Another week, another whitewashing controversy to unpack on Hard NOC Life. This time around, we welcome back NOC-favorite director Lexi Alexander and Shaun Lau from the podcast No, Totally! to break down Doctor Strange screenwriter Robert Cargill’s statements about why they whitewashed The Ancient One. They also chat about Keith’s New York Times op-ed and announce the new hashtag campaign #whitewashedOUT.
Topics covered on the show include:
- Why Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson is unfortunately getting caught in the whitewashing crossfire
- Using Chinese/Tibetan politics as an excuse for whitewashing
- The media’s penchant for discussing Asian American issues in the context of China and “yellow peril”
- Why Hollywood should hire people like Shaun and Keith to be on their “diversity task force”
- Which franchises are doing right by casting AAPI leads (Aquaman and Into the Badlands)
- Which directors should take up the cause for including more Asian Americans in their films
- How to take part in the #whitewashedOUT twitter chat with comedian Margaret Cho
All this and more on Hard NOC Life! Watch it on your screen, hit “play,” and check this.
https://soundcloud.com/the-nerds-of-color/episode-047-whitewashedout-with-lexi-and-shaun
Watch this space every Friday for new episodes of “Hard N.O.C. Life” and go to our YouTube channel to subscribe! You can also download the audio podcast on iTunes or Soundcloud!
I very much suspect that Hollywods next tactic will be to give one group what they ask for at the expense of another group, just like they have with white women and WoC. I suspect what they’ll start doing is what they’ve done with Dr. Strange. Using white women to claim diversity while still erasing other PoC in their roles and the next group to be used will be blacks or Latinos to erase Asians.
We have to maintain that our groups are not in competition and that we have each other’s backs when one or the other group speaks up.
Do you really think there’s some kind of deliberate conspiracy in Hollywood to keep people of color down?
The whole point about structural racism is that it doesn’t require individuals to hold racist views in order to function.
When people make statements implying that there is some kind of conspiracy against people of color in Hollywood it makes me slightly uneasy given that historically Hollywood was founded by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and in the first half of the 20th century the idea of a global “Jewish conspiracy” was an integral part of popular antisemitic rhetoric.
don’t forget Justin Lin also made “Finishing the Game” another Asian American film, though a very different genre from BLT. It also had Sung Kang and Roger Fan.
With regard to the “do Japanese people see anime characters as Asian?”, I thought this video by a Japanese youtuber was interesting. From their answers, I get the impression that they saw them as racially undetermined; only in the case of Death Note, where there have already been multiple Japanese live action adaptations, are they more likely to see the character as definitely Japanese.
Didn’t Lexi have British actor Ray Stevenson play The Punisher? It’s worth mentioning Marvel broke canon by making Baron Mordo black. Wong is still Asian also.
Lexi makes disparaging remarks about white British actors who went to posh boarding schools.
It’s worth pointing out that Chiwetel Ejiofor similarly comes from a privileged background and went to a posh fee-paying school (Dulwich College).
Often it’s white working-class actors in the UK who are underrepresented and faced with sever challenges as actors in film and TV.