When we talk about America, people will
always think about “American dream” “freedom” “equality” or other noble words.
It seems that only America is judging our worlds of right or wrong. However, America’s
human rights issue is not as good as it looks like. For example, the black
rights movement is only decades of history, and the Asian group’s rights
movement trend is even worse, At least, for the racial discrimination issue in
Hollywood, it is more than serious than the common expect. As the United States
as a multicultural country, white people to non-white group ratio is not as
high as European countries. But the most money-making actors and actresses’
ratio of white to non-white group is much higher than the real society’s proportion.
In current Hollywood society, the black
actors and actress are mostly casted in the action films, and they are not
likely to appear in other genres of movies such as romance comedies. They may
only play specific roles in specific films. In other word, their choices of
playing roles in films are very limited compared to white groups, even in the
action movies, the blacks’s choices cannot been fully respect. For example, in
the 007 movies series, James Bond casting has changed numerous fitness and
handsome white actors, but none of them is a black Bond. From my point of view,
Idris Elba in The Wire is a rather outstanding figure to cast as James Bond.
His calm and influcial voice and his moving acting is what I expect Bond to be
like. If Bond has to be a Scottish white man, apart from the first James Bond
actor Sean connery, all other James bond actors exist unclear nationality issue
with the real bond. In addition, if we count the white actors playing non-white
roles, we could not even conclude them in one page.
In 21st century, Hollywood are
indeed gradually accepting a wider range of multicultural casting for movies,
but after a decade past, the progress is still slow. Non-white actors still
play substantially to white actors, the blacks are, the Asian’s status are even
worse.
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ReplyDeleteYeah I totally agree with you about how crazy it is that people will turn a blind eye to a bunch of white people playing, say, Egyptians but when Idris Elba is considered (just CONSIDERED, not even given the part) for the part of white-guy, James Bond everyone goes nuts. It’s also interesting that you mentioned non-white actors are cast more in action movies rather than rom-coms and so on as I was reading something not long ago (no idea where, sorry) that was explaining that there is more non-white and female representation in the science-fiction media genre more than any other. Whoever wrote the thing I was reading was saying it’s funny that science fiction is the most diverse genre, almost as if it is more acceptable to see coloured people or women main characters if they are surrounded by aliens and strange technology.
ReplyDeleteNice post :)
Fun read! Yes, I fully agree with you about the way Hollywood disregards the fact that they are choosing white actors to play coloured roles. Like the fact that high grossing film 'The Last Samurai' depicted Tom Cruise a white male as the last samurai in a Japanese context? Really.
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