Hollywood’s whitewashing is not a new conversation. It’s the weekend, you are thinking about what leisure activity you should opt for this evening. You find yourself thinking about that movie that has been the town’s talk. You are wondering on your way to the cinema, why is it a box office hit? You get there, you watch the movie, and you leave satisfied. It was worth the praise. Then, you come back home, thinking of the story that stuck with you. You want to learn more about it, and a few clicks later, you realize that you have watched an altered version of the story. The story you loved was robbed of its original color, it has been whitewashed.
What Does Whitewashing Mean?
Over the last decade, the majority of filmmakers were compelled to cast white actors despite the original narrative’s characters being of the global majority. Half the theme of the story is lost and its purpose and essence are entirely erased.
To better grasp whitewashing, we have to delve into the reason why it even exists in the first place. Simply put, Hollywood favored having white actors on their set because it seemed to guarantee the movie’s success. Some of the audience had, and others still have, a deep-rooted issue with seeing people of color thriving in the industry. They avoided calling it by its name, but this issue too is not a new conversation. It is called racism.
Hollywood tried to lie its way out of the reality of whitewashing using poor excuses. The main one has always been “The lack of qualified non-white talents to be on screen”, but this is just another implicit form of discrimination and racism against the global majority besides the blunt implication of the white people’s superiority. Nonetheless, their excuse is wavering in the face of the talents from all over the globe. Wonders are being created in the film scene when given the chance.
Additionally, this generation refuses to be fed Hollywood’s illusions and remain silent about it. As matter of a fact, this started back in 2015 with the Hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trending on all social media platforms. The Academy, for two years in a row, awarded all the 20 acting nominations to white actors. This, rightfully so, was alarming. It made people look closely at the racism and discrimination that has been a concealed motto in Hollywood. Refusing to acknowledge the contributions of the global majority in the film scene was louder than ever at that point.
5 Movies Hollywood Whitewashed
Whitewashing has two forms. In the first one, the narrative’s main characters are from the global majority but Hollywood chooses to cast white actors to play their roles instead. In the second one, the narrative’s main characters are also from the global majority, but Hollywood changes them drastically to suit the white actors they cast. To have a better grasp of whitewashing, we compiled five movies as examples:
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
The movie is an adaptation of a video game under a similar name. The main character in the narrative is Persian. Yet in the movie, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, they twisted the narrative and turned the Persian character into a white character by making him an adopted son of Persia’s King. Needless to say, this is not accurate as the main character originally is the biological son of the King in the game.
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Angelina Jolie plays the role of Mariane Pearl who, in fact, descends from a Cuban mother of Afro-Cuban descent and a Dutch Jewish father. Mariane has expressed that she personally asked Jolie to play the role because she felt that only she would manage to portray her character genuinely. However, it didn’t sit well with the audience to ignore Mariane’s ethnicity, and simply cast a white actress. The movie makers even went above and beyond to make Jolie’s physical appearance different that she is almost unrecognizable instead of casting an actress who shares the same ethnicity and background as Mariane. This effort rubbed people the wrong way.
Gods of Egypt (2016)
The narrative is inspired by Egyptian Mythology, and so the audience expected the characters to have Egyptian blood to remain loyal to the inspiring tale. However, to their surprise, the entire cast was predominately white. This choice by the filmmaker put them under fire, and they ended up issuing an apology for the inaccuracy, and for devoiding the mythology of its essence.
Wanted (2008)
The movie, starring Angelina Jolie too, is actually based on a comic book under the same name by Mark Millar and J.G Jones. The character in the book was an African-American woman- she was partly inspired by Halle Berry- However, there is no trace left of that or even any allusion to it in the movie. It was a complete erasure of the original character.
Death Note (2017)
The film is based on the Japanese manga series of the same name created by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. The main character in the narrative is a Japanese young man named Light Yagami. In the movie, the creators changed the main character’s name to Light Turner who was played by a white actor, Nat Wolff. They even dared to move the setting from Tokyo in Japan to Seattle in the USA. Along with the adaptation’s execution, the erasure of the background and essence of the main character was a total disappointment to the fans of the well-known manga and anime.
Today, Hollywood fortunately can no longer slip under the radar while whitewashing adaptations of stories that belong to the global majority. People have been educating themselves and are more aware of the implications of this regressive practice. We should all be standing for the rights of the global majority to be able to tell their stories using their own voices. It is their canvas, and they get to choose the colors.
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