> I think the answer is obvious: There aren’t really any rules about who can play who and why.
I think the real answer here is power. Netflix can afford to piss off Egyptians in the name of sticking up for Americans and American freedom of expression. They would not be able to do this as easily for India, or maybe Nigeria, and certainly not China. All it reveals is the lesser global soft power of Egypt as a country and people, and that a massive corporation can afford to ignore their concerns.
To me, the current Hollywood rule is obvious. It's okay if the actor is "less privileged" than the character, but not the reverse.
Black people can play the Founding Fathers; white people cannot play MLK Jr or Malcolm X. The Scooby Doo characters can be recast as Black and Asian (as in "Velma") and there can be a Black "Wonder Years", but you cannot remake a Black show with any other race.
It all functions according to US racial categories as understood in 2023, which is why (from the Hollywood perspective) a Black person can play any role, any time, any place. An Asian person can play a white role, but not a Black one. And so on.
When it comes to identities that are considered equal on the oppression hierarchy, there is no guiding principle, and we get squabbles between groups (see: "Can a Puerto Rican person play a Mexican person?" Mexicans may have strong feelings, but they're both Latinx, so white liberals stay out of it.)
Meanwhile there’s the trend in fantasy shows to cast a broad range of races to play elves, dwarves, etc. sometimes with no apparent racial logic at all. For example, in Rings of Power, Durin the dwarf is played by a white actor, his wife a black actor, but then their children don’t appear to be mixed race. In fact, human notions of race just seem to be immaterial - some dwarves have dark skin, some have light skin, and these differences aren’t noticed or important. This kind of runs away from race essentialism to say - let’s just cast diverse actors and not get hung up on what the “correct” race is, which I like, especially since these are magical beings...though in the Rings of Power, the one thing that threw me off was the lack of explanation why elves, dwarves, hobbits, and other races all had such diverse skin colors within nuclear communities, even in places where everyone was born in one part of the world, these societies just “happened” to be all perfectly diverse. Maybe that affected believability for me.
I think the disconnect is contextual. Some fictional worlds attempt internal consistency, so subverting that rubs the wrong way. If Mom and Dad Save the World was remade today with with idris elba replacing Jon Lovitz or zendaya replacing Wallace Shawn, nobody would care (or people would, but not due to world building implications, just normal water-cooler-twitter talk). But Tolkien fans expect and demand a backstory for every detail, so introducing loose-ends is exasperating.
Yeah. I can sometimes look past it. But the part of me that loves anthropology is like. “Why would a race of subterranean beings evolve skin meant for soaking up harmful sun rays?”
It’s something you can look past but weird.
To me the most annoying one is Star Wars.
So now the first order is diverse??? Why!! They’re the bad guys!! They’re racists. Of course they are!
The "but it isn't scientifically accurate for these magic fantastical creatures to be anything but white, from an evolutionary standpoint!" line of argument is always idiotic on its face. Just look at the argument. Its idiocy needs no explanation. Anyone seriously making it needs a long look in the mirror.
The dumbest variant I've seen is for the new Little Mermaid. People lining up to explain why mermaids wouldn't have evolved much melanin, having already accepted that humans somehow evolved a fish tail.
I mean, this is extremely easy: why are demanding realism with regards to *evolutionary genetics* in a world where magic explicitly exists and the universe is run by supernatural forces. Your explanation for "why is the dwarf black" runs anywhere from "a wizard did it" to "who cares." If you demand a more thorough in-universe explanation for black dwarves, youve completely lost the plot.
That’s not an explanation. That’s pandering. I agree it’s not important. Unless you make it important.
Some of these properties HAVE made it important. When you’re striving for realism it helps to be realistic. And history has a lot of fun lessons on realism.
I mean it’s not idiotic on it’s face. It’s just that we live in a racialized world.
Out of curiosity. If we were making a hardcore movie about the kkk. How diverse should the members of the kkk be?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Also. The little mermaid casting is race baiting to hide behind the fact that Disney live action remakes are straight trash. The casting is the ultimate sacrificial lamb to cover their asses when the movie tanks.
Like ghostbusters 2016. Step one. Make a shitty movie. Step 2 cast it in a progressive way. Step 3 blame it’s failures on racism and not the fact that you made a straight trash piece of art.
Yes. Anyone can be anything. All the time. Agreed.
But if your casting based on race and not believability you’re casting wrong.
