Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Ken Petrie (Ni’ihau)

This announcement came a while back, but I got busy with other write-ups and didn’t have a chance to comment on it until now.  Back in May, the film Ni’ihau, starring white actor Zach McGowan, was announced.  Since I’m talking about it here, it’s no surprise that his character shouldn’t be white.  The film is in fact about Ben Kanahele, a Native Hawaiian.  Also?  He was a real person.

Not that this is the first time a white actor has been cast to play a whitewashed portrayal of a real-life person of color (see also, Jim Sturgess in 21, Ben Affleck in Argo, Jennifer Connolly in A Beautiful Mind.)  But how long is this going to keep happening?  Ben Kanahele received a Medal of Merit and a Purple Heart for his bravery after the events of Pearl Harbor.  Do you know how many real-life Native Hawaiian heroes have had their stories told onscreen?  I’d wager it’s astoundingly few, if any.

Producer Ken Petrie, in talking about the project, said, “There is a weight to be shouldered [in any true story], and the material requires the utmost care and authenticity.”  And that staggers me.  How on earth can someone tout “the utmost care and authenticity” to the real history at the same time that they’re changing the hero’s race to yet another Some White Dude?  (I don’t wanna get too “Zach McGown who?”, but seriously.  I know this guy from a recurring role on the most recent season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but I didn’t realize that from his picture in articles about the movie – I had to read a mention of it in an article and go, “Oh, that’s where I’ve seen him!”)

The other thing to keep in mind here is that Ben Kanahele was lauded for his actions combating a downed Japanese pilot after the attack, and while there’s been no word on who’s going to play the pilot, we all know the producers aren’t going to decide that his race is irrelevant to his character and change it.  So, we’re going to get a story about a heroic white guy fighting an enemy brown guy – awesome.  Not that the real story itself wouldn’t have dealt heavily with the villain’s nationality, considering the obvious of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the whole microcosm of America vs. Japan looks very different when the American hero is reimagined as a white man instead of the Native Hawaiian man he was. 

Doesn’t this movie care that it’s taking away a community’s hero?  (I know, I know – of course it doesn’t.)  A real person who did an important thing, who protected his people and stood for his country, and this movie wants to refashion him to fit its own carbon-copy shape.  And its producer wants to come forward and talk about authenticity?  Are you seriously kidding me with this?

Dear Hollywood (NOT) Whitewashers(!): Ed Skrein (Hellboy)

Color me impressed.  When the newest whitewashing controversy hit the Internet with news that white British actor Ed Skrein had been cast as the Japanese-American Ben Daimio in a reboot of Hellboy, I was disheartened but certainly not surprised.  In amongst my anger and disgust was a tinge of “here we are again – of course,” because Hollywood has proven time and again that this is what they’re about.  Well, that’s still true for Hollywood at large, but the same can’t be said for Ed Skrein.

Christa Campbell, an executive producer for the film responded to the controversy with, “Someone comes and does a great audition to get the role.  Stop projecting onto us. We are all one. We don’t see colors or race” (how do people who say they “don’t see color” not realize it’s a bad thing when they’re literally using it as an excuse for why color has been erased?)  It’s the usual BS, nothing we haven’t heard before and not the quote we’re looking at today.  Instead, we’re looking at both of words and actions of Skrein, who actually demonstrated what a lot of whitewashing filmmakers claim about their touted “commitment to diversity”:  he stepped down from the film so the role could be cast more appropriately (and it was just announced that Daniel Dae Kim will be taking the role – so pumped to see him with a major role in a comic book movie!)

I won’t quote Skrein’s statement about his decision in its entirety, but I do want to highlight this part: 

“It is clear that representing this character in a culturally accurate way holds significance for people, and that to neglect this responsibility would continue a worrying tendency to obscure ethnic minority stories and voices in the Arts.  I feel it is important to honour and respect that. Therefore I have decided to step down so the role can be cast appropriately.”

