Over the years there has been a commonality in Hollywood films, do you think you can guess what it is? Here’s a few hints, it has something to do with the following movies, Breakfast at Tiffany 's, West Side Story, A Mighty Heart, Drive, Avatar The Last AirBender, Aloha, and Ghost in the Shell. Still don’t know? Each one of these movies and many others like them, have minority characters played by white actors. The term for this is called, whitewashing. Whitewashing is defined as, the casting practice most commonly in film, in which white actors are cast as non-white character roles. In this paper we will be looking at both film and theater and the ideas of whitewashing, tokenism and color blind casting. Since we already have defined whitewashing,
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We also see it in our everyday lives in the workplace and amongst our friends, the term the “token black friend” (Jackson). In theater it is very common that there is usually one black actor in a production, this is not just by show but by season. What’s more, “that the lone black cast member is usually male. Black women are often cast only when the script calls for them or to fill promiscuous and degenerate roles. Such casting supports the stereotype that black women are sexmongering, obedient objects, all while fulfilling the negrophilic appetite for black fetishism in concert with oversexualization” …show more content…
Color blind casting or non traditional casting, is where minority or female actors are cast in roles where race, gender and ethnicity aren’t pertinent. People typically argue that there are more black actors on stage then there was in the past, and this very well may be true but in comparison to the number of white actors it still isn’t enough. Along with that calling it “color blind” or “non traditional” is inappropriate, offencive and borderline racist. When you willingly ignore the actors blackness you strip them of the history and culture that they represent and want so badly to be seen. Black actors don’t want to have these white ideals applied to them, they want to acknowledge their existence and hardship. August Wilson said,“An important part of Black Theater that is often ignored but is seminal to its tradition is its origins on the slave plantations of the South” (Wilson,
We also see it in our everyday lives in the workplace and amongst our friends, the term the “token black friend” (Jackson). In theater it is very common that there is usually one black actor in a production, this is not just by show but by season. What’s more, “that the lone black cast member is usually male. Black women are often cast only when the script calls for them or to fill promiscuous and degenerate roles. Such casting supports the stereotype that black women are sexmongering, obedient objects, all while fulfilling the negrophilic appetite for black fetishism in concert with oversexualization” …show more content…
Color blind casting or non traditional casting, is where minority or female actors are cast in roles where race, gender and ethnicity aren’t pertinent. People typically argue that there are more black actors on stage then there was in the past, and this very well may be true but in comparison to the number of white actors it still isn’t enough. Along with that calling it “color blind” or “non traditional” is inappropriate, offencive and borderline racist. When you willingly ignore the actors blackness you strip them of the history and culture that they represent and want so badly to be seen. Black actors don’t want to have these white ideals applied to them, they want to acknowledge their existence and hardship. August Wilson said,“An important part of Black Theater that is often ignored but is seminal to its tradition is its origins on the slave plantations of the South” (Wilson,