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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."
The correlation between population and representation in film is completely and utterly skewed in favor of white people. And this is one of the explanations for why whitewashing still occurs. With 94% of Hollywood executives being white, the majority of those movies will have white leads, even if it’s at the expense of ethnic characters and ...
- 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
Mar 2, 2022 · The recent worldwide success of the animated film Encanto, which took even Disney by surprise, showcases the importance of increased diversity in storytelling and of seeing yourself represented on screen. The future belongs to the children dancing and singing along to ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’, but as believers in white mythic spaces remind me every time I see their arguments online ...
Sep 5, 2017 · The problem of whitewashing is frequently linked to the lack of diversity and institutional racism of a Hollywood film industry that is disproportionately white and male and in which people of ...
- 3 min
Here, the term refers to the observation that white actors secure all the major roles of a film, or they play the most well-rounded, complex characters of a film. Again, Dances of Wolves is an example of this type of film, but other examples include The Last Samurai and Dangerous Minds. Finally, it is also possible to speak of whitewashing as a ...
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Jul 15, 2021 · 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 describe what is more often called ...
