Reply to Color blind casting or color quota casting

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]when it comes to acting and fiction, I don't think you can use history as a way to shut people of color out of roles.

I'm curious how many of these people who just can't get past the historical "inaccuracy" balked at a straight cisgender man playing a trans person on transparent. Or Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club. Or Emma Stone playing that Hawaiian character in that movie. Or Tom Cruise as the last samurai. Or Mackenzie Davis playing a Korean character in The Martian.

But all of these are fine right because not history? Whatever.

We get history from documentaries and textbooks and lots of other places. It is absolutely racist to say that a film can't take creative license to cast a black or another person of color because it takes you out of the moment. It is art. Get comfortable with their own discomfort because yea[/quote]

The alternative perspective is that cinema is a powerful tool that allows people to too easily believe it speaks a truth. No one sees opera or Shakespearean plays as historically accurate or "truth" because they are different forms of art. We understand they're not meant to be substitutes for real life. But movies can be different. I don't categorize all movies in the same way, some are clearly just fantasy, some are clearly just fun, but others do attempt to be more realistic and I don't agree that it's fair or just to distort history to portray a certain message or to be "woke". In fact, one can argue it's a form of cultural appropriation by inventing a fictionalized past that never existed. There's a big difference between a straight actor playing a gay man and, say, having a black Mr. Darcy in a Pride and Prejudice production. The past was, like it or not, a severely racist time in just about all cultures and societies.

Would you accept a white actor playing a warrior in a movie about the Zulus? Or an Asian man as an Ottoman sultan? Or a black emperor in the imperial Chinese court?

[/quote]

why is it different? Why wouldn't it not take you out of the moment to see someone you know is straight playing a gay man?or does it only work the other way when someone who is gay is playing a straight person?
and for what it's worth, pride and prejudice is not history. It is fiction. So they wanted to make an all black version of it or a mixed-race version of it I would not care.
 It worked for Hamilton and it can work elsewhere to.

we just need to get the mouth-breathers to stop talking about history when what they're really talking about is not understanding how whitewashed history was before
[/quote]

Because a straight man can easily play the role of a gay man on the screen and vice versa, without changing the visual meaning of the story, but having a black man play the role of a white man or vice versa is different due to the racial factor. It's intriguing because this forum is filled with threads and posts screaming at how important race is and how we can't ignore racism in just about everything and how much it guides our lives and biases and experiences. I imagine you'd be furious if Disney tried to make a movie about the Zulus and included white actors in the roles of African warriors, would you?

I'm not sure why you're talking about whitewashing history. Pointing out the sheer near-absence of people of color in pre WWII Britain is not whitewashing history. Nor is it whitewashing history to acknowledge that due to the severe racial repression and institutionalized racism there were few African American in prominent roles in the American past. I suspect when you talk about whitewashing history you're simply wishing for a different kind of history than actually did exist. There's definitely, and very understandably, a lot of bitterness at how minority races were treated by white Americans and Europeans in the not too distant past. But no amount of fantasizing is going to ever correct this and showing a more "woke" world than ever did exist in historical movies is only distorting the truth. Now, Disney is Disney and no one should ever take their movies seriously and they are allowed their artistic license and creativity, just as we do for musicals and broadway productions and operas, but I do still think in more serious productions there is a responsibility in being more truthful. By all means let's have movies showing the African experience in 19th century Britain or the US and I would gladly watch them as I'm a passionate student of history and it would be a fascinating topic, but if you tried to show these characters independent of the racial context of the time and treated no differently from the white majority, then you're just whitewashing history by ignoring the black experience. [/quote]

NP here.  There is a long history of Hollywood using historically or canonically inaccurate casting of white actors in roles of color.  Apparently, to OP, it's only a problem when actors of color are cast in Caucasian roles, even if it is historically accurate, so it's not just a race-based issue.  As has been pointed out, there were solicitors and barristers of color at that period.  Not many, but enough that it is not historically inaccurate.  But it bothers OP because OP is only comfortable with white people in such roles.

If you wonder why people are talking about white-washing, it's because it occurs so much more frequently than this reverse issue that it's laughable that OP is only bothered by this case.

In Dr. Strange (2016), Tilda Swinton is cast as the Asian "Ancient One" even though the character is the head of a Himalayan monestary.  Talk about historically inaccurate.
Lone Ranger (2013), Johnny Depp plays Tonto
The Last Airbender (2010), the East Asian and Inuit characters are cast with Caucasian actors
The Passion of Christ (2004), talk about historically inaccurate, Middle Eastern characters from the period of Christ are cast with Caucasian actors
The House of Spirits (1993), characters from the military dictatoship in Chile are played by Caucasian actors rather than Latino actors.  Also historically inaccurate.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), also historically inaccurate film with Caucasians playing Middle Eastern roles, most noticably William Defoe as Christ.
King David (1985), more historical inaccuracy with white actors portraying Middle Eastern characters including Richard Gere as the titular character
A Passage to India (1984), a historical drama with Alec Guinness portraying an Indian man.

There are many more cases, but none of them bother OP as much as Mary Poppins which is clearly fictional fantasy and not historical.[/quote]

Just chiming in to point out that Chileans are very white people. It's a whiter country than the US these days. Have you ever been there? Same with Argentina and Uruguay.

We live in a very racially sensitive time so I do find it interesting being sensitive about race in certain areas but apparently not so in other areas. It's not quite clear to me what people want. [/quote]

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