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- Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. 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."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_in_film
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May 26, 2023 · Whitewashing is a form of racial discrimination, which may lead to poor mental health outcomes. Whitewashing leads to a lack of representation of non-White communities in pop culture.
- Claire Gillespie
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 ...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. There are four distinct types of whitewashing.
- What Does Whitewashing Mean?
- Whitewashing Away Sins of The Past
- The Psychological Dangers of Whitewashing
- Whitewashing Gains New Meaning
- Whitewashing in Entertainment
- An Early Whitewashing Protest
- Whitewashing Art and History
- Defenders of Whitewashing
- A New Wave of Color
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
- EW Staff
- Julia Roberts and Harriet Tubman. The internet almost exploded when Harriet screenwriter and producer, Gregory Allen Howard, revealed that when he first started working on the movie in 1994, one studio executive suggested Julia Roberts portray the legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
- Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman. When Harriet finally reached the screen in 2019—without Julia Roberts—its lead, Tony-winning actress Cynthia Erivo, faced a backlash of her own: critics were not happy with a British-born actress of Nigerian heritage portraying one of America's most important and beloved abolitionists.
- Scarlett Johansson and Rub & Tug. In July 2018, Scarlett Johansson was attached to portray the real-life transgender massage parlor owner and gangster Dante "Tex" Gill in the movie Rub & Tug from director Rupert Sanders.
- Ed Skrein as Ben Daimio in Hellboy. On Aug. 21, 2017, British actor Ed Skrein (Deadpool) announced he had joined the cast of the next Hellboy film as Ben Daimio, a character of Japanese-American descent in the comics.
Dec 31, 2019 · Whitewashing in Hollywood is the well-documented practice of movie executives and other decision makers to choose white actors to portray people of color on film. One of the most famous cases of Hollywood whitewashing involves Mickey Rooney portraying an Asian character in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Oct 6, 2015 · The list of films in which white actors have played other races includes everything from romantic comedies to action adventures and fantasies to historical epics.
