The Problem with Color-Blind Casting
Warning: this post contains spoilers for the following films and television shows: Euphoria, Get Out, Last Night in Soho, Love, Victor, Never Have I Ever, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Trilogy), Watchmen, Waves, and The White Lotus.
The lack of diversity in the entertainment industry has always been an issue. The last couple years have seen a rise in critiques about the ‘90s sitcom Friends, one of the most popular television shows of all time, and its all-white cast for a show set in a diverse city like New York City. Co-creator Marta Kauffman acknowledged this blindspot earlier this summer and pledged $4 million to Brandeis University’s African and African American studies department as an apology.
Today, it can feel like Hollywood has been doing a better job at representing minorities in major roles. Shows like Never Have I Ever and Orange is the New Black that star LGBTQ and/or people of color have consistently ranked atop streaming charts. Marvel and Star Wars, two of the biggest franchises in the world, now have an abundance of shows starring underrepresented groups, including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and the latest Star Wars trilogy. And revivals of late-2000s shows, like Gossip Girl (2021) and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, that almost exclusively starred cishet white actors in their previous iterations, now feature several queer actors and actors of color.
The cast of ‘Friends’ (left to right): Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Courtney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, and Lisa Kudrow.
Color-blind casting, the trending practice of hiring actors without regard to their race, has made appearances in many prominent projects as of late. Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon have garnered praise for casting actors of colors after both franchises had previously featured exclusively white actors in major roles. The Tony-winning musical Hamilton and Netflix’s Bridgerton stunned audiences with their casting of people of color in historically and/or traditionally-white roles, and both became international sensations.
To Hollywood, color-blind casting (and its many blind casting variants that don’t consider ethnicity, body type, sex, and/or gender), seems like the solution the industry has been searching for to address the lack of diversity the industry has faced throughout its entire existence. Unfortunately, color-blind casting has its (ahem) blindspots and may not be the perfect solution after all.
Sophia Nomvete portrays Princess Disa in ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’.
The most obvious problem with color-blind casting is apparent in its name—”color blind.” It’s akin to every racist’s favorite phrase, “I don’t see color.” In a perfect world, color wouldn’t matter, and that would be great. But, unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. In the real world, in our society where whiteness reigns supreme, our color does matter, whether we want it to or not. “The thing about color-blind casting is that it denies the person standing in front of you,” said Snehal Desai, artistic director of the Asian theater company East West Players, the longest-running theater of color in the United States. “It ignores identity, and for people of color, that further alienates us.” Refusing to see ourselves for our race and skin tone is a refusal to acknowledge our racially-specific experiences and worldview. You cannot see us as complete human beings without being able to acknowledge our racial identities. And, as such, you can’t just pluck any actor of any color and put them in a one-race-fits-all role because, oftentimes, it can amplify racist stereotypes. “Creators may cast blind, thinking their job [is] done, failing to consider that a Black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress—even when cast without any regard to race—can still be problematic,” wrote New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips.
Just look at House of the Dragon, which cast Sonoya Mizuno, who is Asian, as Mysaria, a character Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin wrote as white. At face value, the casting of an Asian actress in a franchise that was criticized for being too white seems progressive, but when we take a look at what role, exactly, Mizuno was given, it raises a few eyebrows. Mysaria is a mistress and sex worker, and she’s often referred to as the “whore” of Daemon Targaryen, one of the show’s lead characters, played by a Matt Smith, a white actor. “The fact that the show’s creators seem to have gone out of their way to cast an Asian woman as a character who is decisively extremely white in the books, whose identity is grounded in her status as a sex worker, and who’s called a whore by an endless stream of the show’s most powerful white men, is certainly...a choice,” wrote Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung. “The perverted sexualization of Asian women, particularly under the white male gaze, is deeply rooted in centuries of western imperialism and the well-documented sexual enslavement of colonized Asian women by the U.S. military,” Cheung continued. “The sexual fetishization of Asian women in the west isn’t a compliment—it’s about colonial power and dominance, rendering the numerous times the white men call Mysaria a ‘whore’ particularly frustrating.”
Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) in ‘House of the Dragon’.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magnum opus Hamilton continues to inspire debate about its controversial color-blind casting. Though I love the musical and defended its decision to cast actors of colors as our country’s Founding Fathers, and for “challenging the idea of what a revolution, especially the people who lead it, can look like,” the criticisms against its use of color-blind casting are valid. “In ‘Hamilton’, the revision of American history is dazzling and important, but it also neglects and negates the parts of the original story that don’t fit so nicely into this narrow model,” wrote Maya Phillips. “The characters’ relationship to slavery, for example, is scarcely mentioned, because it would be incongruous with the triumphant recasting of our country’s first leaders.” Casting Black actors as the country’s white slave-owning Founding Fathers presented a dilemma the show, nor Miranda, had any interest in addressing.
This past weekend, I finally watched the 2019 festival darling Waves, a drama that follows the volatile relationship between an affluent, suburban Black family of four (a father, mother, son, and daughter) in America. Despite mostly enjoying the film myself, I found the film to be problematic in its depiction of a Black family, especially since I knew the film was written and directed by a white man, Trey Edward Shults. He wrote the film without any particular race in mind for the main characters, but Shults ultimately made the family Black after casting Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Tyler, the son. Late in the film, Tyler becomes increasingly erratic and violent. Eventually, he spirals and, in a drunken rage, murders his girlfriend (played by Mexican American actress Alexa Demie of Euphoria fame). The third act of Waves follows Tyler’s sister Emily (Taylor Russel), who begins a relationship with a nice white boy named Luke (Lucas Hedges). Seeing Luke repair his relationship with his dying father helps Emily find the courage to rekindle her relationship with her father Ronald (Sterling K. Brown). Shults surely didn’t intend for this effect, but Tyler and Emily’s storylines both promote stereotypes about Black masculinity and violence. “The narrative of Black males submitted to trauma and violence while white males act as saviors to Black women distracts from Shults’ final message of forgiveness,” wrote film critic Robert Daniels. Fellow film critic Radheyan Simonpillai agreed. “[Tyler] is Black. Both his sexuality and his masculinity are root causes that propel him toward the film’s central tragedy,” Simonpillai explained. “Hedges’s Luke, on the other hand, is white. His sexuality comes off as sensitive, awkward and adorable. He’s a balm in this narrative and stands in stark relief against Tyler’s threatening manhood.”
Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) in ‘Waves’.
Similarly, in my review of Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, I criticized the film’s irresponsible depiction of its lone Black character, John (played by Michael Ajao), who plays a supporting role as the love interest to the film’s lead, Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), a white woman. With Hollywood preferring white love interests over non-white ones, it looked great on paper to have a Black love interest. But this casting caused unintended harm when, in a key scene, Ellie and John initiated consensual sex, until Ellie suddenly has a nightmarish vision and throws John off her bed, screams, and Ellie’s landlord threatens to call the police. To make matters worse, Ellie and John had just come from a costume party and he still had Halloween makeup on, which, when combined with the dramatic lighting effects during Ellie’s panic attack, made John appear frightening. This entire sequence brought to mind the racist “predatory Black man” and “innocent white woman” trope. Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns are both white and likely didn’t consider the racial politics of such a scene between a Black man and a white woman.
HBO’s Euphoria, one of the most popular shows on TV right now, has a diverse cast, but it famously lacks a writers room, with each episode written solely by the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, who—you guessed it—is a cishet white man. 37-year-old Levinson’s lack of genuine connection to the experiences of the Gen Z teens he depicts in Euphoria results in the show’s biggest flaw—its abundance of exploitative representation. As explained by Washington Square News's Deputy Opinion Editor Srishti Bungle, “The only Black male lead in the first season, McKay (Algee Smith), is a football prodigy—already an extension of the common racist stereotyping of Black boys and men as hyper-athletic.” When McKay later gets sexually assaulted as part of a hazing ritual, Levinson fails to do anything productive with the storyline. “In fact,” writes Bungle, “the sexual assault McKay endures is never mentioned for the rest of the season except in passing comments made by Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), his white girlfriend, to her friends.” Even worse, McKay is absent for the majority of the second and most recent season. Instead, another major Black character is introduced in the season, played by Dominic Fike, and he’s a drug addict!
