Imagine a world where everyone on Earth had roughly the same skin color. How would it happen? I don’t know, imagine! Maybe COVID-45qanon affects skin color. Maybe God snaps her fingers and we all turn chartreuse. I picture a super popular K-Pop/HipHop documentary directed by Harry Styles that starts a worldwide trend of everyone marrying someone differently looking and ten generations later we’re all looking like Mariah Carey, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, or Bruno Mars, only more so.
I maintain my previous statement: color blind casting is the best practice unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. Black Panther must be African: it's a vital part of his identity which cannot be served by casting a white actor. Magneto must be cast as a Jewish Holocaust survivor: it's a vital part of his identity. Shang-Chi must be Asian, likely Chinese. It's a vital part of his identity.
Magic: the Gathering is making Aragorn black in their upcoming set, and that's great! There's no reason Superman, Steve Rogers, Batman, Thor, Tony Stark, pick your hero couldn't be recast too.
This whole debate is ridiculous (which is not to criticize the article: I agree with it)
Are you imagining Steve Rogers' origin as Captain America being divorced from the WW2 setting? If not, making him black requires either clearly addressing or re-envisioning away 1940s racial discrimination in the US military.
So you're saying "the United States was so racist in the 1940s so Captain America has to be White" which, frankly, I find rather repugnant. This is not a difficult story problem to solve.
You can find it repugnant, but it's an accurate statement: it was a struggle to get the U.S. military in the 1940s to even accept black soldiers in combat positions -- the same organization administering an untested chemical to a black man in an experiment to make him a "super solider" would have Tuskegee vibes all over it in any even semi-historical atmosphere.
I mean, it's fiction, so you can imagine anything you want, but then we're simply back to my point about "re-envisioning away 1940s racial discrimination in the US military." You can *pretend* that the military would have recruited men (and, gee, why limit it to men at that point? Let's have it be gender balanced too, since we're pretending) of all races in equal proportion to the super soldier program and chosen to administer the serum to a black candidate on a meritocratic basis, but that's not what would have happened in anything approaching a real telling of American history from the era. To me that's not just ahistorical, but in fact deeply disrespectful to the real life people of color who struggled for equality in that period because you're explicitly pretending the 1940s U.S. military wasn't a racially segregated institution.
Whining about how you can’t imagine a fictional comic book story about how Captain American is black and therefore it’s inaccurate so shouldn’t be printed” isn’t the argument you think it is
If your argument is really that a fictional comic book can’t print a black Captain America because there’s no way it could happen is just dumb, absurd and a ridiculous thing to spend your time arguing about on the internet.
I specifically said you can imagine it, but only by either divorcing the character from his WW2 origins, e.g., by making him a Gulf War vet, for example, or by pretending the U.S. military (and at a broader level American society) in the 1940s had a dramatically different attitude toward race than it actually did. To do the former is to discard something that is traditionally a *huge* part of the character, who was developed by two Jewish creators as a specific rebuttal to Nazi "ubermensch" rhetoric; to do the latter is to portray a past that's no less falsely idealized than white supremacist fantasies of the past.
This was really well said and very timely given that I was just discussing racism, the K-pop industry, and Chinese K-pop idols' support for China on Reddit a few minutes ago. It hits home for me personally, as well. There's a number of studies that seem to indicate that the concept of race is incredibly general and....kinda meaningless tbh. We're all so racially mixed that it's incredibly difficult to find people who are purely, 100% White or Black or any other race. And this post has a lot of personal relevance to me, as the product of the marriage between a Swedish man adopted by a German Jewish guy and a Japanese, Chinese, & Native Hawaiian woman. Nearly all of my relatives on my mom's side are in marriages that are, to varying extents, cross-racial, and my mom has at least one White ancestor that we know of. Hell, the culture my mom grew up in has been shaped (and continues to be shaped) by the interactions between Hawaiian, Portugese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, & Filipino plantation workers. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Glad the piece resonated. Your family sounds great. I don't feel any guilt but I sorta feel I messed up by just marrying another boring white person. All I have is my Jewish heritage. On the up side, I do like my kid, even if he is darn white.
I actually have had my doubts about non-white actors being shoehorned into period pieces and the like, but when you have prominent voices complaining so loudly about the skin colour of mythical creatures, and now middle-aged man debating the casting of the Little Mermaid, then to my mind it's over. Whatever lingering doubts I may have had have been put to rest by the subtle, and at times not so subtle, racism that keeps condemning the casting of people of colour (like myself).
If you're putting a parenthetical reference to MJ not being white in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Captain Marvel probably deserves one for (but the main secondary characters aren't!).
(Quibble, quibble, quibble, but pedantic quibbles aside, this is another good one.)
