Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Kevin Feige (Doctor Strange)

This Wednesday, sadly, is not quite so marvelous.

Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One.  Sigh… Why, Marvel, why?  This one really pisses me off, because I’ve loved so much of Marvel’s casting.  Virtually every major character in the franchise has been cast spot-on.  I like that they have a nice mix of “names” like Robert Downey Jr. and suprising choices – how many people in the US knew Chris Hemsworth before Thor?  I like that they’ve cast a few traditionally white characters as PoC, like Nick Fury and Heimdall (which doesn’t negate my argument, by the way.  Ongoing racial disparities in Hollywood mean we’re nowhere close to it being okay to walk this the other way,) and I like that this isn’t the first time they’ve gender-flipped an originally-male character (like Jeri from Jessica Jones.)  But casting a white woman as a character who was originally a Tibetan man doesn’t work for me. 

Here’s Marvel president Kevin Feige defending Swinton’s casting:

“I think if you look at some of the early incarnations of the Ancient One in the comics, they are what we would consider today to be quite, sort of, stereotypical.  They don’t hold up to what would work today.  Also, within the storyline of the comics, and our movie, ‘the Ancient One’ is a title that many people have had.  We hit very early on on, What if the Ancient One was a woman?  What if the title had been passed and the current Ancient One is a woman?  Oh, that’s an interesting idea.  [Clicks fingers.]  Tilda Swinton!  Whoah!  And it just hit.”

The argument here is that the character as originally written is a racist stereotype and the movie is looking to correct that, all admirable.  But that’s the thing.  Casting a white person doesn’t fix the problem – it only avoids it, and it makes the film less diverse in the process.  Marvel has made a lot of awesome, smart movies, and I have no doubt that they could have applied theirselves to the issue and figured out how to write their Tibetan character in a non-racist, non-stereotypical way.  Being Asian doesn’t make a character a stereotype; it’s how that character is presented.  If Marvel had decided to do their due diligence on the writing side, a talented Asian performer could have brought that out and given us a richer character.

But that’s not what you did, Kevin Feige.  You swept race under the rug so you wouldn’t have to do the hard work of addressing it.  One could argue that you’re doing a different kind of work by changing the gender of the character – you certainly want us to focus on that – but I don’t know why the two have to be mutually exclusive.  You’re right that it’s cool to think of the title being passed down and the current Ancient One being a woman.  It is cool, and you’re also right that a female master in itself already starts reducing the “wise old man/Asian mystic/Orientalist” stereotype.  Why does she have to be a white woman, though?  It’s neat to have a woman as the head of a Tibetan monastery, but having a white woman in change of all these Asian monks, in addition to perpetuating Asian erasure, feels rather imperialistic.  So, essentially, you’ve exchanged one race problem for a different one.  Why not an Asian woman?  (Maggie Q?  Michelle Yeoh?  Just putting it out there.)  That could’ve been awesome.