John Ambrose (Jordan Fisher) and Lara Jean (Lana Condor) in ‘To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You’.
The problem with color-blind casting isn’t limited to promoting harmful stereotypes, it can also reinforce the power of white desirability. In the Netflix film To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, the second installment in the To All the Boys trilogy based on Jenny Han’s book series, the filmmakers (led by director Michael Fimognari, a white man) race-bend the character John Ambrose. Despite being written in the books as white, and even appearing in the first film played by a white actor, John was portrayed by Black actor Jordan Fisher in P.S. I Still Love You. The series’s lead character Lara Jean (played by Vietnamese American actress Lana Condor) becomes entwined in a love triangle with John and Peter (Noah Centineo), a white character. She eventually chooses Peter over John.
People of color can be the perpetrators of problematic casting decisions too. The 2021 film adaptation of In the Heights, based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical, faced its own casting controversy despite the filmmakers’ efforts to cast and highlight its diverse, mostly Latino cast. Asian American director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and his team engaged in color-blind casting, in which they claim to have cast the “best” actors in the film’s predominantly Latino roles, resulting in mostly light-skinned Latino actors being cast (and only one major Afro-Latina cast), misrepresenting the film’s setting, Washington Heights, which is predominantly Afro-Latino and dark-skinned. Miranda apologized and wrote, “I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback. I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short. I'm truly sorry.” The film’s lead, Anthony Ramos, said to The Hollywood Reporter, “I think this is a good opportunity for us to hear people, for us as creatives,” and acknowledged there is no debate about the controversy. “There’s no debate about it. You know you can’t, right? Like there’s nothing to debate.”
Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) and Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) in ‘In the Heights’.
Chu is no stranger to this type of controversy, as he faced similar criticisms with his 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, based on the novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan. Chu had an ethnic-blind approach to casting Asian actors in Chinese-specific roles, resulting in several non-Chinese actors like Ken Jeong (Korean American), Nico Santos (Filipino American), and Sonoya Mizuno (Japanese English) being cast in ethnically-Chinese roles, perpetuating the racist idea that all Asians look alike. In addition, racially-ambiguous, mixed-race actors, including Henry Golding (Malaysian and English), Gemma Chan (Chinese and Scottish), Remy Hii (Chinese, Malaysian, and English) and, again, Sonoya Mizuno (Japanese and Scottish), were cast as rich and attractive Chinese Singaporeans. Intentional or not, the casting of so many mixed-race Asian actors, specifically those with white backgrounds and with Eurocentric features, continued Hollywood’s tradition of glorifying Asian actors who are mixed-raced, ethnically ambiguous, and/or white-passing, like Keanu Reeves, Maggie Q, Vanessa Hudgens, and Chloe Bennett.
In the Heights and Crazy Rich Asians’s respective colorism controversies are symptoms of the larger diversity problem in Hollywood. While, yes, many projects have been casting actors of color in order to promote themselves as progressive, it matters which actors of colors are being cast—light-skinned and/or racially-ambiguous ones. The Bridgerton television series, adapted from the books by Julia Quinn, was celebrated for its color-blind casting of actors in major roles in a show set in the British Regency era (early 1800s). Like Hamilton, Bridgerton had Black and brown characters set on equal footing as white ones. But, as writer Amoy Daley wrote in The Boar, “Most of the non-white cast members are mixed-race, and while this is not an issue in itself, it demonstrates TV’s discomfort with placing darker-skinned actors in prominent speaking roles.” Daley explained, “The character of Simon’s dad who is played by a dark-skinned man, is also the only character in the show who could be considered a villain.” And all of the non-white women on the show are light-skinned, demonstrating “the industry’s reluctance to cast dark-skinned women in prominent roles.” When Chu responded to the criticism that In the Heights lacked proper representation of dark-skinned Afro-Latinos, he pointed out to the large number of such actors in the background. And that’s just it—these types of actors are too often relegated to the background, as backup dancers, rarely ever leads.
