Conservatives are freaking out again, now "black wash" in Hollywood – Daily Kos

First, let’s get some common sense from Steve Shives.

“Why are these people so upset about casting decisions for a movie they won’t even see?”

So it’s a point of view. How about another?

It’s Matt Walsh, I don’t know if you know Matt Walsh – but he’s one of those conservatives who likes to do a lot of fake equivalencies and pretends he’s calm and relaxed and logical while the left is crazy and wild and out of control. He takes his time and points out that recently several white or white actors – in what he claims is the “so-called White-Washing” – have come under fire for playing 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 brunette actress for the live-action version of Alladdin who apparently wasn’t “brown enough”.

Unsurprisingly, Walsh calls everyone who has raised the issue of “White-Washing” as “Race Obsessed.” The drive to be ethnically correct in your casting is clearly *abnormal* compared to the way things are traditionally done, and to make a problem of white people playing ethnic roles – you have to have some sort of “problem” with the Whites.

He then argues that people who took this issue “so seriously” that they claim that replacing ethnic characters with white actors is literally “genocide” seemed to be completely happy when black actors are put in characters. traditional whites. There’s a miniseries with a black Ann Boleyn. We have a black Cinderella on Broadway. A black beauty in The beauty and the Beast on Broadway. Etc. (Hey, just for the record – how many white guys have played othello?)

And now we have a little black mermaid in the new upcoming live-action movie project.

Walsh says this type of casting is famous by the left and the media because it’s ‘brave’ and ‘important’ – but at the same time doing the opposite, ‘whitewashing’, is constantly labeled as ‘racist’.

He goes on to criticize a Daily Beast article which complains about the “racist reaction” to the new Little Mermaid, then states that instead of anything racist, he only quotes a few tweets criticizing the underwater CGI in the movie preview. Honestly, CGI is updated and reworked right up until the time a movie comes out – so sure, it might still be tough right now, but it probably won’t stay that way. But Walsh goes on to use this example to argue that any criticism of this film – or a 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 Where The Lord of the Rings prequels without being accused of belonging to the KKK! he says. And conversely – “Cities would be burned down if Tom Hanks played Frederick Douglas!” “The character played by Morgan Freeman in Shawshank takeover was supposed to be an Irishman, which is why he was named ‘Red’ – but nobody cared back then before things got 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 comment and lambaste him for his “racist tirade against the Little Mermaid”. In fact, what they said was “Daily Wire host says it’s unscientific to make a black person a mermaid”, which to be fair – he didn’t actually say .

“Unfortunately, we now live in a culture of blatant racial double standards. Based on skin color, we’re told what opinions are allowed and the kinds of things you’re allowed to worry about. What if you’re white , there are all kinds of things that you care about, but you would be crazy, racist, stupid and petty to care about yourself.

Yeah.

Walsh therefore appears rational and reasonable on the face of it, but there is a fatal flaw in his argument. This is the fatal flaw that is always present in arguments like this that attempt to claim that what happens to a white person is exactly the same as what happens to a black person. Yeah, like when a black person gets pulled over by the police, what happens next is fair exactly like what happens when a blank is stopped. Of course, there is absolutely no difference. Right? For Walsh, the hardest thing to find on Earth would be actual racism — unless it’s by someone on the left.

So of course it’s not like White-Washing in Hollywood has been going on for almost 100 years, including people like Al Jolson in Black Face, Amos and Andy, John Wayne in Genghis Khan, Yul Brenner in The king and meChuck Norris as GeronimoCharlton Heston as Moses in Ten CommandmentsChristian Bale as Moses in gods and kingsElizebeth Taylor as Cleopatra, John Carradine — instead of Bruce Lee — as Kwai Chang Kang in Kung FuMickey Rooney in Breakfast at TiffaniesPeter Sellers in CelebrationJohnny Depp as Tonto, Emma Stone as a half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese character in AlohaJake Gyllenhal in Arabic in Assassin’s Creed and Scarlet Johansen in ghost in the machine.