You can do that, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the single deadliest war in American history and which has been hugely influential on the country's development for the past 170 years isn't going to be a perennial ripe subject for film making.
Really well said Carl.
I maintain my previous statement: color blind casting is the best practice unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. Black Panther must be African: it's a vital part of his identity which cannot be served by casting a white actor. Magneto must be cast as a Jewish Holocaust survivor: it's a vital part of his identity. Shang-Chi must be Asian, likely Chinese. It's a vital part of his identity.
Magic: the Gathering is making Aragorn black in their upcoming set, and that's great! There's no reason Superman, Steve Rogers, Batman, Thor, Tony Stark, pick your hero couldn't be recast too.
This whole debate is ridiculous (which is not to criticize the article: I agree with it)
Are you imagining Steve Rogers' origin as Captain America being divorced from the WW2 setting? If not, making him black requires either clearly addressing or re-envisioning away 1940s racial discrimination in the US military.
So you're saying "the United States was so racist in the 1940s so Captain America has to be White" which, frankly, I find rather repugnant. This is not a difficult story problem to solve.
You can find it repugnant, but it's an accurate statement: it was a struggle to get the U.S. military in the 1940s to even accept black soldiers in combat positions -- the same organization administering an untested chemical to a black man in an experiment to make him a "super solider" would have Tuskegee vibes all over it in any even semi-historical atmosphere.
I mean, it's fiction, so you can imagine anything you want, but then we're simply back to my point about "re-envisioning away 1940s racial discrimination in the US military." You can *pretend* that the military would have recruited men (and, gee, why limit it to men at that point? Let's have it be gender balanced too, since we're pretending) of all races in equal proportion to the super soldier program and chosen to administer the serum to a black candidate on a meritocratic basis, but that's not what would have happened in anything approaching a real telling of American history from the era. To me that's not just ahistorical, but in fact deeply disrespectful to the real life people of color who struggled for equality in that period because you're explicitly pretending the 1940s U.S. military wasn't a racially segregated institution.
Whining about how you can’t imagine a fictional comic book story about how Captain American is black and therefore it’s inaccurate so shouldn’t be printed” isn’t the argument you think it is
If your argument is really that a fictional comic book can’t print a black Captain America because there’s no way it could happen is just dumb, absurd and a ridiculous thing to spend your time arguing about on the internet.
Good day
I specifically said you can imagine it, but only by either divorcing the character from his WW2 origins, e.g., by making him a Gulf War vet, for example, or by pretending the U.S. military (and at a broader level American society) in the 1940s had a dramatically different attitude toward race than it actually did. To do the former is to discard something that is traditionally a *huge* part of the character, who was developed by two Jewish creators as a specific rebuttal to Nazi "ubermensch" rhetoric; to do the latter is to portray a past that's no less falsely idealized than white supremacist fantasies of the past.
You lack imagination
This was really well said and very timely given that I was just discussing racism, the K-pop industry, and Chinese K-pop idols' support for China on Reddit a few minutes ago. It hits home for me personally, as well. There's a number of studies that seem to indicate that the concept of race is incredibly general and....kinda meaningless tbh. We're all so racially mixed that it's incredibly difficult to find people who are purely, 100% White or Black or any other race. And this post has a lot of personal relevance to me, as the product of the marriage between a Swedish man adopted by a German Jewish guy and a Japanese, Chinese, & Native Hawaiian woman. Nearly all of my relatives on my mom's side are in marriages that are, to varying extents, cross-racial, and my mom has at least one White ancestor that we know of. Hell, the culture my mom grew up in has been shaped (and continues to be shaped) by the interactions between Hawaiian, Portugese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, & Filipino plantation workers. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Glad the piece resonated. Your family sounds great. I don't feel any guilt but I sorta feel I messed up by just marrying another boring white person. All I have is my Jewish heritage. On the up side, I do like my kid, even if he is darn white.
I actually have had my doubts about non-white actors being shoehorned into period pieces and the like, but when you have prominent voices complaining so loudly about the skin colour of mythical creatures, and now middle-aged man debating the casting of the Little Mermaid, then to my mind it's over. Whatever lingering doubts I may have had have been put to rest by the subtle, and at times not so subtle, racism that keeps condemning the casting of people of colour (like myself).
If you're putting a parenthetical reference to MJ not being white in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Captain Marvel probably deserves one for (but the main secondary characters aren't!).
(Quibble, quibble, quibble, but pedantic quibbles aside, this is another good one.)
I imagine a world where no one makes Civil War movies.
You can do that, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the single deadliest war in American history and which has been hugely influential on the country's development for the past 170 years isn't going to be a perennial ripe subject for film making.