Racial Diversity with a Twist
Posted by sarah on February 25, 2009 @ 10:15 am | media, newsAn infuriating first-hand account of a casting call for M. Night Shyamalan’s white-washed interpretation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
One middle-aged black woman, clad in a denim jacket and black slacks, raised her hand. “Are you at a disadvantage if you didn’t wear a costume?” she asked, evidently concerned about her “non-ethnic” outfit.
“Absolutely not!” Rickets reassured her. “It doesn’t mean you’re at a disadvantage if you didn’t come in a big African thing. But guys, even if you came with a scarf today, put it over your head so you’ll look like a Ukrainian villager or whatever.”
The casting call was for extras of different racial backgrounds. Those applied were encouraged to show up adorned in their respective country’s traditional clothing. Even if people of color didn’t originally hail from those countries, they could at least make an attempt to “look like a Ukrainian villager or whatever.”
This excerpt alone tells people of color that they will only be accepted into mainstream society if they act towards a certain stereotype. Mixed-peoples have it even harder – should I act out my Irish side and play up my booze-drinkin’? My Japanese side and pull out some karate moves? Throw on some heavy eyeliner to look more AZN!?
There seems to be a universal agreement that the characters from Avatar hail from Asian backgrounds, and although Shyamalan wants to throw in more representation of other races, he is doing it in a completely ignorant way: enforcing the idea that white people can only be leads, whereas minority characters are continuously pushed to the side. If he really wanted to show different ethnicities, why separate everybody into “this race” and “that race”? Why not include mixed peoples to truely show how diversity works?
via Lisa Zhu | A ‘last’ straw for ignorance - Opinion.
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My name is Sarah. Half Japanese, half Irish-Polish-Lithuanian. I majored in East Asian Studies and yet somehow am working as a web and graphic designer. Go figure.
Shyamalan is as good about being respectful to people and other cultures as he is with making films. He doesn’t care about making a film that’s got much meaning to it. to his audience or himself. And it’s not just his crew, most casting’s go on like this, even when they do have public calls they often put up “searching for ethnic looking people for backdrop* and when you show up it turns into a “can you look a little more… i don’t know… (place stereotype here.),and the people who turn up don’t even realize that they were just stereotyped. backdrops are often just overly excited to be in it and dismiss it.
Yeah I was never a fan of his films to begin with. Have you experienced this first-hand? To be honest before this article I never thought about how casting calls went when they were looking for a person of color. Frustrating.
Kinda, in my family there are some that don’t look at all Mexican and look completely Mongolian, one cousin in particular, and she’s always trying to get into film’s she doesn’t care about having roles she just wants to be in them. Well at one point she was suppose to be “walking in a street on Hollywood” but they decided to have her come up front and had her act like a Chinese tourist. She went through it, watched the movie when it came out on the Sci-Fi channel and well, she’s no longer in films.
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