unusualmusic at Angry Black Woman wrote this great, great, great, GREAT post about racialization in movies, in casting and characterization. There are all sorts of examples where people of colour have been characterized as evil, undercharacterized, or simply replaced with whiteness.
Whitewashing is a frequent topic these days, given the complete and utter failure that is The Last Airbender. Some of the arguments I’ve seen purport that race simply doesn’t ‘matter’ and that’s why it’s okay to cast white actors as main characters in an Asian-inspired world, surrounding them by supporting actors of colour. Few times is this actually true. Usually, in media representations, when someone says that the whitewashing of characters of colour is justified because their race doesn’t matter, it means that whiteness is raceless. With this logic, being white means you are not racialized and you have no race. Or an ethnicity for that matter. Obviously, white people can’t be ethnic, right?
Anyway, read the post at ABW. It’s got an impressive set of links for reading.
