Whitewashing in Hollywood

Race in media has always been a sort of interesting topic because of the nuances of storytelling and popularized culture of art within Hollywood. As Dr. Palmer mentioned in class, the industry is filled with very specific roles cut out for very specific people. I think the reason this is such an issue to begin with is that these stories are meant to hold truth. They are depicted and shown as a sort of reflections of reality, and therein lies what I think is the problem. Movies are glamorous escapes into a different story that may never be ours but could very well be real. It feels real anyway, that’s what makes a good movie. You have to buy into it, and it almost becomes a space for exploration and reflection and a realm in which we can explore ideas and concepts while keeping a certain distance. The issue is that these spaces don’t exist for everyone. Granted, it’s impossible to capture everyone’s unique story, but when Hollywood continues to present a certain character for specific people over and over and over in its movies, you buy into it. It’s a dangerous way for people to project their ideas of reality onto someone else, and it’s probably the most powerful way to internalize oppression because you realize from a very young age that you don’t have space in this reality or in another. It’s a very scary thing.

One story can be a very powerful way to represent a group of people and I’m sure that through empathy, people are able to find threads of their own realities in someone else’s, but when even the stories we glamorize and market reject and ignore entire populations of people where do they go? If that one story becomes the only narrative for a people, then it’s only clear how few the opportunities would be. Growing up, the only asian person in a movie I knew was Mulan. And she was animated. Later I knew Christina, but they took her off of Greys, and then there was Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels but there was a very clear hole. I got my fill of my own people’s stories by reading stories and watching movies from Korea, I grew up on Korean shows and movies because that was what was familiar. There in which there were white people, which I always thought was odd. I watched what everyone else was watching, but the thing is my mom even though she grew up in Korea grew up with Hollywood movies. But that was also because of the American oppression of Korean cinema, which wouldn’t wear off until around the 2000s with new laws that would force Koreans to watch and make Korean movies.

I grew up in Utah, and everyone, I kid you not, everyone in my class thought I was an alien. They asked me if they could touch me and how I lived and did regular things like eating and getting to school. One kid asked me if I was in the military, another asked if I was really super smart. That was the first time they had ever seen an Asian person. Even then, they thought I was shipped from China. I kid you not, those were their exact words. We were seven and I was called the China Doll in everything I did. They also just assumed I was adopted, which was a whole other thing altogether. But the thing is, the media voices aspects of reality. These kids had no idea there were realities outside of their own because they never had any exposure to them.

The articles highlighted the obvious lack of opportunity to begin with in movies. We simply don’t have enough different roles for minorities. You have to be twice as good to even get a shot, and it’s a naturally competitive thing. I loved Gabrielle Union’s speech so much because it shot it all down. Hollywood pushes people down into boxes, and has kept people out of the narrative, written over stories with romanticized versions of history, and pushed white faces into stories that never should have been. Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite movies, and I was beyond disappointed with Hollywood’s rendition for a number of reasons, but the main being the fact that Scarlett Johansson, as amazing of an actor she is, was simply not a good fit.  I'm not going to point all factors to racism, because I understand that the movie makers are constantly asking as we did in our activity, "Is this bankable?" I think the greatest disappointment could be summarized by Keiko Agena from a Hollywood Reporter interview. “As a fan, as a human Asian-American, I want to see that star being born. That was the part that hurt… This is such a star-making vehicle. And they can find people ...this could have made a young, kick-ass Asian actress out there a Hollywood name and star.”

The issue is Hollywood is not willing to take risks and create that space, be it for whatever reason and honestly, we can just find it elsewhere because that’s how it was always done. But I think the younger generations are getting tired of looking elsewhere and of waiting and waiting and getting fed disappointment by the spoonful.

On another note: whitewashing in Hollywood can be seen even in the names actors choose for themselves. And it’s not just Hollywood, it’s everyone. An article about Chloe Bennet’s own choice to change her name states, “A 2016 study that looked at the US labour market, for example, found that minorities who modify their CVs to remove information that hints at their ethnicity (a practice known as “résumé whitening”) are more than twice as likely to get a follow-up interview as those who don’t.” Chloe says that she gained so many more roles after the name change. We see it happen at Govs, my mom did it too. There’s a pervasiveness to whitewashing, it’s not only prevalent to Hollywood. Our movies are a reflection of the reality, It just so happens to be that Hollywood reflects that reality as well. "I think the hope lies in the voices that are emerging, that are open and bold about the situation. People who are willing and who call out Hollywood on the system and the pigeonholing, and their outward and open anger and frustration. I’m so excited about Black Panther, and I’m hoping for a lot with the live-action remake of Mulan. I don't think there is just one main reason colored people are being blocked out of Hollywood, but the issue is clear that there are simply not enough roles and opportunities. I think things are slowly changing, because the audience is changing so much. We need stories that will continue to show us different realities, not the same story pushed through the machine over and over. And I do believe that it’s all changing, slowly but surely. Mainly because the demand is increasing, and Hollywood finds it can spare to invest in more diverse stories and casts.We just have to keep changing the way we see the world and the way we want to be shown the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/01/chloe-bennet-right-hollywood-racism-wrong-change-name-whitewash