The cast of ‘Bridgerton’ Season 2.
Actress DeWanda Wise, who recently starred in Jurassic World Dominion, called this “digestible diversity.” Meaning, non-white actors had to have Eurocentric features, like Asians with freckles, Black women with lighter skin, etc. Wise said that oftentimes in “all ethnicities” casting calls, “without fail, you’ll wonder who got that [part], and it’ll be someone German (whose father is kind of half-black).”
Blind casting can also be a problem in animated productions. Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon featured a fictional world and cast of characters inspired by the cultural richness of Southeast Asia. Yet, the majority of its voice cast were East Asian actors: Awkwafina (Chinese-Korean), Gemma Chan (Chinese-Scottish), Daniel Dae Kim (Korean), Benedict Wong (Chinese-English), and Sandra Oh (Korean). This lack of care wasn’t helped by the fact that neither of the film’s co-directors were Asian. “At best, they didn’t know there was a difference,” I wrote in my review of the film. “At worst, they did know but didn’t care.” After all, many people think all Asians are alike.
“I prefer when [a role is] ethnically specific because then I know [that] what I’m going in for is right for me, and it’s written for someone who looks like me, as opposed to throwing darts in the dark and hoping they stick,” said one anonymous Black actor named Allen. DeWanda Wise agreed. “It could be anyone [in the role], which on the one hand is nice,” she said, “because you’re not reading something and thinking, this is what you think of me [as a black woman]?” But, she added, the lack of specificity can be frustrating and makes her feel like a diversity token.
DeWanda Wise in ‘Jurassic World Dominion’.
Arjun Gupta, an Indian American actor who’s had roles in shows like Nurse Jackie and How to Get Away With Murder, believes the downside of color-blind casting is that it exacerbates the number of actors of color in supporting roles. “They opened up ‘all ethnicities’ and I feel like what ended up happening was that people of color just started playing secondary parts—‘Oh look, we have a diverse cast’—but you’re not really servicing them with leads … you’re almost just fulfilling what you ‘have’ to do,” he said. And there is truth to this! The biggest film of the year so far is Top Gun: Maverick, the legacy sequel to the Tom Cruise hit from 1986. While the original Top Gun had an entirely white cast, the sequel has much more diversity—in its supporting cast and background characters. Three of the main characters are played by white actors: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, and Jennifer Connelly. Cruise’s character is forced to teach a new class of elite TOPGUN graduates, portrayed by Teller; Glen Powell, a white actor; Monica Barbaro, whose mother is of Mexican and Nicaraguan descent; Lewis Pullman, a white actor; Jay Ellis, a Black actor; Danny Ramirez, who is of Colombian and Mexican descent; and Greg Tarzan Davis, a Black actor—and these are the ones with speaking roles. The other graduates who have no lines and can be seen in the background throughout the film are all Asian, played by actors Raymond Lee, Kara Wang, and Manny Jacinto. Yes, MANNY JACINTO! And out of all the graduates, only Teller and Powell can really be considered major supporting characters. The rest are treated like cosmetic diversity.
Manny Jacinto, most known for his role as Jason Mendoza in ‘The Good Place’.
Diverse casting without proper consideration can be problematic when it comes to body size as well. In Euphoria, Barbie Ferreira plays Kat Hernandez, the show’s sole fat character. But she’s not like the dexualized fat characters you typically see in other shows and movies. No, Kat is sexual and desirable, and creator Sam Levinson goes over the top to prove this, to the point that Kat becomes hypersexualized instead of being written with proper care and nuance. “In the first episode of season one, Kat has to prove she’s not prudish by losing her virginity to a random boy she met at a party. In the third, she’s fetishized on a PornHub-liked platform and decides that a sexual revolution will give her the confidence she previously lacked,” wrote Washington Square News's staff writer Sade Collier. “‘Euphoria’ careened from one side of the spectrum to the other with a story that hypersexualizes a fat woman to give her value.” Being the token fat character is also problematic, as Ferreira’s casting still imposes a certain standard for what’s acceptable for fat women. “In order to be seen as valuable in that sphere, fat women must have an hourglass figure; they must remain as close as possible to conventional standards of body size and shape,” Collier added. “The problem doesn’t reside in Ferreira identifying with a fat body type. Rather, the fault lies with casting agencies only moving forward with Ferreira-esque body types: curvy and small-framed. It speaks to how we view fat bodies and how we determine which ones deserve attention. Casting practices seem to demand that fat women be fat enough to fetishize without diverging too far from the norm to be hypersexualized.”
Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira) in ‘Euphoria’.
So, what can really be done, then? I think there are two major things the entertainment industry can do to help produce meaningful, effective, and diverse representation in media.
The first is to have more diversity behind the scenes, from writers and directors, to executive level decision-makers. These roles are still overrepresented by cishet white men. While Friends co-creator Marta Kaufman and star David Schwimmer agreed the show could’ve done a better job of being more diverse, fellow star Lisa Kudrow disagreed. “You write what you know,” she said. “[Co-creators Marta Kaufman and David Crane, both white] have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color.” Instead, Kudrow pinpointed a different issue. “The big problem that I was seeing was, ‘Where’s the apprenticeship?’” People in power need to establish proper pipelines across all facets of the entertainment industry and build up experienced and diverse talents.
Donald Glover and Lena Dunham in ‘Girls’.
When Lena Dunham’s Girls debuted on HBO it faced lots of criticism for having an all-white cast in a show set in New York City, a racially-diverse city. This criticism was laughably addressed when Dunham cast Donald Glover as her character’s love interest for a two-episode arc in the beginning of the second season. To top it off, Glover’s character was a Black Republican! Dunham, who co-wrote almost every episode of Girls, acknowledged the show’s lack of diversity. Her full statement addressing the issue read:
"I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, 'I hear this and I want to respond to it.' And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately.”
To some, Dunham was the wrong target of these criticisms. “Where are all the pieces taking television studios and networks to task for commissioning shows that that have, for the most part, been created by and will be run by middle-aged, upper-middle-class, heterosexual white men?” asked Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan. “Why are we holding Lena Dunham’s feet to the fire, instead of the heads of networks and studios? That troubles me, not least because it’s easier (and lazier) to attack a 25-year-old woman who’s just starting out than to attack the men twice her age who actually control the industry.” The anonymous actor, Allen, echoed this sentiment. “The fact is that when you go into these rooms at higher levels, whether it be a producer’s session or a director’s session, there’s no diversity [in the people] sitting behind the table.”
The cast of ‘Girls’ (left to right): Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet.
To others, the lack of diversity in Girls was not worth giving attention to, especially since it was an honest depiction of segregated America. “Really, is it that difficult to fathom 4 white girls living in Brooklyn, who have no black friends? It’s not for me,” wrote IndieWire staff writer Tambay Obenson. “I live in Brooklyn, and it’s as segregated as many other multi-racial/etehnic community.” Girls wasn’t the first show to have an all-white cast, and wasn’t the last. Instead of criticizing Girls, Obenson said, “We should invest all that energy into supporting those black filmmakers, content creators, movements, initiatives, causes, organizations, etc, etc, etc. that we see some value in.”
The great playwright August Wilson, whose stories chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century, spoke out against color-blind casting, arguing that casting Black actors in white roles denies Black people of their own humanity and history. “It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large,” he said. “The idea of color-blind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. For the record, we reject it again.” Instead, like Obsenson, Wilson advocated for institutions that supported art created by and for people of color, telling their own stories.
Regina King stars as Angela Abar in ‘Watchmen’ (2019).