It’s still messed up that any of this happened in the first place, but this is a response to applaud, and I’m thrilled to be able to share a story with a happy ending on Dear Hollywood Whitewashers.  Skrein is a class act, and I wish him nothing but luck in his future endeavors.

It’s important to note here that Ed Skrein isn’t a big name.  He has some face recognition in fandom circles – he played Original Recipe Daario on Game of Thrones, and more recently, he was in Deadpool – but he’s definitely no Scarlett Johannson, Emma Stone, Christian Bale, or any one of numerous A-listers who’ve played a part in the continuation of this practice.  In turning down this role, he had more to lose than one of them would have, in both exposure and money.  But he still turned it down.  I won’t discount the possibility that he recognized how this conversation has been going in recent years and realized the smarter move was to get out, although, for my money, his statement reads as very sincere.  But regardless of the reasons, this is huge.  I’m not aware of anyone at the center of a whitewashing controversy doing this before, and I have to give Skrein credit where credit is due.

This is what I was talking about in a previous post on this subject.  White actors (especially white stars, but Skrein proves that you don’t need A-lister clout to do the right thing) may not be able to force studios to change their minds in how they cast.  However, there’s one thing that each individually can decide to do, and that’s not contribute to the system.  They can say no.  I hope the actors who’ve already said yes and been through online shitstorms are watching Skrein, and I hope they regret the choice they made.  I hope the actors who’ve never yet had to think about this decision look at him and see that there’s a better way.  (For that matter, I also hope producers and filmmakers in general are seeing how the tide turned in this story and realize how much more benefit there is in not perpetuating lazy, racist casting practices.)

Will the change here affect more than just this movie?  Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure:  this was good news, and when it comes to whitewashing in Hollywood, we don’t get much of that.

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: White A-Listers

I’m not looking at a specific movie or TV show today, or the unconvincing comments made about it by an executive/director/actor/etc.  Instead, I’m speaking more generally to white celebrities who work in Hollywood – the Scarlett Johannsons, Christian Bales, and Rooney Maras, yes, but also the stars who have yet to place themselves on the wrong side of a whitewashing scandal.

And yes, what I’m going to say ought to apply to all white actors – however, I think a major part of this problem stems from A-listers, so we’ll start there.  White Hollywood stars, you’re what movies want.  We all know that.  Plenty of whitewashing defenses talk about money, about how you need a star to open a movie, about how there aren’t any bankable Asian, Native American, South Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latino stars of color, about how the only reasonable thing to do is to cast one of you to make their movie work.  Never mind that the box office has shown that big-name stars in whitewashed movies don’t necessarily bring in big bucks, and that recent films with strong PoC casts – like Get Out or The Fate of the Furious – have raked in the dough.  Despite fan outcries, monetary evidence, and countless thinkpieces, studios continue to insist you’re the winning ingredient to make a movie a success.

And you know what that means?  It means you have the power here.  You’re not the only ones taking whitewashed parts, but you’re the ones the producers are looking for, the ones they’re holding up as the justification for not casting an actor of color – who wouldn’t want Emma Stone in their movie, or Russell Crowe, or Ben Affleck?  That means this sytem, this practice, is built on you, and that means you have the ability to play a huge role in shutting it down.

How?  You say no.  All of you.  You get offered a role based on a true story or a previously-written work, you do a quick Google search on your prospective character to make sure they’re white.  You get sent an original script, you note cultural identifiers for your prospective character and see if anything suggests – or outright states – that they’re not white.  And if anything you find tells you that your prospective character was supposed to be or currently is a person of color, you say no.

Now, you might say, “But it’s a great role.”  That’s true, but that doesn’t mean it’s a role you should be taking, certainly not one you should be taking from an actor who almost never gets the opportunity to even try our for a great role.  You might say, “Without me, the project won’t get made.”  That may be true, but if it’s a question between doing it wrong or not doing it at all, I’d prefer the latter – I’d rather wait until Hollywood is prepared to do it justice.  You might say, “But I really believe in this project.”  Then support it in other ways; maybe get involved as a producer and use your name and influence to help ensure that it gets done right.

