The battle against whitewashing and racebending

When I was a teenager I didn't feel pretty when I saw Natalie Wood prancing around as a Puerto Rican character in the 1961 film version of West Side Story. Marnie Nixon's vocals and strange accent had no relationship to the familiar (to my ear) sound of Nuyorrican Spanish.

Her predecessor on the Broadway stage in the role of Maria was Carol Lawrence (1957).  

Yes'they found Puerto Ricans to play Maria's sidekick Anita (Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno) but the star had to be a white woman.

Here is part of my sing-a-long lyrical response, which opens with:

"I feel pretty, pretty shitty
It's a pity how shitty I feel
a committee has been organized to whitewash me "

and I close with a rousing:
 
I feel angry. Very angry.
It's alarming how angry I feel
because Hollywood will never get real.

I was a teenager then. They didn't have a name for this all-too-frequent phenomena back in those days, though we were real clear about related issues like blackface. We have names for it now.

It's called whitewashing and racebending.

The casting of white actors in non-white roles, or whitewashing, is not new. It's a tradition, which was pointed out quite clearly recently by Aasif Mandvi in his recent Salon piece (see slide show).    

"Racebending" as defined at the activist website racebending.com:

[R]efers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color.

More often than not, this practice has a resultant discriminatory impact on an underrepresented cultural community and actors from that community (reinforcement of glass ceilings, loss of opportunity, etc.) In the past, practices like blackface and yellowface were strategies used by Hollywood to deny jobs to actors of color. Communities of color were helpless to control how they would be represented in media. Because characters of color were played by white actors, people of color were hardly represented at all'and rarely in lead roles. While white actors were freely given jobs playing characters of color in make-up, actors of color struggled to find work.

Our society has yet to escape the legacy of these casting practices, which still continue in a subdued form today. Even today, although actors of color are disproportionately underrepresented in the media, films with lead characters of color are still cast with non-minority actors.

A friend sent me a link to this recent whitewashing controversy in California, a state that is certainly not bare of Asians.

California's Asian American population is estimated at 4.4 million, approximately one-third of the nation's 13.1 million Asian Americans.

Heated exchanges at La Jolla Playhouse over multicultural casting:

The casting of 'The Nightingale,' written by Tony-winning 'Spring Awakening' collaborators Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, has drawn sharp criticism. The musical, adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story and set in ancient China, features a multicultural cast of 12, with two actors of Asian descent in supporting roles. The show's lead role of a young Chinese emperor is played by a white actor.

The production has five male roles. All are played by white men.

Spoken word artist Jason Chu makes it clear when he says, "Colorblind is just another way to say we don't care."

A community forum was between audience members, activists and the creative staff:
La Jolla Playhouse: The Nightingale Panel Discussion.

Some had come from as far away as New York.  

I found one question to the staff quite thought provoking:

If this had been set in Africa would you have dared to cast a white male as the African King? Would you have considered casting a white male?

The answer was, "I'm not sure it's productive to say what if," which to me was not an answer at all.

(Continue reading below the fold.)