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- In its simplest form, whitewashing refers to the tendency of media to be dominated by white characters, played by white actors, navigating their way through a story that will likely resonate most deeply with white audiences, based on their experiences and worldviews.
www.thesociologicalcinema.com/blog/what-is-whitewashingWhat Is Whitewashing and Why Does It Matter? - @TheSocyCinema
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First, whitewashing happens in films based on historical events, where white actors play the role of non-white characters. An exemplar of this first type is the classic movie, Birth of a Nation, where a number of white actors notoriously appeared in blackface.
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According to one Merriam-Webster definition, to whitewash is to “gloss over or cover up,” which, in a sense, is what the racial form of whitewashing does. It creates a White world where sins against people of color, including Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other minority groups cease to matter because, in revisionist history and rea...
A flashback to the four-day opening of the National Park Service’s Colonial National Monument (CNM) in Virginia in 1931 illuminates and underscores the problems of racially revisionist storytelling. Slavery didn’t get so much as a cursory mention at the segregated event, which celebrated and recreated the U.S. colonial era and featured White people...
When people think of “whitewashing” today, they generally think in terms of Hollywood. It drastically slashes opportunities for actors of color, who are already shut out of White roles and now must compete with White actors for non-White parts. In and out of Hollywood, whitewashing also negatively affects children in minority groups, who grow up se...
Although White actors had been playing characters of other ethnicities for centuries, often employing blackface, redface, and yellowface, the term “whitewashing” didn’t become a popular way to describe this practice until the late 1990s. According to Merriam-Webster, whitewashing as a term revolving around White supremacy debuted in a 1997 issue of...
Whitewashing permeates every layer of society, but it’s been most prominent and pervasive in pop culture. For decades, it was accepted as an unavoidable fact of entertainment, from White artists like Elvis Presley and Pat Boone recording songs written and/or originally performed by Black songwriters and singers in order to make the music more palat...
One of the first highly publicized protests against whitewashing arrived after the musical Miss Saigon (based on the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly) opened in London in 1989. Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Engineer, a half-Vietnamese, half-French character, and he wore bronzing cream and prostheses to make his eyes appear slanted. In 19...
Whitewashing the past goes far beyond how the Civil War has been traditionally taught in American schools as a battle over states’ rights in which slavery was but an afterthought and the major players were all White (Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee). It’s all over the paucity of non-White heroes in the mainstream version of America...
Unfortunately, as with racism and cultural appropriation, there are those who would rather downplay whitewashing or deny it altogether to avoid having to deal with the messy politics of it. In Hollywood, for instance, a popular defense is that it’s an actor’s job to play a variety of roles that are far removed from who they are, so why should playi...
Things are improving—at least in entertainment. Recent movies starring Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson as Asian characters failed critically and/or commercially, suggesting that perhaps audiences are finally demanding better. In 2017, Netflix launched a popular reboot of the ’70s TV series One Day at a Time featuring Latino central characters. Th...
- Jeremy Helligar
Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. [1] As defined by Merriam-Webster , to whitewash is "to alter...in a way that favors, features, or caters to white people: such as...casting a white performer in a role based on a nonwhite person or fictional character."
FilmYearDescription2008The film about card counting features ...2007In the vampire horror film, actor Josh ...2016In the science fiction film based on the ...2021The white actor Matt Van Smith plays ...Instead of a flagrant stain upon cinema, it is a shadow that lurks in the background. Instead of blackface, there is whitewashing. “Whitewashing” is generally defined as choosing a “white male or female to portray a character who is originally of an ethnic background.”.
Dec 3, 2023 · In the realm of film and television, a troubling practice known as whitewashing has cast a shadow over the industry. This investigation focuses on the ethical dimensions of race-based casting...
Definition. Whitewashing refers to the practice of casting white actors in roles that represent characters of diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds, often ignoring or erasing the authentic stories and experiences of those communities.
This study aims to dissect how whitewashing and blackwashing differ, as well as discuss how blackwashing succumbs to the racist history of the Hollywood film industry despite its attempt at leading a brighter future for Black representation in film. Whitewashing will be viewed as direct racism, or the act of treating people differently in
