Breakfast At Tiffany's Whitewashing Essay

Hollywood has had a long, difficult history of racism. Although the obvious racism comes in many different forms, a prevalent type is whitewashing. Whitewashing is when a character of color is portrayed by a Caucasian person instead. One of the most famous instances of whitewashing was in 1961 in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Japanese character Mr. Yunioshi was portrayed by the white actor Mickey Rooney, complete with horrifyingly buck teeth, yellowed skin, pinched eyes, and an offensive accent. One might expect that distasteful and unbelievably blind actions such as this are unable to occur now due to a newfound awareness; however, that is not the case at all. Although atrocities like this occurred almost six decades ago, a lack of race diversity and representation in the Hollywood film industry is still at large.
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The setting can be inferred to be at the Academy Awards as the Oscar statue is in the background; an awards ceremony known for its scarcity of non-Caucasian nominees. A woman, possibly of color due to the shade of her skin, is speaking to an old, bald, white man in a tuxedo. They are having a conversation, and the woman asks the man “Instead of scrambling for diversity at awards time, why not worry about it when you’re making the movies?” to which the man replies “Of course- Hire more extras!!”. The woman is obviously talking about the absence of protagonists or even supporting characters who are people of color in films, but the man is oblivious and in his mind, cannot even comprehend that happening. He instead has a “Eureka!” moment and thinks to hire more extras, completely missing the point of the woman’s question. This image is a spot-on depiction of how deeply ingrained racism in Hollywood is, so much so that starring people of color in films is