When Alesha Randolph wants to post a selfie on Instagram, she knows there’s only one filter that is flattering to her skin tone: Sierra. Yes, Instagram filters can work against people of color. But Randolph, a senior designer at Vox, and her fellow designers and engineers were tired of accepting it as a given. So they developed Tonr, a photo-editing desktop app built to enhance and affirm nonwhite skin tones.
Solstice/Kiran seemed like an interesting character although we barely got to know her before the rebooted the DCU. But a character with the same name showed up in the new 52. Of course, when she showed up she looked a lot different.
The Teen Titans has been cancelled and will have its last issue in May, not surprising as it has generally been considered one of the worst runs using the title Teen Titans, ever. But before we go we saw Solstice in her human form.
As a person of color, I’ve learned to expect a certain level of whitewashing from Hollywood. Jake Gyllenhaal as The Prince of Persia? Dude, wtf? Random white dude as Goku – wow, WOW, take it easy, buddy!
And yet, Hollywood execs surprised us with yet another bottle of fuckery by casting Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a character described as a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese. Let me lean in closer so I can say that again:
Emma Stone, a blonde haired, blue eyed WHITE WOMAN, was chosen to portray an ASIAN-HAWAIIAN PERSON with an Asian last name. I don’t approve of whitewashing, especially when Asian characters get swapped with white ones (see: Ghost in the Shell), but this is a new level of lazy bullshit. How can you go 80% of the way, write a script ABOUT AN ASIAN PERSON but not cast an Asian actress? That’s like making a movie about the Jackson 5 set in the 1960s but casting Honey Boo Boo as Tito and a ham sandwich as Michael – did you even try, bro?!
Hollywood continues to whitewash because white folks don’t see ethnicity as an IDENTITY. They don’t believe race and ethnicity can effect your opportunities and personality in real life, or in a fictional movie. Instead, race is treated like a COSTUME you steal from one person and give to another. In fact, white culture has ALWAYS taken ethnic labels and slapped them onto white products.
We needed more R&B artists so we slapped a label on Justin Timberlake. We lacked diversity in the workplace so we made a category called “White Latinos.”
And yet, when they do consider our ethnicity it’s used in a way to exploit us: to paint us as uneducated thugs, awkward math nerds, and illegal immigrants. They never meet us half-way and write a script about normal ass POCs, acting as if we’re either born into our designated stereotype or we’re colorblind.
If you wanna know how white folks feel truly feel about us, take a look at ANY Hollywood movie and observe the POC characters. When white men were at their peak of Black male intimidation, they made ‘Mandingo’ and 'Birth of a Nation.’ When they were afraid of Asians, they filmed 'Fu Manchu’ and 'The Interview.’
If we can accept the writings of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as expressions of Black thought, why aren’t we accepting racist Hollywood films as expressions of white ones?
Is it just me or did someone say “Sure, Casca’s cool and all, but isn’t she a bit too dark? Lets make her a bit less black, that might be better. Just make her paler until she’s nearly the same as everyone else.”
Like, okay, her skin is still noticeably darker than other peoples, but they really have made her a lot paler. Was there a reason for this? I don’t think there was. I mean… People have mentioned whitewashing in animated films before, but this… Yeah, this makes it pretty damn clear.
it gets worse……..
It’s cause the beauty standard in Asia is pale skin. Nothing wrong with that but we still need dark skin representation
Seriously, it surprises me that people still don’t get that “whitewashing” doesn’t just mean “taking a character of color and turning them white,” but also applies to “focusing disproportionately on the stories of white people,” “glossing over or altering parts of a story to make it more palatable or make white people look better,” and “treating ‘white’ as the default race”
The fact that Disney churns out film after film after film after film about white people with a maximum of one film per ethnicity that showcases a group other than white people is whitewashing.
The fact that the story of “Pocahontas” (not her real name) has been substantially altered so that some of the white people in that story don’t look like such villains, with John Smith younger and Pocahontas significantly older, as well as recounting a popular myth of her saving John Smith from near-execution (a story John Smith made up to make himself look brave, the real Pocahontas told him to stop telling and hated him for using her to make himself look good, and he started to spread like wildfire after she died because she could no longer object) is whitewashing.