You've already lost your mermaid believability when you made the character a mermaid! The idea that a white mermaid is somehow more believable than a black mermaid is laughable; they're both god damn mermaids! They leapt over the plausibility line when they stuck a fish tail onto a lady!
I think I'm sympathetic to the idea that diverse casting is cover for the fact that the movies suck, but it's not like the casting is the actual problem here. It's the lighting/writing/idea of doing these remakes in the first place.
Agreed. The casting isn’t the problem. The tokenism is and in most of these cases it’s plain bald faced tokenism. That’s bad.
Is an all female team of ghostbusters made up of well vetted comedic actors a good idea? Yeah sure. Why not. Is it fair to then and hide behind “it failed because of sexism” when all you did was cast the movie as a marketing stunt? No. That’s bad faith.
There are so many good examples of good and diverse casting and the thing is in most of them representation is never mentioned or thought of. It happens organically because of the story they’re telling.
The expanse, Miles morales in spider man, death in the sandman adaptation, again Hamilton.
Like Jeff said if you’re casting to “believable” you have no problem. All of those properties did an amazing job (especially the expanse) that you didn’t even notice. No one made a peep. Because it was organic. It wasn’t a studio producer looking at a chart and saying “um, guys, we can get a .2% market share if we add x,y and z”.
This is also a uniquely American problem. We live in a melting pot so it makes sense for us to look for a variety.
But it’s like a lot of producers have never visited fucking Scandinavia or Iceland. Groups of samey looking mother fuckers are everywhere. It’s a meta problem.
It intrudes on the creative process and stretches believability. All for kudos. A bad reason to create something artistic is for a pat on the back and a lot of this stuff is just being created for a pat on the back.
Speaking of the little mermaid. I feel bad for that actress. She’s a sacrificial lamb. It’s not her fault. She’s been made into a stunt. Just to prove a point.
Is there any version of a Little Mermaid movie where a black mermaid wouldn't be "tokenism?" (For the record, I agree that this version is, since the mermaid family looks like people holding hands around the earth in an elementary school classroom).
"This is an adaptation of a Danish story, so the characters should look Danish" is much more convincing than the absurd "where did those mermaids evolve that melanin?"
The Castro one is hilarious, because Castro's father was from Spain (and therefore "white") and his mother was from the Canary Islands (and therefore a mixture of mostly "white" and some North African). It's hard to argue that Castro is anything but white.
Ancient Egyptians were not “black” in the same sense as Sub-Saharan Africans. Art work from the period showing interactions between Egyptians and Africans from further down the Nile, in modern day Sudan/South Sudan/Ethiopia makes this very clear.
That said, the ancient Egyptians were not “white” either, and could be credibly portrayed by actors/actresses of mixed/varied ethnicities. Vin Diesel would make a great pharaoh!
As for Fidel Castro, John Leguizamo needs to stfu..Castro’s parents were both Spanish immigrants to Cuba-Fidel is as lilly “white” as one can get.
It’s just the same tired oppression and marginalization hierarchy. It runs on a linear scale of how melinated your skin is. It is profoundly boring and makes for terrible art. I’m embarrassed for the people trying to push this ahistorical ‘cleopatra was an oppressed black woman’ narrative - it is so delusional. People are really fed up with this shit.
- Hamilton doesn’t posit “race doesn’t matter”; it explicitly casts all the historical figures as non-white except for King George. One of their casting calls got into a bit of hot water by listing for non-white only (or similar words) and when they were threatened with a lawsuit tweaked the wording and said “of *course* we welcome all auditioners!” (The winking that accompanied this could be heard from space)
- I like the “convincingly” part. Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis, Jr. are stone cold classics, as is Eddie Murphy’s old Jewish guy in the barbershop in Coming To America (the SNL Mr. White was intentionally a stereotype, but that worked, too). There should be a space to do this, but it’s OK for it to be really narrow (“You best not miss”). Also, while I don’t have the specifics, there were Minstrel performers who went for “believability” and “accuracy”, or thought they were doing so, and now look just as racist as any Stepin Fetchit role, which is to say it’s a *really* narrow space, at least as far as performing Black is concerned.
- Which brings me to what the real rule seems to be (as I also wrote below): White people stay in your lane, others judged in a scale of skin tone (a reverse brown bag test, essentially)
I've been on a CBT journey lately to both improve my day-to-day mood and present myself in a better way to the outside world.