Imagine how powerful that would be, if all of you stood together on this, if every time a studio came looking for a white celebrity to play their whitewashed starring role, all of you went to ground, taking your fame and your box-office draw with you.  If they had no option of a white A-lister who would take their role.  I’m not saying it’ll change overnight, because Hollywood attitudes about race are still deeply entrenched, and for a while, they’ll court lesser-known and unknown white actors for these parts, actors who don’t feel they can afford to turn down juicy roles.  But if whitewashing the roles with someone of your caliber doesn’t guarantee box-office gold, then these actors won’t even fare as well as that, and eventually, Hollywood will finally start to get the message that this practice isn’t financially sound, realizing that the only way to make these projects is to make them right.  Not to mention, your position and influence may help these lesser-known actors find the resolve they need to turn down these parts as well – even though it would be a greater financial/career loss for them, they might look to you and say, “Well, Jake Gyllenhaal was offered the role, and he turned it down.”  Or, “Jennifer Lawrence wouldn’t do it.”  Send a message that “this is not how we do things,” and others will start to follow.  Isn’t that something you’d like to be a part of?

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.

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Lionsgate (Gods of Egypt)

Gods of Egypt is kind of an interesting case for me.  No doubt, the casting was very badly handled – in this action fantasy set in ancient Egypt, the majority of the Egyptian gods are played by white people (Chadwick Boseman and Elodie Yung are the only exceptions, neither of whom are of Arab descent.)  This was a definite movie fail.  But, at the very least, this is one of the few films to get involved in a controversy like this and not entrench themselves in the defensive and make a bunch of damage-control excuses.

The outcry began as soon as the casting was announced and only got louder when the first character posters came out featuring the likes of Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau playing Egyptian gods.  Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, and Alex Proyas, its director, didn’t respond to the criticism right away, but when they did, they didn’t try to obfuscate.  Here’s the statement Lionsgate put out on the film’s casting:

“We recognize that it is our responsibility to help ensure that casting decisions reflect the diversity and culture of the time periods portrayed.  In this instance we failed to live up to our own standards of sensitivity and diversity, for which we sincerely apologize.  Lionsgate is deeply committed to making films that reflect the diversity of our audiences.  We have, can and will continue to do better.​​”

Which, I admit, is nice to see.  It’s a relief not to hear a bunch of complaining about how “it’s not our fault there are no Arab movie stars,” “The haters just don’t get it and will totally understand when they see the film,” “Hey, it’s not like we put anybody in brownface,” or “It doesn’t count as whitewashing because these are gods, not people.”  I definitely give Lionsgate and Proyas credit for owning up to the mistakes they made here.

It’s just a shame that they put themselves in a situation in which they needed to apologize in the first place.  Commitment to diversity in film only works when your movies reflect that commitment, and films set in the Middle East still seem to be a consistent blind spot on this front.  From Christian Bale as Moses to Russell Crowe as Noah to Jake Gyllenhaal as the prince of Persia to pretty much any movie about Jesus, we’ve seen this again and again.  In fact, Gods of Egypt came out within two years of both Exodus:  Gods and Kings and Noah.  Instead of making the same mistakes as those (very recent) films and having to apologize for it, why didn’t Lionsgate learn from those films’ mistakes and cast their own with more sensitivity?

I don’t know what it’s going to take for studios and creative teams to consistently show their commitment to diversity at the start of production rather than after the fact.  One female- and/or PoC-led flop is enough to scare Hollywood off and make them declare, “See?  People don’t want to see movies about woman/PoC!”, but we’ve seen flop after whitewashed flop over and over (not saying that they all flopped specifically because of whitewashing, but casting white people certainly didn’t guarantee box office gold,) and yet the studios keep doing it.  Where’s the breaking point?  When are they going to realize that it’s literally not worth it?