The fact that the characters on “How I Met Your Mother” are all white, and they supposedly live in New York City, but apparently associate exclusively with other white people (with the exception of Wayne Brady, who occasionally visits from out of town, and a recurring taxi driver) is whitewashing.
The fact that the Doctor has now been a white man a full twelve times in a row is whitewashing even though the character’s always been white, because the idea that there’s a character whose entire appearance can change in a matter of seconds, yet ends up white twelve times in a row by pure random chance, implies that white is a neutral default and other races are a deviation from that norm.
The fact that people get really angry at the suggestion that characters like Newt Scamander or Hermione Granger could be black because the books never explicitly say “they are black” is whitewashing.
Because that’s the thing. People often assume that when someone’s race isn’t explicitly specified, they’re white. People insist that Katniss Everdeen must be white because it is possible for them to rationalize that idea in their head. People think of white as “raceless” and every other color or ethnicity as “raced,” and that’s what we call “eurocentrism.“
And that’s the thing about whitewashing. It’s this idea that a “person” is white, and a “person of color” is black or asian or arab or latin@ or whatever they might be.
It’s why people call John Stewart the “Black Green Lantern” but just call Hal Jordan the “Green Lantern.” It’s why Miles Morales is called “Black Spider-man” but Peter Parker is just “Spider-man.” If you want to throw gender into the mix, it’s why Jennifer Walters is the “She-Hulk” but Bruce Banner isn’t the “He-Hulk.”
People think “character” is white and “character + black” is black. There is no default race. Community did a whole episode about how a truly raceless character would look something like this monstrosity:
But there’s the tricky part: Once you stop thinking of white characters as “character” and start thinking of them as “character + white,” it becomes really overwhelming how many characters are white.
I mean, I know there’s a kerfuffle over Disney Princesses right now, so let’s look at the list of official Disney Princesses, shall we? That is, let’s look at the list and include everyone’s race, not just the princesses of color:
Snow White + White
Cinderella + White
Aurora + White
Ariel + White
Belle + White
Jasmine + Arab
Pocahontas + Native American
Mulan + Asian
Tiana + Black
Rapunzel + White
Merida + White Soon to beadded:
Anna + White
Elsa + White
4 of those 13 women are women of color. All four of those women of color are different races than one another. At the moment, the number of white princesses is seven, but it’s about to go up to nine. All nine of those princesses are the same race as one another, despite a few of them being different nationalities, although most of them hail from Western Europe.
And a lot of people are saying “but they’re just accurately portraying the parts of the world those stories are set in!” First of all, the presence of a person of color has never been implausible in any part of the world, in any period of human history. Hell, a bunch of these movies were set after Shakespeare had born, lived, and died, but he still managed to write a play set centuries earlier featuring a black male lead in Italy.
Second, and most importantly, it’s not like they are being assigned a setting at random and have to accommodate it in their character designs. The people at Disney choose to set film after film after film in France and Germany and Denmark.
It’s not that those areas produce more or better fairy tales and folk tales than any of the other continents, it’s that the stories that come from those areas are the ones Disney considers universal.
In the eyes of Disney, there’s a Princess for Black little girls to look up to, a Princess for Native little girls to look up to, a Princess for Arab little girls to look up to, a Princess for Asian little girls to look up to, and nine princesses for all little girls to look up to. It’s no coincidence that in almost all promotional art featuring the “Princess Lineup,” Jasmine, Tiana, Mulan, and Pocahontas are all standing in the back, usually obscured by other white Princesses’ dresses, while the blonde lady brigade stands in the front.
Way back in my senior year of high school, my friends and I took full advantage of our senior year freedom to go see The Forbidden Kingdom in theaters several times. As far as we were concerned, The Forbidden Kingdom was the long-awaited team-up of Asian action stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li—it didn’t matter to us that the plot included some white guy as the main protagonist. In fact, we were pretty happy about it—we thought the white protagonist would make the movie much more attractive to Americans and thus make more money at the box office, thereby proving that Asians could sell movies. And to be fair, The Forbidden Kingdom did rank #1 at the box office in its opening weekend. But nearly a full decade later, it’s pretty apparent that The Forbidden Kingdom’s flaws in 2008 are the same flaws that Hollywood still has today.