One of the most successful examples of thoughtful diversity behind the scenes is HBO’s 2019 Watchmen television series, based on the 1986 comics series of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Instead of being a direct adaptation of the original comics, the TV series was a continuation, taking place 34 years after the events of the comics. The show’s creator, Damon Lindelof (the writer and co-creator of Lost), was inspired to make the show focus on anti-Black racism in America after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.” The show’s lead character was a Black woman, played by Regina King, but Lindelof was a white man. To properly tell this story, Lindelof intentionally hired a diverse group of writers, half were Black and half were women, which he claimed was the most diverse writers’ room he’d ever assembled. The show was a big hit, amassing tons of awards, including 11 Emmys, and even a Peabody Award! The show’s depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in its first episode was the first time millions of Americans learned of the real-life tragedy. “When ‘Watchmen’ aired, there were a lot of smart people who said, ‘How come I never heard about this?’” Washington Post reporter DeNeen Brown explained. “They said, ‘Did this really happen?’” Before Watchmen, filmmakers were unsuccessful in their efforts to acquire funding to document and tell the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre. But Watchmen served as a catalyst, sparking renewed interest in getting this story told. Since the show’s release, the massacre was depicted in HBO’s Lovecraft Country, several in-depth documentaries were produced about the massacre, including Brown’s Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, and MTV announced it was creating a new limited series based on the massacre with Courtney B. Vance and Angela Bassett.
The cast of ‘Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella’ (1997), left to right: Brandy Norwood, Paolo Montalbán, Woopi Goldberg, and Victor Garber.
The second thing the industry can do is engage in race-conscious or color-conscious, rather than color-blind, casting. Unlike the latter, race/color-conscious casting acknowledges the impact, dimensions, and importance that an actor’s race and skin color can bring to a role. One of the most famous examples of race-conscious casting is the 1997 TV movie Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, which starred Black singer-actress Brandy in the titular role, alongside a Black queen (played by Whoopi Goldberg), white king (played by Victor Garber), and Filipino prince (played by Paolo Montalbán). “The casting of this was one of the hardest things I’d ever done,” said the film’s Executive Producer Debra Martin-Chase. “We made the decision we were going to do, not color-blind casting, but diverse casting.” Casting a Black woman to be one of the most popular fairytale princesses was unheard of at the time, but it had a profound effect on its star. “I thought I was ugly,” Brandy recalls. “I turned out to be the first Black princess. That’s pretty mind-blowing.”
A more recent example of proper color-conscious casting can be seen in the Watchmen television series, in which they turned Doctor Manhattan, who was depicted as white in the comics, into a Black man (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). It’s a meaningful creative decision because Doctor Manhattan is essentially a god in the Watchmen universe. Malcolm X once said, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman.” It matters that Lindelof and his creative team made the lead character of a traditionally majority-white series a Black woman (Regina King), that this Black woman helped defeat neo-Nazis, and that she, herself, becomes a god by the end of the series (at least, it’s hinted that she does).
Race-conscious casting can be effective in all-white productions as well. HBO’s The White Lotus, currently nominated for 20 Emmy awards, eight of which are acting noms for its predominantly white cast, was both a ratings and critical hit. Set on a Hawaiian resort and featuring a cast of wealthy and privileged characters, the show was a satire on class and whiteness, so it made sense that the cast would be played by all-white actors. Two supporting characters were played by actors of color, Belinda (played by Natasha Rothwell), a Black woman and the resort’s spa manager, and Kai (played by Kekoa Scott Kekumano), a Native Hawaiian staffer. Both characters are abused and taken advantage of by the white characters vacationing at the resort, hammering down the point that marginalized groups are often suffering at the hands of those with more power, who are often white.
‘The White Lotus’ cast (left to right): Sydney Sweeney, Brittany O’Grady, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Lacy, Connie Britton, Fred Hechinger, Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge, Natasha Rothwell, and Murray Bartlett.