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings)

Nope – I didn’t forget about you, Kubo.  This was an instance where the first trailer was reeling me in hard but took a sharp left turn when it proudly displayed the main voice actors for this Japanese story:  Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, and Rooney Mara (I know stop-motion takes a long time to make, and I’m not sure when in that process the vocals get recorded.  I’m wondering if, for Mara, this was pre- or post-Pan?)  To be fair, as I said in my review, the film also features George Takei and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa as the two least-significant characters in the main cast.  (A couple big spoilers.)

Now, this was a film that I did see despite the whitewashing, although I was conflicted about it and the casting still leaves a bad taste in my mouth (I always have such a sinking feeling when I see a white actor I love helping to perpetuate this practice.)  But as usual, those behind the film rush forward to assure me it’s not what it looks like.  Here’s what director Travis Knight had to say on the subject:  “For Kubo, most of our characters are not even human.  For those that are humans, it was important for us to have authenticity in terms of the characters. Most of the characters that are human characters are [voiced by actors] of Asian descent.”

First, let’s quickly address the fact that, again, the human characters voiced by Asian actors are all-but-nameless villagers who are little more than extras and don’t have important roles in the film.  In the purely-human characters, Asian voice actors might physically outnumber the white ones, but the actor voicing Kubo is white, and any character played by an Asian actor has only a sliver of screentime or significance compared to him.

But what I really want to focus on here is Knight’s point that it’s fine to be more flexible in casting non-human characters.  This is actually an area where I concede to some wiggle room.  Call it the Mushu Principle, if you like – Disney’s Mulan was voiced almost entirely by Asian actors, with the notable exception of Eddie Murphy playing the dragon spirit Mushu.  This doesn’t bother me, and I fully admit to loving how Murphy plays off of Ming-Na Wen’s Mulan.  If care is taken in the rest of the casting, I don’t think having actors of a different race voice non-human characters is necessarily a problem.

However, the situation with Kubo’s non-human characters is a lot dicier.  While there are a number of them, they can be split into two major categories:  gods and enchanted beings.  On the side of the gods, we have Ralph Fiennes as the Moon King and Rooney Mara playing the Sisters.  Now, we can argue about whether or not it would be insensitive to portray gods in a Japanese story as being white, but regardless of where you fall on that issue, the Moon King and the Sisters are definitely made to look Japanese, which makes Fiennes and Mara’s casting seem much more suspect.  Would Fiennes be cast as a god with demonstrably Asian facial features in a live-action film?  I sure hope not.

Then, there’s Monkey (Charlize Theron) and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey.)  One’s a monkey, one’s a beetle – on first glance, it seems racially neutral, and in the interview with Knight, it’s mentioned that he points to Monkey while making his comments about non-human characters.  But these characters aren’t just magical talking animals.  Over the course of the film, it’s revealed that they’re actually Kubo’s parents.  Monkey is the last vestiges of Kubo’s mother’s magic bringing a wooden talisman to life, and Kubo’s father was cursed by the Moon King and turned into the amnesiac Beetle.  Kubo has a vision of them in the bodies of his parents at the end of the movie, plus Theron voices Kubo’s mother both before and after she becomes Monkey.  And Kubo’s parents look Japanese.  Kubo’s mother is a former god who may or may not have gotten a human body when she left the Moon King’s realm, but either way, she’s clearly meant to appear Japanese.  And Kubo’s father was definitely human and decidedly Japanese.  Meaning these aren’t just non-human characters; they’re magical creatures who used to be people.

Again, think of it in turns of live-action.  If there was a live-action movie in which a Japanese man was turned into a beetle, would people be cool with having Matthew McConaughey play both versions of the character on the grounds that “it’s fine – most of the time, he’s a beetle anyway”?  I really, really hope not.

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.