Dear Hollywood (Not Exactly) Whitewashers: Finn Jones (Iron Fist)

I want to be careful, because my goal today isn’t to slam Finn Jones.  His situation is different from a lot of the films I’ve discussed in this feature because he isn’t playing a character of color who was whitewashed.  Iron Fist, the next show on Marvel’s Netflix docket, is a complicated chapter in the fight for Asian representation in Hollywood.  Amid a recent slew of whitewashed Asian roles (Aloha, Doctor Strange, The Ghost in the Shell,) a number of Asian Americans, in addition to speaking out against this, have started online campaigns to cast certain prominent comic-book characters, who have canonically been white, with Asian actors.  Iron Fist’s Danny Rand was the first such campaign that I encountered, and I’ve since seen fans online rooting for an Asian-American Peter Parker and, since that ship has now sailed as well, Robin.

There are many reasons people have been pushing for these.  Changing any of these characters from white to Asian would hurt no one and bring much-needed representation to a community that’s been expected to be satisfied with scraps.  By making an iconic American character like Robin or Spider-Man Asian, a film could combat harmful “perpetual foreigner” stereotypes, and the racebending could open up new avenues for exploration within the story.  And frankly, if studios keep insisting that it’s fine to make Asian characters white, then they might as well do it the other way, too.  Among these campaigns, the call for an Asian-American Danny Rand was probably the most passionate.  Not only would it have given Marvel its first Asian-American lead (granted, Daisy is a major lead on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but it’s more of an ensemble show,) it would’ve also avoided some troubling Mighty Whitey-ness from the original comic, wherein a white guy goes to Asia and becomes a great kung fu master to end all kung fu masters.  Like most comic book series, Iron Fist began many, many years ago, when the vast majority of protagonists were white Just Because and orientalism was something cool to add to the proceedings.  Online, fans argued that an Asian-American Danny could feel like just as much of an outsider in Asia as a white one could, but without the “white savior” implications and with the more interesting threads of identity to pull into the story.

For me, in this situation, Marvel gets way more of the blame than Finn Jones.  They’re the ones who didn’t listen to these fans and stuck with a white Danny.  While Scarlett Johanssen and Tilda Swinton would’ve had to be almost willfully obtuse not to know that Major Motoko Kusanagi and the Ancient One are meant to be Asian, Jones would’ve had to have been aware of an online fan campaign that advocated changing his character’s original race in order to tell a less racially-problematic story.  I can much more easily buy that he didn’t know this was going on when he accepted the part, and like it or not, the character was originally conceived as white, so it’s a lot easier for everyone involved to insist that there’s no issue here.

So after all this explanation, why is Jones still the subject of today’s post?  There was recently what appears to have been a mostly-cordial dust-up on Twitter between Jones and Asyiqin Haron from Geeks of Color.  Included in his response to Haron’s remarks about the problematic aspects of Danny being white was this:  “There are a lot of characteristics in Danny which are problematic, that’s the point, rather than shy away from them we inspect them.  It makes for a rich, intelligent, thought-provoking show.”  He later added, “Changing the character isn’t the solution, it’s better to keep his flaws and inspect them.”

Even Jones’s defenses aren’t as troubling as many I’ve come across.  I think the biggest issue here is that he doesn’t get what Haron and others who hoped for an Asian-American Danny are saying.  “Problematic characteristics” isn’t the same as “problematic storytelling,” no more than being white is a character flaw.  Rather, in this particular instance, it’s a storytelling flaw, because it takes what could’ve so easily been an Asian-American story and gives a white focal point, because it takes trappings of Asianness and gives them to a white hero.  Jones is absolutely right that characters need to be flawed and their flaws should be inspected.  But he’s talking at cross purposes with Haron, who’s talking about a tired trope that has been used for years to tell white people’s stories with Asian set dressing.  That’s not a story that needs to be told again, and even if Iron Fist is serious about exploring the problematic aspect of Danny intruding on Asian spaces and using their traditions to take up a hero mantle, I don’t see how it could be as “rich, intelligent, [and] thought-provoking” a show as Marvel’s first Asian-American lead could’ve had the potential to be.