Color blind casting or color quota casting
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Anonymous
+1. |
Anonymous
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Let's imagine a world without color blind casting. Asian actors would need to wait for the next revival of Miss Saigon; black actors would have to wait for the next revival of A Raisin in the Sun or hope that the next big musical has a role for a black woman to "sing the soul" (think of Joanne in Rent). America is diverse and casting should reflect our diversity, and if race is not integral to the part, why shouldn't actors of color be given equal opportunity with white actors for "traditionally white" roles?
Film and theater requires an inherent suspension of reality. Whether it's breaking into song and dance during dinner or condensing a life story into 2 hours, there's always an element of fantasy when seeing a play or musical. However, there's lot of things that can make it difficult for an audience to accept a cast. If a play is set in England and one actor has a thick German accent for no apparent reason, that's going to make they dialogue hard to follow and probably confuse an audience. If a play has two parents with small children and one is in their 30s and the other is in their 60s, an audience is going to wonder how those parents are able to have newborns. And if a play has an Asian lead and a parent character is introduced who is cast with a black actor, that can be distracting. Yes, all of these situations are possible in real life, but most Brits don't have German accents, most couples with babies don't have one spouse in their 60s, and most Asian people don't have a black grandparent. Yes, maybe the best, most talented, actor was cast in each of those roles, but producers need to be cognizant that casting can impact how an audience accepts a performance. There's a line that needs to be drawn between opening horizons and allowing talented actors from historically underrepresented backgrounds have a shot at lead roles and casting actors that create confusing, unrealistic, or distracting situations on stage or screen. That can come in so many shapes and sizes: age, nationality, gender, height, and yes, even race. Non-traditional casting can work out beautifully, but it can also quickly feel forced and unrealistic. It's not racist to be distracted by unusual or non-traditional racial casting in a period piece and it doesn't make you a "dumb theatergoer" to not be bothered by it. Different people will always see the same performance different from one another. |
Anonymous
While the largest influx started in the late 17th century to the 18th century, there were African and Asian immigrants as early as the 16th century, but maybe not as many as depicted in MQ of S. The depiction in Mary Poppins is quite historically accurate - there were black professionals in the early 20th century. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/intro/intro.htm |
Anonymous
Well said! I agree. |
Anonymous
No. |
Anonymous
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Film and television are not history books or documentaries. You suspend disbelief when you sit in a theater and actors get up there and ACT.
Sometimes, straight people play gay, and vice versa. To comply with lawa, oftentimes adults are hired to play teenagers. And sometimes, directors assume the audience isn't so pedantic and narrow that they allow creative casting in a piece of ART to distract them so immutably. |
Anonymous
Here we go, this is the right answer. |
Anonymous
And while OP is stuck on skin color, the most frequent inaccurate representation is using white actors to play non-white characters. You just dont notice it because it's "normal". After all, Crazy Rich Asians was considered a breakthrough movie because not only was it set mostly in Asia with Asian characters, but it actually cast Asian actors to play the roles. |
Anonymous
I think it is actually a bit of the opposite: prior representations whitewashed so much that people wrongly think there were no POC in these societies, and certainly not as anything other than slaves or servants. The Mary Poppins example is more true to life than what OP thinks it was. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
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Just to put some things in context, there were only about 50,000 non whites in the entire UK at the onset of WWII. The British population at the time was 47 million people. The largest immigrant group prior to WWII were the French Hugenots in the 17th into 18th centuries and they numbered around 100,000. The Irish do not count as immigrants as Ireland was part of the UK.
There were African and South Asian men who came to Britain from the colonies to be educated and train in the professions, most went back to their home countries: It must be acknowledged that even they would not have been accepted as social peers by the white British populations, a real life equivalent of Mr. Banks would certainly have been a very racist man by our standards and hardly have had coworkers of African heritage. That’s just the reality of the times. The British population did not have the same degree of entrenched institutionalized racism because there were so few non whites that most white Britons would go years and years without seeing one, especially in the country and smaller towns. But the British who lived in the colonies were just as racist and discriminatory as American whites. And the small communities of non whites were mostly isolated and lived unto themselves. There is a big push to try to diversify history. Part of it is genuinely sincere in its efforts to bring to light the previously overlooked but the flip side is that it has resulted in greatly exaggerating the roles and presence of non whites in pre WWII, especially Victorian and pre Victorian Britain, and sugarcoating the racial realities of the past. It’s a bit of a controversial topic in the UK today and several recent documentaries were heavily criticized for attempting to try to exaggerate the long history of small, statistically insignificant numbers of immigrants of varying races and ethnicities into something much bigger than it really ever was. As it is, Disney is Disney. I don’t expect them to be historically accurate. I think it’s ok in the context of Disney movies to have a distorted and inaccurate and sugarcoated portrayal of the past to satisfy modern sensibilities. Race really isn’t important here. Just like it’s not important in operas or even Shakespearean plays. But for more serious historical dramas I would be very critical and I do agree it’s important to be racially accurate because we are taking about history. After all, would we ever make a movie about an African tribe with white tribesmen or set a story in 12th century China with a white emperor? No. |
Anonymous
| I would like a fantasy movie where White people are being kidnapped from Europe and sold as slaves in Africa. Set anytime in the past 200 years. |
Anonymous
You're thinking of the barbary pirates. And, yep, they did this. |
Anonymous
Gandhi was a barrister in England in those times, early 1900s. |
Anonymous
Note: the original shows a North American robin landing on a windowsill in London, way out of its habitat. And, of course, actors faking British accents. |