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Apr 1, 2019 · At the same time, Hollywood incorporates foreign-born directors and actors to reach international audiences. This article assesses how Hollywood’s “going global” impacts local racial–ethnic minority politics in the U.S. film business.
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- Abstract
- Dedication
- Chapter One: Introduction
- What are we trying to prove?
- Defining Key Concepts
- Modern Whitewashing Legitimized
- Whitewashing in Context
- Gods of Egypt
- The Birth of a Nation
- Gods of Egypt
- A Mighty Heart
- Gods of Egypt
- Blackwashing in Context
- Annie
- Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far from Home
- Racist Connotation
- Anti-Racism and the Arts
- The Shortcomings of Blackwashing
- Red – The Shawshank Redemption
- Annie – Annie
- MJ – Spider-Man
- Is There a Solution?
- Chapter 6: Conclusion
When a discussion about whitewashing arises, there are often claims that “blackwashing,” the practice of replacing a traditionally White character or role with a Black actor, is the same issue. Much is known about whitewashing and how damaging it is to represent People of Color in film with White actors, however, blackwashing is a recent term to d...
To the little Black girl, sitting alone at a table in the lunchroom. To the Black teen in high school who never thought she would live to be eighteen. To the Black college kid who wondered if any of it was worth it. To me. For getting this far. To pushing farther. It was worth it. iii
Mass outrage often ensues across online social platforms when a traditionally white Hollywood role is given to a black actor. In the late summer of 2019, Halle Bailey, a Black R&B singer and Hollywood actress, was cast to play Ariel in the live-action reboot of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The uproar began almost immediately after the a...
As previously mentioned, the goal of this research is to compare blackwashing to its violently racist counterpart, whitewashing. Whitewashing, by nature, is an actively racist practice that erases People of Color from the narrative that it portrays. Blackwashing, though filled with good intentions of presenting the world with Black representation, ...
At the base of this research is the concept of racism. While it may seem fairly obvious what racism is, there are several common misconceptions about its definition. Racism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an i...
Modern whitewashing is regularly attacked via social media, and subsequently makes headlines. However, when Hollywood is caught casting White people to act as People of Color, there is always an attempt to justify it. Much of Hollywood’s whitewashing is justified for economic reasons. There is a widely perpetuated belief that diversity does not sel...
The differences between whitewashing and blackwashing are not subtle. The intent behind whitewashing, as mentioned previously, is historically hostile and nefarious in nature. By portraying People of Color stereotypically using White actors, whitewashing only serves to harm societal perceptions of People of Color. Alternatively, blackwashing which ...
The whitewashed film, Gods of Egypt (2016), consists of a fictional account of the Egyptian gods, and Horus’ battle against Set for Egypt’s crown. Only vaguely following the original Egyptian myths, Gods of Egypt trails a mortal called Bek in his quest to revive his deceased love and free Egypt from Set’s wrath. To do this, Bek bribes Horus, the fa...
Black culture is a complex idea because it varies from location to location. Blackness is not monolithic. It appears in many shapes and forms, in the same way that Whiteness is often viewed (Johnson, 2). But the stereotypes The Birth of a Nation uses to depict Black culture often appeared in minstrels, effectively marketing Black culture as a caric...
Not only was the plot of Gods of Egypt lackluster in terms of general cinema, but if all the characters were given entirely different names, there would be almost no evidence that the story was meant to be about Egyptian mythology. The film strips the ancient theology to the bare minimum and rewrites the myths to make them more Western. Zhang state...
The whitewashing in A Mighty Heart may not create stereotypes of Black characters or prime the audience to directly view Black individuals negatively, but it strips part of Pearl’s identity from the story. The casting choice instead adds a Eurocentric twist to the narrative. By casting a White actress in place of a mixed-Black woman, the film steal...
Filming for the feature took place in Australia, which explains the reason such a large percentage of the cast is from Australia; however, the filming location does not excuse this infraction. Again, Hollywood corporations chose to adapt a story of Black strength and use it as an opportunity to create another White Savior type film. Instead of dire...