One thing that strikes me about this stuff is how maladaptive it is. It's just a bad way to live. Iranians shouldn't be hurt over a stupid Prince of Persia movie. Black and Egyptian people shouldn't feel anguish over the casting or lack of casting about some movie.
A few days ago, some moron at ESPN made some joke comparison the last name Whitecloud to a toilet paper. This is a shitty joke, and I didn't laugh. Someone who took the lessons I did from CBT should leave it there. But, of course, people went online to say how offensive it was because Whitecloud is a First Nations name, so the ESPN dude had to issue an apology about how it was erasing colonial blah blah blah.
Of course, I don't think the average Iranian, Egyptian, Black person, or First Nations Canadian gives even a 1/100th of a shit about any of this stuff or anything similar. But there's a certain group of middle and upper middle class people who destroy their mood and wellbeing over minor shit.
The literal interpretation is that she was part of a black African culture, but this is clearly wrong: she was raised, & lived for most of her life, in Alexandria, which Alexander the Great had founded as a colony of Greeks in Egypt & which remained culturally Greek at least up to the Byzantine period. She did learn Egyptian & participate in native Egyptian religion, but the native Egyptians were mostly not black by modern standards either (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits for contemporary pictures of ancient Egyptians). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra claims she also learned Ethiopian, but "learned a foreign society's language for political reasons" & "adopted the culture of that society" are quite different things.
This is a nicely argued 'rant', and I agree with it (I'm Jewish and have played both a priest and a Nazi onstage, as well as Roy Cohn, who actually was Jewish, but, well, you know...) However, I strongly recommend carefully proofreading this--there are lots of typos and if it catches on you'll be embarrassed.
This is the exactly the kind of Analysis Of Niche Entertainment Industry Bullshit that I love from this blog
Could ANEIB (pronounced A-NEEB) become the acronym standard? Should Jeff copywrite the term?
That one quote from the NYT.... how can anyone not roll their eyes at a phrase like "proximity to whiteness" at this point?
> I think the answer is obvious: There aren’t really any rules about who can play who and why.
I think the real answer here is power. Netflix can afford to piss off Egyptians in the name of sticking up for Americans and American freedom of expression. They would not be able to do this as easily for India, or maybe Nigeria, and certainly not China. All it reveals is the lesser global soft power of Egypt as a country and people, and that a massive corporation can afford to ignore their concerns.
To me, the current Hollywood rule is obvious. It's okay if the actor is "less privileged" than the character, but not the reverse.
Black people can play the Founding Fathers; white people cannot play MLK Jr or Malcolm X. The Scooby Doo characters can be recast as Black and Asian (as in "Velma") and there can be a Black "Wonder Years", but you cannot remake a Black show with any other race.
It all functions according to US racial categories as understood in 2023, which is why (from the Hollywood perspective) a Black person can play any role, any time, any place. An Asian person can play a white role, but not a Black one. And so on.
When it comes to identities that are considered equal on the oppression hierarchy, there is no guiding principle, and we get squabbles between groups (see: "Can a Puerto Rican person play a Mexican person?" Mexicans may have strong feelings, but they're both Latinx, so white liberals stay out of it.)
Meanwhile there’s the trend in fantasy shows to cast a broad range of races to play elves, dwarves, etc. sometimes with no apparent racial logic at all. For example, in Rings of Power, Durin the dwarf is played by a white actor, his wife a black actor, but then their children don’t appear to be mixed race. In fact, human notions of race just seem to be immaterial - some dwarves have dark skin, some have light skin, and these differences aren’t noticed or important. This kind of runs away from race essentialism to say - let’s just cast diverse actors and not get hung up on what the “correct” race is, which I like, especially since these are magical beings...though in the Rings of Power, the one thing that threw me off was the lack of explanation why elves, dwarves, hobbits, and other races all had such diverse skin colors within nuclear communities, even in places where everyone was born in one part of the world, these societies just “happened” to be all perfectly diverse. Maybe that affected believability for me.
I think the disconnect is contextual. Some fictional worlds attempt internal consistency, so subverting that rubs the wrong way. If Mom and Dad Save the World was remade today with with idris elba replacing Jon Lovitz or zendaya replacing Wallace Shawn, nobody would care (or people would, but not due to world building implications, just normal water-cooler-twitter talk). But Tolkien fans expect and demand a backstory for every detail, so introducing loose-ends is exasperating.
Yeah. I can sometimes look past it. But the part of me that loves anthropology is like. “Why would a race of subterranean beings evolve skin meant for soaking up harmful sun rays?”