After hearing the news that James Cameron would be helming a film adaptation of Battle Angel Alita next year, I decided to take a dive into the series and see what the fuss was about. I’d never actually read it, but after 15 years of anime convention-going I was sure I’d heard the name before. And since I like to be an informed critic, and am already strapped in and ready to critique the movie (with its tragically predictable almost-Asian-less cast) I figured there was no harm in familiarizing myself with it for dragging’s sake.
Well, after reading all nine volumes of the series, I can confidently say that while I can explain the story, I have no idea what the fuck it is about.
I don’t like that made Bumblebee’s skin light in the new show. Bumblebee is a dark skin black girl. She always has been. There are times when she doesn’t even look black like in the new Weird Science comic that just came out. I’ve seen some people complaining about it, but more people need to speak up about it. Making a dark skin character light skin is wrong.
someone posted in leftbook today an article discussing how heavily integrated japanese imagery is in the new bladerunner movie and how there are like exactly zero asian people in it and it got me thinking about just how much asia has sculpted the western landscape of sci-fi while being systematically excluded from it. from bladerunner to firefly to star wars, white creators want everything about us except for us lol
It’s called Techno-Orientalism and people have been critiquing it since the first Blade Runner. There’s a book on it now:
What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner toCloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalisminvestigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising.
its interesting that depictions of History etc is like 1 sort of ambiguous orient (the “classical” arab/muslim/etc orient) and Future is like, ambiguously east asia.. interesting
it stems directly from the 80s when japan was experiencing a huge economic boom and huge tech innovations while the american auto industry was slowly dying. there was a lot of white fear about japan overtaking the US. there’s a pretty specific logic behind these settings that are both dominantly asian and also bleakly dystopian
I decided to go ahead and make a list of actors, singers, etc. who claimed to have Native heritage but aren’t really Native. I’m doing this because people don’t understand the nuances of our identities and how complicated and complex it is. Sure, you may have Native ancestry, but our identity goes beyond that. Does your tribe claim you? Do you support your people? Are you connected to your culture?
Another reason why I’m making this is because some people do actually believe these actors, singers, etc. are Native. They’re not aware of the long history of white people and non-native people of color pretending to be Native. The most famous example is Iron Eyes Cody. He claimed his father was Cherokee and his mother was Cree. It turned out he wasn’t Native after all, he was Italian. He made a whole career out of pretending to be Indian. Most people know him from playing the ‘Crying Indian’ in the PSA commercials about the environment. A mess.
So, below are the pretendians:
Johnny Depp — In the past he’s claimed to be Cherokee due to his grandmother side. He played a Native American man in ‘The Brave’ and Tonto in the tragic and racist reboot of ‘The Lone Ranger’. I’d generally avoid him because he’s a piece of sh*t.
Hailey Baldwin — Instamodel. Nepotism. Devoid of anypersonality. In 2011, she claimed to be Cherokee in thistweet. If you’re Native, a white person claiming to be Cherokee is nothing new and I generally wouldn’t count them as Native unless proven otherwise. She also allegedly said the n-word so yikes.
Blake Lively — She claims to be Cherokee in this L’Oréal commercial. Again, we know how the story goes. People did their research and turns out she has ZERO Native ancestry in her lineage. Shocking, right?
Justin Bieber — In 2012, Bieber claims to be part Indian in an interview with Rolling Stone: “I’m actually part Indian,” he says – “I think Inuit or something? I’m enough percent that in Canada I can get free gas”. *bangs head on desk* If Justin was actually Inuit, he’d know that they don’t get free gas. That’s a common misconception in Canada.
Taylor Lautner — Taylor is known for playing Jacob Black in The Twilight Series. The character is Native, Quileute, to be more specific. Taylor Launter is not Native. When asked about it, Taylor said the following: “I have some Native American in my distant background.” Later in an interview with his fellow co-stars Chaske Spencer, Alex Meraz and Kiowa Gordon confirmed Taylor isn’t Native American.
