Hollywood White-Washing In Hollywood

Darius Tann
Professor King
English 101.023
27 April 2016
Hollywood White-Washing Hollywood has long been known for and criticized for the numerous roles that that cast Caucasian or Caucasian looking actors in the roles of other races and ethnicities. The minority representation in movies is often stereotyped and thus perpetuates the racial and ethnic stereotypes that persist in the United States. We have all seen a movie with an African-American actor playing a slave, an Asian-American playing a nerd, and a Hispanic or Latino actor playing a drug-dealer, and there are all appropriate times when this should occur. But these experiences should not be whittled down to these tropes. What may surprise you is how frequently this still happens

Guy Aoki said African Americans "have long felt the full brunt of the 'whitewashing' of roles" and that Asians have experienced it as well. The inverse of whitewashing is seen as non-traditional casting, where non-white actors fill the roles of historically white characters. The earliest films historically cast white actors in non-white roles. Since the inception of the film industry, minority roles have often gone to white actors. USA Today noted with films like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), A Mighty Heart (2007), and Pan (2015), "White actors continue to be top of mind for plum roles, despite the under-representation of people of color at the acting, directing and producing levels." Among the most recognized are Katharine Hepburn as Jade Tan in Dragon Seed and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. One of the earliest films, Birth of the Nation (1915) employed blackface on white actors for African-American actors. While these casting decision might have been expected during an era of racial segregation and oppression, Hollywood has continued to make casting decisions that prefer white actors over minority actors. In the last decade, Jake Gyllenhaal was cast in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2010) and Justin Chatwin

Based on the cyclical nature of the film industry, well-known actors are given more roles and few well-known actors are minority, so it is difficult for minority actors to become established in the industry. Films have acted as social barometers, producing what sells to make profit and pushing the boundaries of society. Films have normalized interracial relationships much more than in the previous decades and they have the potential to continue to be progressive. The difficulty is progressivism breeds controversy and controversy doesn’t always sell. A second type of whitewashing can be observed in films that claim to be based on true stories. Here, the constellation of events that comprise a historical moment are reconfigured, forcing the audience to experience the story from a white perspective, as such, this type of whitewashing is a principal agent in shifting the public memory of real events. For example, Dances with Wolves ostensibly depicts a period of what has been euphemistically described by some historians as the Western Expansion, but is more accurately characterized as a patchwork of genocidal