Race swapping and whitewashing

[JuliusHackebeil]

Torillian said:

JuliusHackebeil said:

To be fair about what Paatar said: people did in fact care that Ariel was played by a black person. They complained a lot. But I do think that the double standard still exists though. People would riot, if we had a white Blade or Shaft.

That's not a double standard if we look at context. Let's say there's a hypothetical world with 100 superheroes in film, 95 white, 3 hispanic and 2 black. If we go through a new round of making movies there's a much larger impact of whitewashing a single Hispanic or black character than there is of race swapping a single white character. Just because it is the same singular action in each case does not mean they should have the same response. 

I am somewhat persuaded by this line of thinking. I can agree that the individual action is the same but the impact is felt greater because there are more characters from one race than the other. But I cannot agree that this impact should be felt in a positive or negative way.

I cannot agree that there is no double standard. Because the point I make is not about a tally of how many asians are still allowed to be portrayed before optimal representation is reached (and if they overshoot, any asian role can and should be swapped to something else). My point is about principal. It is that one race should not be regarded as a better option than the other. This whole representation game smacks of trench warfare. Of tid for tad morality.

It seems that some people might think that in a world of bad representation character x has less of a right to be race x and should be changed. That is certainly not what I would think. That a white character in a see of white people should be celebrated to become some other race - "yeah, another one for the team." That is not my team. I don't want to fee bad for hispanics when they "lose" another character, because I don't want to see race like that. As a tally to get right.

And the whole representation stuff is unwinnable, because the rules are not even clear (to me at least). The moment you make movies with an international release, what in the world should you represent? And even if you strive for perfect representation of the general population that you portray in film, individual groups of people (of which movies are about) are unrealistically expected to have the same mix of races as the general population.

In short: representation (however it is) should not be a reason to make race swapping more or less okay. That is at least how I think about it.