New column on Afropunk - Racebending: When Will Hollywood Stop the Madness?
From West Side Story to The Prince of Persia, there has been a long tradition in Hollywood of casting white actors in roles intended for people of color. In an industry where minorities don’t get enough good roles as it is, it’s always a little disconcerting for me to watch California-born Natalie Wood play a Puerto Rican immigrant, or peep Mickey Rooney with taped back eye-lids hamming it up in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It would be nice to think that we’re past these kinds of painful and unpleasant features of Tinsel Town’s yesteryear, but even today there are reverberations of the same idea: Hollywood just doesn’t want to hire people of color, and when they do, rarely do they ever want to show them in a light outside of a certain mode – the “spicy” Latina, the sassy black woman, the nerdy Asian. Even though today most filmmakers know that blackface and all variations thereof are, you know, probably not a good idea - studios have still tried to circumvent the risk of protests and petitions by simply changing roles intended for people of color to white roles. But it’s not that simple…
Read the full blog post here!