Reply to Color blind casting or color quota casting

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[quote=Anonymous]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.

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