reverse, “white-washing”, is constantly slammed as “racist.”
He goes on to criticize a Daily Beast article that complains about the “racist backlash” to the new Little Mermaid and then states that instead of anything racist, it only quotes a few tweets criticizing the underwater CGI in the film preview. Honestly, CGI gets updated and reworked right until the time of a film's release — so sure, it might still be rough right now, but it likely won’t stay that way. But Walsh goes on to use this example to argue that any criticism of this film — or similar film with prominent ethnic characters — will automatically be considered “Racist” or at least racially motivated.
“You can’t criticize the new Game of Thrones or Lord of Rings prequels without being accused of being a member of the KKK!” he says. And conversely — “Cities would be burned down if Tom Hanks were to play Frederick Douglas!” “The Character played by Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption was supposed to be an Irishman, that’s why he was named ‘Red’ — but no one cared back then before things became so politically correct.”
“If they can complain about Black erasure, why can’t we complain about White erasure?”
He then goes on to “guarantee” you that Media Matters will produce a clip of his commentary and blast him for his “racist tirade against the Little Mermaid.” Actually what they said was “Daily Wire host says it unscientific to cast a black person as a mermaid” which to be fair — he didn't actually say. [Yeah, he said it.]
“Unfortunately we now live in a culture of blatant racial double standards. Based on skin color we are told what are opinions are allowed to be and what sort of things you are allowed to care about. And if you’re white there are all sorts of things you care about but you would be insane, racist, stupid and petty to care about yourself.”
Yeah.
So Walsh on the surface seems rational and reasonable, but there is a fatal flaw in his argument. It’s the fatal flaw that is always present in arguments like this that attempt to claim that what happens for a white person is just exactly the same as what happens to a black person. Yeah, like when a black person gets stopped by police what then happens is just exactly like what happens when a white person is stopped. Sure, there’s absolutely no difference. Right? To Walsh, the hardest thing on Earth to find would be any actual racism — unless it’s by someone on the Left.
So sure, it’s not like White-Washing in Hollywood has been going on for nearly 100 years including people like Al Jolson in Black Face, Amos and Andy, John Wayne as Gengis Khan, Yul Brenner in The King and I, Chuck Norris as Geronimo, Charlton Heston as Moses in Ten Commandments, Christian Bale as Moses in Gods and Kings, Elizebeth Taylor as Cleopatra, David Carradine — instead of Bruce Lee — as Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanies, Peter Sellers in The Party, Johnny Depp as Tonto, Emma Stone as a half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese character in Aloha, Jake Gyllenhal as an Arab in Prince of Persia and Scarlet Johansen in Ghost in the Machine.
White people playing ethnic roles is a Hollywood tradition. That’s the “norm.” That’s the normal expectation. More importantly for most of the history of Hollywood black and ethnic characters were essentially racist stereotypes. You had the “Mammy” characters in Gone with the Wind, you had the lazy “bandito” characters for Latinos, the shifty eyes schemers for Asians, and the violent savages for Native Americans. Hollywood was used to pushing and reinforcing the larger message of white supremacy and racism directly into the larger society. Hollywood began with Birth of a Nation — it still hasn’t grown beyond it fully.
The reason that Sydney Poitier was “groundbreaking” when he did Lillies in the Field was that he very specifically didn’t play a stereotype — he played a fully human person. That role inspired people directly against the precepts of white supremacy — it showed that a black man could be far more than anyone had previously been shown. It changed the paradigm. But it’s been slow progress since then. In the late 80s the options for black and ethnic actors were still mostly in stereotypical gangster/junkie/slave roles as shown by this scene from Hollywood Shuffle.
The idea that now 35 years later we can just — switch — the ethnicity of a former white character to black (or female, or LGBTQ) is groundbreaking. It’s astonishing. But it’s not everything.
According to people like Walsh, besides being a “double-standard” the issue of black, female and LGBTQ inclusion is part of an “agenda.” It’s deviating from the “norm” of what Hollywood usually does. I’ve seen one conservative reviewer arguing that there needed to be a “reason” for the diverse cast in Marvel’s The Eternals. A reason? Do we seriously have to fucking explain why it is that people who lived in different parts of the world for thousands of years— fucking look different? They're all supposed to be white for some reason? Of course not, but decades of Hollywood have produced that default perception that having everyone be white — is “normal” even when there literally no reason for that to be the case.
