Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: A General Clarification

Recently, Matt Damon weighed in on the controversy surrounding The Great Wall (the war fantasy set in ancient China that he stars in, because of course he does,) and while I don’t want to do a second post specifically about The Great Wall, which is still months away from release, I do want to use his remarks as a jumping-off point for clarifying a few things about whitewashing in general.

Among Damon’s on-the-whole unimpressive comments, he said, of the whitewashing/White Savior accusations, “I was like, ‘Really, guys?’ To me whitewashing was when Chuck Connors played Geronimo. (laughs) There are far more nuanced versions of it and I do try to be sensitive to that, but Pedro Pascal called me and goes, ‘Yeah, we are guilty of whitewashing. We all know only the Chinese defended the wall against the monster attack.’”

Before I start, let me point out that Damon’s defense isn’t unique.  One of the many arguments made by films accused of racially-messed-up casting is that their film doesn’t count as an examble of whitewashing.  It’s all right for Tilda Swinton to play the Ancient One in Doctor Strange because she’s not playing an Asian character; the script changed the part to a white woman.  It’s all right for Scarlett Johansson to play Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell because the studio didn’t go so far as to alter her appearance using digital yellowface.  And so on and so on.

The prevailing attitude seems to be that there is one type of racially-insensitive casting, and it’s of the “Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” variety.  But in fact, Hollywood, there are several distinct types of casting fails that you regularly employ to the disadvantage of actors of color (and I’m just talking about the ones that involve casting white people instead of PoC – I’m not even getting into stereotypes, colorism, and other issues plaguing roles that are open to people of color.)  Although each is a separate type of uncoolness, they all fall under the umbrella of “whitewashing” or “erasure.”

• Blackface/yellowface/brownface/redface:  casting a white actor to play a character who is specifically not white.  Often involves makeup, wigs, and/or prosthetics to make the white actor (badly) appear more “ethnic.”  Practiced far more often in “the old days” (Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Katherine Hepburn in Dragon Seed, Natalie Wood in West Side Story,) this type of erasure isn’t as prevalent these days, but that doesn’t mean it no longer happens.  Jim Sturgess in Cloud Atlas and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger are examples from more recent years, and I’d count Emma Stone in Aloha here as well.
• Whitewashing:  taking a character who is supposed to be a PoC and changing it to be a white character, making the film less diverse.  Now, I know I said “whitewashing” is the name of the general term for all these practices, but it has its own separate definition as well.  This one still gets a lot of use and falls into two main categories – adaptations of previous-written works involving PoC characters (Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Rooney Mara in Pan) and movies about real people who were PoC (Jim Sturgess (again) in 21, Ben Affleck in Argo, Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind.)
• White Savior:  framing a story about people of color from the perspective of a white protagonist, often the hero who comes in to save the PoC from circumstance or danger.  The white protagonist may or may not be taught a valuable lesson of their own by the PoC they encounter, but they’re almost always the main movers of the story.  Found in drama (Freedom Writers, The Blind Side, The Help) and action alike (The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, Glory).  It’s true that The Great Wall hasn’t come out yet, so we can’t say for sure if Damon’s character has a white-savior narrative, but the film’s promotional materials are sure doing their best to convince us that that’s the case.

So, yes.  It’s still entirely possible for white actors to be cast in roles that are racially tone-deaf without performing a minstrel act or pulling a Charlie Chan.  Hollywood, before you decide if a casting move is kosher, I encourage you to consider more than just whether or not you put dark makeup on a white actor, because there’s so much more going on than just that.