While whitewashing ultimately strips films of Blackness and promotes Eurocentrism, blackwashing, or altering a character from White to Black, only serves to diversify the cast of the films and provide representation for Black people on-screen. By updating casts to consist of more People of Color, blackwashing regularly fits the setting of each film...
Will Gluck’s adaptation of the Broadway musical is often referred to as the “Black Annie.” The film modernizes the original orchestral soundtrack to have a 2014 pop music sound, alters Annie’s orphan status to be a foster child, and changes the race of several characters, including Annie and Stacks, but the narrative does not center around the race...
Marvel’s new MJ may not seem like the type of character that audiences would empathize with. Throughout Homecoming, Zendaya’s MJ is a loner who simply makes comments as comic relief. The majority of her interactions with the other cast members are brief and witty, giving her just enough screen-time to have a recognizable role while still maintainin...
More often than not, it is assumed that blackwashing is as racist as whitewashing is. That is not the case. Racism has a deep-rooted history in the United States and whitewashing stems from that history. The United States systematically disrupted Black culture by reducing them to specific caricatures and promoting those as the only truth with the g...
As we know, anti-racism is the practice of opposing racism across all platforms. From direct anti-racism, developing equal opportunities that lead to equal outcomes, to indirect anti- racism, the technique of providing unequal opportunities that result in equal outcomes, equity for all races is the goal of any anti-racist praxis. No matter what, an...
While blackwashing’s goal is to bring diversity to the big screen, it does not qualify as a perfect solution to the issues of structural racism within the confines of White-dominated Hollywood. There are a number of ways in which blackwashing comes up short. It may be a score for people to see more Black people in the world of cinema, but blackwash...
Ellis “Red” Redding may be the protagonist of the novel Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, but Darabont’s cinematic adaptation, he is relegated to being a supporting character who observes the new protagonist, Andy Dufresne. The role was not designed to accommodate the race of the character, as he was a White Irishmen in the novel. Therefo...
The intertextuality of primed Black stereotypes is strongly intersectional as well. The character of Annie was designed to be of a lower socioeconomic class to show the contrast between her and Oliver Warbucks during the Great Depression. When translating that storyline onto a Black child, the intersectionality of her oppression expands, making it ...
Zendaya makes her mark as MJ in the Spider-Man series with her quick wit, philosophical darkness, and downplayed intellect. She comedically riffs on people’s emotional states and punctuates moments with sharp comments. However, even a performance from Zendaya cannot escape the intertextuality of Black stereotypes from media. The character of MJ is ...
The shortcomings of blackwashing lie deep within the issues of under representation and misrepresentation of Black people across time in entertainment and media. Because the Black people are and have been underrepresented for extended periods of time, the impacts that their portrayals have are far more groundbreaking than say, a new portrayal of a ...
To understand blackwashing and the truth behind its goals, historical context will always be needed. Without an understanding of the history associated with blackwashing and its counterpart, whitewashing, it is easy to mistake them for similar practices. Whitewashing was deliberately constructed to deliver White supremacy packaged as entertainment....
Jan 10, 2020 · Connecting literature on the racialization of cultural genres and on symbolic violence, the authors demonstrate how authentication through faithfulness to preestablished sociocultural configurations reinforces the whiteness of rock music consumption in both countries in very similar ways.
- Julian Schaap, Pauwke Berkers
- 2020
Grounded in critical race media literacy (CRML), we contend that a comparison of The Hate U Give novel and adapted film can allow for more nuanced conversations in the classroom regarding the ...
Nov 20, 2020 · The scholarship on White spaces has highlighted the ways in which institutions have devoted themselves to reproducing Whiteness through intentional ideological work, and how the prevalence of such ideologies impact the individuals within these spaces.
- Bhoomi K. Thakore
- 2020
The history of mainstream race depiction contextualise the recent Hollywood trend of Whitewashing (the replacement of a coloured character with a white actor), and combined with the cultural relevance of the capital gained from popular film media, the importance of racial progression and further democratisation of ethnic diversity in our globali...
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Jun 2, 2023 · David C. Oh's Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture (2021) is an imaginative, paradigmatic examination of big-budget films from 2008–2018.