Hollywood, for almost a century, completely banished people of color from existence. And if they did show them, it was almost always as a thin two-dimensional semi-person. They treated women as objects to be desired or to be sent to the kitchen. And the treatment of LGBTQ characters has been far worse. In time things have improved, but not completely. Even in the 2015 film adaptation of Stonewall the key LGBTQ characters were shown as White instead of being the Black Trans that they actually were in real life. White-washing, yet again.
Recently Oscar winner Viola Davis has stated that if her upcoming historic biopic “Woman King” — which tells the story of female warriors in 1820’s Africa — isn’t a massive hit then it will be more difficult for future Black female movies to be made.
“The Woman King,” a rousing emotional wallop that seamlessly fuses interior drama with action spectacle, was met with universal acclaim at its Toronto premiere as a crowd-pleaser of another kind. But the Hollywood calculus for what might appeal to a broad audience has traditionally really meant “Will white people watch it?”
“Black people did not have to love ‘Thelma & Louise’ for ‘Thelma & Louise’ to get made,” says Davis. “White people have to love ‘The Woman King’ for ‘The Woman King’ to get made — according to Hollywood.”
It’s not like a period-piece action movie with an all-white cast would ever have to worry that if they aren't a big hit no one would ever try to make another movie like that. You bet they would.
Hollywood is a business built on perception. And that perception is often viewed from the “White gaze.” The target is usually the white audience. So movies with ethnic actors are often judged as to whether those actors can — sell the product to white people.
$ Millions — sometimes $Billions — are on the line. The right casting can change literally everything. Even if black or ethnic actors are cast in a role — they still have to pass “white muster” to keep that role.
So is there an “agenda” when black actors are cast in general or in what had previously been a traditionally white role?
Yes.
Change and improvement doesn't happen unless someone makes that change an item on their agenda. Someone has to decide to make that change. And that agenda is to reverse what has previously been done. The agenda is to correct the distortion that has been placed in front of our eyes for generations. It’s not like we would have had movies like Amastad, Selma or Hidden Figures if people like Oprah Winfrey and Pharrell Williams hadn’t been willing to bankroll them. White and Black washing are not “equal” — they are not the same. One has been part of a distortion created by the direct implementation of White Power — the other is a slight minor correction to that distortion. Over the course of 80 years, from 1937 to 2022, Disney has produced 49 movies with various versions of a “princess” and so far only one of them — Tatiana — has been black. Yet doing a change for the live-action version of Little Mermaid only (shouldn’t they really be green-skinned?) is just a step “too far beyond the pale.” Black representation of merely 4.08% is apparently too much? Uh huh.
In all seriousness, white people are in absolutely no danger of being completely supplanted in the Entertainment Industry — just as they are in no real danger from the “Great Replacement” by minorities — however, they may actually have to compete for their roles with a wider array of potential actors. On the other hand, if they white-wash the few ethnic roles that even exist — there won’t be any of those roles. Period.
[In full disclosure: I have a friend who is an Asian actor — Archie Kao — who ultimately had to move to Taiwan in order to get roles — and he was born in Washington DC. His last US role on the first season of Chicago PD which had him play the “IT Guy” whose first name we didn't even learn until the end of the season when he was murdered and tossed off the show. I haven’t watched another episode since.]
White people just might actually have to really earn their jobs. Who could have a problem with that except for someone who was expecting to automatically get a leg-up and suddenly doesn’t have it anymore?
Thursday, Sep 15, 2022 · 10:32:27 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Also, there’s the issue of “Black-Phishing” which is an entirely different thing where people who are essentially white are darkening their entire body and changing their hairstyle to appropriate “blackness” and portions of black culture.
Key example: Kim Kardashian. Also: Ariana Grande.
And on top of this, you have actors and writers who are adopting ethnicity in order to gain the “benefit” of being non-white. Holy Crap!