It’s something you can look past but weird.
To me the most annoying one is Star Wars.
So now the first order is diverse??? Why!! They’re the bad guys!! They’re racists. Of course they are!
The "but it isn't scientifically accurate for these magic fantastical creatures to be anything but white, from an evolutionary standpoint!" line of argument is always idiotic on its face. Just look at the argument. Its idiocy needs no explanation. Anyone seriously making it needs a long look in the mirror.
The dumbest variant I've seen is for the new Little Mermaid. People lining up to explain why mermaids wouldn't have evolved much melanin, having already accepted that humans somehow evolved a fish tail.
Also. I demand an explanation. If it’s idiotic in its face it should be easy for you to explain.
What about authors. Was Tolkien racist?
I mean, this is extremely easy: why are demanding realism with regards to *evolutionary genetics* in a world where magic explicitly exists and the universe is run by supernatural forces. Your explanation for "why is the dwarf black" runs anywhere from "a wizard did it" to "who cares." If you demand a more thorough in-universe explanation for black dwarves, youve completely lost the plot.
That’s not an explanation. That’s pandering. I agree it’s not important. Unless you make it important.
Some of these properties HAVE made it important. When you’re striving for realism it helps to be realistic. And history has a lot of fun lessons on realism.
But. How much prose do you write?
Fair amount, as a hobby. Regularly participate in an online for-sport fiction contest.
I mean it’s not idiotic on it’s face. It’s just that we live in a racialized world.
Out of curiosity. If we were making a hardcore movie about the kkk. How diverse should the members of the kkk be?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Also. The little mermaid casting is race baiting to hide behind the fact that Disney live action remakes are straight trash. The casting is the ultimate sacrificial lamb to cover their asses when the movie tanks.
Like ghostbusters 2016. Step one. Make a shitty movie. Step 2 cast it in a progressive way. Step 3 blame it’s failures on racism and not the fact that you made a straight trash piece of art.
Yes. Anyone can be anything. All the time. Agreed.
But if your casting based on race and not believability you’re casting wrong.
You've already lost your mermaid believability when you made the character a mermaid! The idea that a white mermaid is somehow more believable than a black mermaid is laughable; they're both god damn mermaids! They leapt over the plausibility line when they stuck a fish tail onto a lady!
I think I'm sympathetic to the idea that diverse casting is cover for the fact that the movies suck, but it's not like the casting is the actual problem here. It's the lighting/writing/idea of doing these remakes in the first place.
The only believable mermaid is the one with dark back and light belly! :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countershading
Agreed. The casting isn’t the problem. The tokenism is and in most of these cases it’s plain bald faced tokenism. That’s bad.
Is an all female team of ghostbusters made up of well vetted comedic actors a good idea? Yeah sure. Why not. Is it fair to then and hide behind “it failed because of sexism” when all you did was cast the movie as a marketing stunt? No. That’s bad faith.
There are so many good examples of good and diverse casting and the thing is in most of them representation is never mentioned or thought of. It happens organically because of the story they’re telling.
The expanse, Miles morales in spider man, death in the sandman adaptation, again Hamilton.
Like Jeff said if you’re casting to “believable” you have no problem. All of those properties did an amazing job (especially the expanse) that you didn’t even notice. No one made a peep. Because it was organic. It wasn’t a studio producer looking at a chart and saying “um, guys, we can get a .2% market share if we add x,y and z”.
This is also a uniquely American problem. We live in a melting pot so it makes sense for us to look for a variety.
But it’s like a lot of producers have never visited fucking Scandinavia or Iceland. Groups of samey looking mother fuckers are everywhere. It’s a meta problem.
It intrudes on the creative process and stretches believability. All for kudos. A bad reason to create something artistic is for a pat on the back and a lot of this stuff is just being created for a pat on the back.
Speaking of the little mermaid. I feel bad for that actress. She’s a sacrificial lamb. It’s not her fault. She’s been made into a stunt. Just to prove a point.
Is there any version of a Little Mermaid movie where a black mermaid wouldn't be "tokenism?" (For the record, I agree that this version is, since the mermaid family looks like people holding hands around the earth in an elementary school classroom).
"This is an adaptation of a Danish story, so the characters should look Danish" is much more convincing than the absurd "where did those mermaids evolve that melanin?"
