Down a Rabbit Hole in Asia

[sistermagpie]

There was an article posted in The San Francisco Chronicle about the Avatar: The Last Airbender question, which led to a long discussion on avatar_fans about the casting again. This discussion included arguments from both sides, and after a while it made me want to make this opinion clear. It got way long—sorry.

It's easy to get sucked into trying to show that Avatar takes place in Asia and that's why the cast should be Asian. This is an unwinnable argument. The fact that the architecture, clothing, writing, utensils and philosophy--among other things--are inspired by things Asian can always be countered with: "It's magic so it can be different" or "it's fiction so it can be different".

The heroes can always be white. That's is the very tradition that makes the casting offensive. Obviously they can be cast white: so far they have been!

What race was Charlie Chan? He was Chinese. He is identified as Chinese by his narrator and by other characters within his story. I am sure he's also identified as Asian (Oriental) in looks as well.

What race is Harry Potter identified as by his narrator? His narrator never assigns him a race. Nowhere in the HP series does a character or the narrator describe Harry as white. (Not that this would probably stop people from arguing that we are told that he's white: he has green eyes! He's British! Well, yeah, we do make those inferences. But he's never identified as white.)

What race were the actors who played Charlie Chan when he was the lead in movies? They were white. What race is the actor who plays Harry Potter and most people he knows? They're white too.

Charlie Chan being specifically described as Chinese didn't mean he "had to" be played by an Asian man according to Hollywood standards. The MIT students who were the basis for the movie 21 being Asian-American did not mean they had to be played by Asians in the movie (they weren't). "Acting Chinese" took care of things for Charlie Chan. Ethnicities not being necessary for the plot, presumably, took care of things in 21. There's always an argument for why they could be white if you need one.

Do you think anybody had to make a case for why Harry should be white in HP? In that movie there was groundswell of feeling from just about everyone that he couldn't be anything but British since Harry is--fake accents just wouldn't cut it, even if the child actor in question was accomplished and talented. (Similarly the fantasy worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth are mostly populated by white people who could pass as British.) He was already understood to be white: now he had to be white and British.

Nobody had to make a case for Harry being white against somebody pointing out all the non-white British people. Or the non-white people with green eyes. (That is, blue eyes--Harry's often-mentioned green eyes was changed to accommodate the young actor's problems with contacts, I believe.)

This whole line of argument, I think, is a way of getting things away from the real problem, which is less about the reality of Avatar and more about western history with race and the part movies have played in it. Getting it "like the cartoon" is shallow compared to the wider issue. That's why it's getting written about in newspapers.

One other misleading argument I wanted to speak to is the idea that talent is more important than race. This falsely implies that by wanting to find non-white actors, a movie is abandoning it's previously-held "talent first" policy. Even if Hollywood is looking for talent, it is looking for type first.

There seems to be this idea that since this is a competition based purely on talent (which it isn't), looking at minority actors translates into less talent. Iow, since there are more white people, there are more white actors to choose from, and that means more people competing, which means people have to beat out a lot of people by having more talent.

In reality, white actors are chosen for things other than talent all the time. There are plenty of movies that feature bad performances by white child actors. Those actors were considered right off over potentially better actors of color because they weren't invited to audition, without anyone really thinking it was a problem.

I knew a guy called into coach a white child actor in a movie who was terrible. His well-reviewed performance on screen was the result of careful editing and trickery on the part of the rest of the cast. The makers of Rabbit Proof Fence chose their cast from a pool of Aboriginal children. When the first kid was cast, nobody worried that restricting the talent pool to white kids meant settling for less talent. And even with a bigger pool to choose from, the Aboriginal children gave far better performances.

Also, questions like "where are they supposed to find a ton of Inuits to choose from?" skip so far ahead they're irrelevant. The relatively small number of Inuits is not an argument for why all the leads being white is inevitable.

That got much longer than I meant it to be. It's just what's tricky about these arguments is they sound so obvious and succinct but actually hold a ton of unexamined assumptions.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I just made it Aboriginal. My instinct is to want to know the actual people, as you say. It's the same with Native Americans. If I can I'd rather say the name of the Nation--though of course people can have families who are from more than one (and non-Native too).