The power of race-conscious casting isn’t always this blatantly obvious, either. In 2017, Jordan Peele’s debut feature Get Out became a breakout hit. The psychological horror offered biting commentary about anti-Black racism in America. At one point in the film, an auction is held for a white audience, with Daniel Kaluuya’s character Chris being the prize. Whoever won would be able to transfer their consciousness into, and completely take over, Chris’s Black body. The resemblance to slave auctions is obvious, but there was one aspect of the scene that confused many viewers—the inclusion of a sole Asian character also participating in the auction. Before the auction, the Asian man, Hiroki Tanaka (played by Japanese American actor Yasuhiko Oyama), asked Chris in a thick Asian accent, “Is the African American experience an advantage or disadvantage?” The symbolism presented by the Tanaka character was multifaceted. This character’s inclusion widened the film’s social critique of racism by expanding beyond the black-white binary, and it reminded us of Asians’ complicity in perpetuating anti-Black racism and upholding white supremacy. “Peele points here to a long history of Asians enriching themselves at the expense of black people,” wrote Melissa Phruksachart, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow for the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. “Whether it’s Asian Americans who protest affirmative action because it gives spots to black and brown students that a ‘deserving’ Asian student might take, or the everyday Asian Americans who uphold structures of white supremacy through their work, thoughts, and actions, without interrogating anti-blackness.” Tanaka asking Chris for the pros and cons of being Black represented the real-world belief prevalent among non-Black people that it’s actually better to be Black in America than anything else. And, finally, the character’s Asian accent brought attention to the “perpetual foreigner” concept, the idea that, despite being considered the “model minority,” Asian Americans will always be considered outsiders. Peele’s inclusion of Tanaka was a subtle yet brilliant decision that added depth to a film already filled to the brim with meaning.
Hiroki Tanaka (Yasuhiko Oyama), seen in the back, participates in the auction in ‘Get Out’.
Race-conscious casting isn’t a bulletproof solution, however. Shows like Netflix’s Never Have I Ever and Hulu’s Love, Victor show the shortcomings of such casting when they both introduced new love interests competing against the respective show’s white love interests. Des (played by Indian American actor Anirudh Pisharody) is Devi’s new boyfriend in the third season of Never Have I Ever, but by the end of the season they break up and Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) chooses Ben (Jaren Lewison), the white boy she’s been having a will-they-won’t-they relationship with all series long. In the second season of Love, Victor, Rahim (Filipino-Iranian American actor Anthony Keyvan), a Muslim Iranian teen, is the titular character’s new love interest. However, by the third and final season, Victor (Michael Cimino), goes back to his first love, Benji (George Sear), who’s white. Despite the race-conscious casting, white desirability continued to be upheld.
I used to believe everything needed to be diverse, and I used to call out projects that lacked it. When the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women came out, which starred many talented white actors, including Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Timothee Chalamet, and Meryl Streep, I tweeted that the film was “White People: The Movie.” I absolutely LOVED Little Women when I saw it in 2019, to the point I named it as one of my favorite films of the year. I’ve since changed my mind about diversity in media—not that we shouldn’t have diversity, but that not everything needs to have diversity. I realized my initial criticism of the film’s trailer was shortsighted. This was a film written and directed by a white woman, based on an 1868 novel written by a white woman, set in the late 1800s about a white family, with a plot that’s not about racism or slavery, so what purpose would having a token Black character, or any character of color, serve, other than further tokenization or to fill a diversity quota? Like I said last year, do we really want someone like Lena Dunham writing Black characters?
Victor (Michael Cimino) and Rahim (Anthony Keyvan) in ‘Love, Victor’.
Having diverse decision-makers behind the scenes can help steer clear of avoidable mistakes, especially when these decision-makers are from the same marginalized communities their projects aim to represent. Jon Imparato, director of cultural arts and education at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, recalled a sharp uptick in requests for good transgender actors after Caitlyn Jenner came out publicly as trangender. “I say, ‘Is she a hooker and does she get murdered at the end?’” Imparato explained. “If so, we want nothing to do with it. We’ve heard that story.” Every project needs to involve self-reflection among the stakeholders and there needs to be a discussion over whether or not certain stories can be effectively told from the parties involved. “It’s absolutely OK to say this role calls for a specific actor,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, who wrote the book for In the Heights and its film adaptation. “And if you’re telling me you can’t find that actor, you’re not equipped to do the play.”
Color-blind and race-conscious casting can be a great thing, and it can be meaningful and impactful when taken with proper care. Ultimately, the goal shouldn’t just be to reappropriate white roles but for people of color to be our own storytellers and have people who look like us be represented any and everywhere.
