Just stumbled upon this tweet from February: Neil calling out Mental Floss for lightening his skin.
Tag: whitewashing
i’ve seen a lot of edits where characters with dark skin have been lightened by the psd so i decided to make this simple one for PoC. feel free to adjust anything if necessary and please like or reblog if downloading. {download here}
And this is only a few out of the thousands. T.V. has always been “White-ish” but once that’s either pointed out or POC do the same damn thing, these bigoted white people want to pull the race card or bark at these POC for doing the same damn thing they’ve already been doing.
like… ALL of their faves are white as hell.
diversity meant adding white gays to the main cast…
still does apparently
like…
and it’s been going on for fucking ever
HELL…
stfu Donald and anybody else on this bullshit just because the titles weren’t “White-ish”.
When asked whether he has gotten any offers to venture into Hollywood during his 20-year career, Jung Woo Sung replied, “Going abroad should not be an actor’s ultimate goal.”
He added, “Of course, filming foreign projects is up to the individual, and they will have a reason for doing so.” Then he frankly stated, “Hollywood is a white-dominated industry, so unfortunately the main character has to be white. But I want to be a main character.”
He further explained, “I’m not sure why Asian actors must make it their goal to enter Hollywood, if it means that they will end up playing villains and supporting characters.”
south korean actor, jung woo sung, speaking frankly about casting and job opportunities in hollywood. (x)
This is cultural bias in effect. General (generally white) audiences never question why characters are white and blond. If a character could be white, that’s usually justification enough. Whiteness as default becomes logical and comfortable. Only non-whiteness requires an explanation.
Indeed, if a character is not white, some people will cry out that their racial identity is the product of political agenda-driven tampering. If a character is white, the same people will comfortably assume that he or she came out of the box like that.
It should be noted that we’re not even talking about the broad US census category of “white”, which covers people whose families hail from Europe, North Africa or the Middle East — including many people with tan, olive or ruddy skin.
In comics, whiteness is predominantly represented by the pale pink complexions of Northern Europeans — the color once problematically referred to as “Flesh” on Crayola crayons, until Crayola changed it to “Peach” in 1962. Real world white comes in many shades, but in comics all white people seem to trend towards hex color #FFCFAB. (Individual colorists may of course bring more nuance to their work, but how many white superheroes can you name who are consistently portrayed with bronze or olive-toned skin?)
Superhero comics don’t actually favor whiteness; they favor a subset of whiteness that borders on Aryan idealism. We ought to regard that as uncomfortably fetishistic, because it’s an aesthetic that the industry has chosen.
All fiction is manufactured. Authors make their worlds and choose what goes in them. It is always possible to contrive a fictional justification for a character looking whichever way the author wants, up to and including finding a way to make a white person the hero in a story about, say, feudal Japan, or ancient Egypt, or Persia during the Islamic Golden Age. A white hero is not the most likely scenario, but it’s always a possible scenario, so in that way it always becomes justified.
The decision to cast Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch has been called out by message board posters as evidence of an agenda at work — but white heroes in these non-white settings are rarely called out as similar evidence of an agenda. It’s all artifice, it’s all contrived. Fiction exists in service to an author’s design. All fiction serves an agenda, whether it’s articulated or not.
LemonGrenade 