Tinsel Korey — Since 2009, there have been numerous reports about Tinsel being another pretendian. Apparently her real name is Harsha Patel and she is of Asian Indian descent. There’s a post about that here and here. Comedian Ryan McMahon backed up the claims in this tweet.
Kelsey Chow — In July, Adam Beach called out Taylor Sheridan for not casting a Native actress in his TV show ‘Yellowstone’. Kelsey has claimed to be Cherokee (notice a pattern here?) and played a Native American character in Taylor’s new movie Wind River (which is pretty awful). She’s white and Chinese.
People I’m not sure if they’re Native or not:
Blair Redford — Thisarticle from 2010 claims he’s Native American along with being French, German and Irish. Since then we have yet to learn which tribe he’s from. He’s set to play Native American superhero John Proudstar in the FOX X-Men show The Gifted. He’s also played another Native American character Ethan Whitehorse in the ABC Family drama The Lying Game.
Blu Hunt — She’s set to play the Cheyenne superhero Danielle ‘Mirage’ Moonstar in the X-Men movie Mutants. The announcement this past summer stirred controversy because she was listed as Western European on her website and is only Native because of her paternal grandmother. Another reason why everyone was up in arms is because Danielle is portrayed as a brown-skinnedNative in the comics and Blu is light-skinned.
and they started opening a bunch of different Asian fusion cuisine/Asian-inspired restaurants.
They’ve seen success in the other restaurants they’ve opened. Every single restaurant they’ve funded so far has been headed by a white male executive chef.
(Scuttlebutt has it eventually there will be a Wakandan restaurant opening at some point. There’s been some black pastry chefs who have been featured in their existing restaurants. There’s also a famous chef who is a woman who has worked as a sous chef in the two Avengers Restaurants, and the Captain American Restaurant and Iron Man Restaurant, but she hasn’t been given a chance to open her own restaurant as of yet.*)
More recently, they’ve opened restaurants for white chefs who went to Asia and learned how to master making xiaolongbao or omakase and other specialties…with some Asian American cooks and dishwashers in the back.
And then people pointed out, “You know what, the way they’re funding these restaurants is messed up. When it is an Asian cuisine-inspired restaurant, they only ever seem to to fund them when the chef is white. This new restaurant concept and branding is part of a systemic problem and doesn’t sit well with me. I am critiquing the concept and the branding and their bias for only sponsoring white chefs, even when the cuisine is from Asia.”
And you’re like, “Oh, but you have to wait until the restaurant is open and eat every single dish at the restaurant before you can critique it at all.”
People are critiquing the concept of the restaurant, the branding, and the focus on chef Finn Jones, who by all accounts is not that great of a chef (or great at promoting his restaurant.) Not the food.
*She wasn’t having any luck getting Marvel Restaurant Group to give her her own restaurant, so she went to Dreamworks Restaurant Group and started her own robot-themed sushi restaurant inspired by a restaurant from Japan. This restaurant will be opening later this month. When people pointed out that Dreamworks Restaurant Group also only seems to also sponsor white chefs in their chain, will they ever given Asian chefs a chance, etc…. fans defended the decision saying things like “well, yanno, shellfish sushi is racially ambiguous” and “this sushi is made by robots, so it has no ethnicity” and “when I look at photos of the restaurant from Japan I really can’t tell that the sushi was meant to be Japanese.”
Asbaek co-starred with Scarlet Johansson in the movie Lucy, which also had some infamous… issues with Asian people. Y’know if they weren’t going to bother to give a Japanese/East Asian actress the opportunity to star as the main character they could have at least tried to hire one to play Batou. Just saying.
Could have been worse, I guess. Could have hired Tom Cruise.
Just reiterating that depictions of non black Asians in ancient murals/cave paintings are whitewashed after they already went through a fading period. Once you look at ancient Asian art it will be easier to distinguish the real from the fakes.
So just like with the ancient paintings artifacts too had the original dark skin removed after a period of time