The Castro one is hilarious, because Castro's father was from Spain (and therefore "white") and his mother was from the Canary Islands (and therefore a mixture of mostly "white" and some North African). It's hard to argue that Castro is anything but white.
Ancient Egyptians were not “black” in the same sense as Sub-Saharan Africans. Art work from the period showing interactions between Egyptians and Africans from further down the Nile, in modern day Sudan/South Sudan/Ethiopia makes this very clear.
That said, the ancient Egyptians were not “white” either, and could be credibly portrayed by actors/actresses of mixed/varied ethnicities. Vin Diesel would make a great pharaoh!
As for Fidel Castro, John Leguizamo needs to stfu..Castro’s parents were both Spanish immigrants to Cuba-Fidel is as lilly “white” as one can get.
All good until you lost me at "Vin Diesel would make a great".
The Iron Sheik reference made my day. Thank you for that. 😁
It’s just the same tired oppression and marginalization hierarchy. It runs on a linear scale of how melinated your skin is. It is profoundly boring and makes for terrible art. I’m embarrassed for the people trying to push this ahistorical ‘cleopatra was an oppressed black woman’ narrative - it is so delusional. People are really fed up with this shit.
A few things:
- Hamilton doesn’t posit “race doesn’t matter”; it explicitly casts all the historical figures as non-white except for King George. One of their casting calls got into a bit of hot water by listing for non-white only (or similar words) and when they were threatened with a lawsuit tweaked the wording and said “of *course* we welcome all auditioners!” (The winking that accompanied this could be heard from space)
- I like the “convincingly” part. Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis, Jr. are stone cold classics, as is Eddie Murphy’s old Jewish guy in the barbershop in Coming To America (the SNL Mr. White was intentionally a stereotype, but that worked, too). There should be a space to do this, but it’s OK for it to be really narrow (“You best not miss”). Also, while I don’t have the specifics, there were Minstrel performers who went for “believability” and “accuracy”, or thought they were doing so, and now look just as racist as any Stepin Fetchit role, which is to say it’s a *really* narrow space, at least as far as performing Black is concerned.
- Which brings me to what the real rule seems to be (as I also wrote below): White people stay in your lane, others judged in a scale of skin tone (a reverse brown bag test, essentially)
BLAKE EDWARDS FOREVER even if his view of Asians never evolved past Charlie Chan movies
Specifically the ones where Charlie had a Rochester
Indira Ghandi loved Peter Sellers in The Party, and would show the film to guests frequently.
That was amazing. But James Franco would be great as Castro in Tropic Thunder 2!
I've been on a CBT journey lately to both improve my day-to-day mood and present myself in a better way to the outside world.
One thing that strikes me about this stuff is how maladaptive it is. It's just a bad way to live. Iranians shouldn't be hurt over a stupid Prince of Persia movie. Black and Egyptian people shouldn't feel anguish over the casting or lack of casting about some movie.
A few days ago, some moron at ESPN made some joke comparison the last name Whitecloud to a toilet paper. This is a shitty joke, and I didn't laugh. Someone who took the lessons I did from CBT should leave it there. But, of course, people went online to say how offensive it was because Whitecloud is a First Nations name, so the ESPN dude had to issue an apology about how it was erasing colonial blah blah blah.
Of course, I don't think the average Iranian, Egyptian, Black person, or First Nations Canadian gives even a 1/100th of a shit about any of this stuff or anything similar. But there's a certain group of middle and upper middle class people who destroy their mood and wellbeing over minor shit.
I heard someone said about Cleopatra....that she was "culturally black African." Please someone explain to me what this means.
It means someone is covering for the Rachael Doleazal pov…
The literal interpretation is that she was part of a black African culture, but this is clearly wrong: she was raised, & lived for most of her life, in Alexandria, which Alexander the Great had founded as a colony of Greeks in Egypt & which remained culturally Greek at least up to the Byzantine period. She did learn Egyptian & participate in native Egyptian religion, but the native Egyptians were mostly not black by modern standards either (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits for contemporary pictures of ancient Egyptians). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra claims she also learned Ethiopian, but "learned a foreign society's language for political reasons" & "adopted the culture of that society" are quite different things.
This is a nicely argued 'rant', and I agree with it (I'm Jewish and have played both a priest and a Nazi onstage, as well as Roy Cohn, who actually was Jewish, but, well, you know...) However, I strongly recommend carefully proofreading this--there are lots of typos and if it catches on you'll be embarrassed.
I fucking love you. There, I finally said it.