White people playing ethnic roles is a Hollywood tradition. This is the “norm”. This is the normal expectation. More importantly, for most of Hollywood history, black and ethnic characters were essentially racist stereotypes. You had the “Mammy” characters in carried away by the wind, you had the lazy “bandito” characters for Latinos, the shifty-eyed schemers for Asians, and the violent savages for Native Americans. Hollywood has been used to push and reinforce the larger message of white supremacy and racism directly into wider society. Hollywood started with Birth of a Nation – it has not yet fully grown beyond that.

The reason Sydney Poitier was ‘revolutionary’ when he did it lilies in the field was that he wasn’t very specifically playing a stereotype – he was playing a fully human person. This role inspired people directly against the precepts of white supremacy – it showed that a black man could be so much more than had been shown before. It changed the paradigm. But progress has been slow since then. In the late ’80s, the options for black and ethnic actors were still mostly in stereotypical gangster/junkie/slave roles, as this scene from Hollywood Shuffle shows.

The idea that now 35 years later, we can just – change – the ethnicity of a former white character to black (or female, or LGBTQ) is groundbreaking. It’s amazing. But that’s not all.

According to the likes of Walsh, in addition to being a “double standard,” the issue of Black, female, and LGBTQ inclusion is part of an “agenda.” This deviates from the “norm” of what Hollywood usually does. I’ve seen a conservative reviewer claim that there must be a “reason” for Marvel’s cast diversity. The Eternals. A pattern? Do we seriously have to explain why these people who have lived in different parts of the world for thousands of years – look different? Are they all supposed to be white for some reason? Of course not, but decades of Hollywood have produced this default perception that everyone is white – is “normal” even though there’s literally no reason why it should be.

Hollywood, for nearly a century, completely banned people of color from existence. And if they did show them, it was almost always in the form of a thin, two-dimensional half-person. They treated women as objects to be desired or to be sent to the kitchen. And the treatment of LGBTQ characters has been much worse. Over time, things got better, but not completely. Even in the 2015 film adaptation of Stone wall key LGBTQ characters were presented as white instead of the Black Trans they actually were in real life. Blanching, again.

Recently, Oscar winner Viola Davis said that while her upcoming historical biopic ‘Woman King’ – which tells the story of female warriors in 1820s Africa – isn’t a huge hit, it will be more difficult for future black female films to be made.

“The Woman King,” a driving emotional punch that seamlessly fuses inner drama with action spectacle, won universal acclaim when it premiered in Toronto as a crowd pleaser of a different kind. But Hollywood’s calculation of what might appeal to a wide audience has traditionally meant “Will white people watch it?”

“Black people didn’t have to like ‘Thelma & Louise’ for ‘Thelma & Louise’ to be made,” Davis says. “White people have to like ‘The Woman King’ for ‘The Woman King’ to be made – according to Hollywood.”

It’s not like a period action movie with an all-white cast would have to worry that if it wasn’t a big hit, no one would ever try to make another movie like it. You bet they would.

Hollywood is a business based on perception. And this perception is often seen from the “white gaze”. The target is usually the white audience. Thus, films with ethnic actors are often judged on the ability of those actors to sell the product to white people.

Millions of dollars – sometimes billions of dollars – are at stake. The right casting can literally change everything. Even if black or ethnic actors are cast in a role, they still have to pass the “white muster” to retain that role.

So is there an “agenda” when black actors are cast in general or in what was previously a traditionally white role?

Yes.

Change and improvement only happen if someone makes that change part of their agenda. Someone has to decide to make this change. And this agenda is reverse what has been done before. The agenda is to correct the distortion that has been placed before our eyes for generations. It’s not like we’d have movies like Amastad, Selma Where hidden numbers if people like Oprah Winfrey and Pharrell Williams hadn’t wanted to fund them. White and black wash are not “equal” – they are not the same. One was part of a distortion created by the direct implementation of White Power – the other is a slight minor correction to this distortion.

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 of “Great Replacement” by minorities – however, they may in fact have to compete for their roles with a wider range of potential actors. On the other hand, if they whitewash the few ethnic roles that exist, there will be none 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.]

The Whites may well have to really earn their job. Who could have a problem with that, other than someone who expected to have an automatic head start and suddenly doesn’t?