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Last month, a casting agent for Peter Jackson’s latest film, an adaptation of The Hobbit was fired after he dismissed an actor for being "too dark" to play a hobbit. This month, a group is protesting the casting of Black British actor Idris Elba in the movie Thor. These are fictional -- fantasy -- characters. What gives?
In late November, a casting agent for Peter Jackson’s latest film, an adaptation of The Hobbit was fired after he dismissed an actor for being "too dark" to play a hobbit. The actor, Naz Humphreys , who is of Pakistani heritage, went public after attending a casting call in Hamilton, New Zealand. According to AFP,
The independent contractor who made the comments and placed an advertisement in a local newspaper specifying female hobbit extras "should have light skin tones" had been dismissed, a spokesman for Jackson's Wingnut Films said. "No such instructions were given, the crew member in question took it upon themselves to do that and it's not something we instructed or condoned.”
....The Waikato Times said video footage showed the casting agent telling people at the audition: "We are looking for light-skinned people. I'm not trying to be -- whatever. It's just the brief. You've got to look like a hobbit."
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. Image courtesy New Line.
Since a hobbit is a mythological creature, conceived by author J.R.R. Tolkien, who didn’t explicitly describe the hobbits as "Caucasian and native English-speaking" (even though some have clearly debated it), what gives? This is not the first time the "White-washing" of characters has been debated, and not the only time when fictional characters written as either non-White or of no discernable racial identification are cast as Caucasian once adapted to film or television. A recent example of this was the film Avatar: The Last Airbender -- though the children’s cartoon took place in an all-Asian world, when adapted to film, all of the characters were suddenly White.
The Hobbit is not only an example of blatant discrimination based on physical characteristics of a human being. It is an example of discrimination that extends to a character that is not only not human, but a mystical creature which does not exist in reality (or at least my reality, that is). To me, this is mind puzzling. This particular case is an example of the purposeful "Whiteification" of mainstream popular culture, in which industry executives and workers feel that, in order to appease a larger audience, they have to make them as socially palatable and relatable to the general public as possible -- which means they need to strip out the qualities that might suggest otherwise.
This particular news item sadly justifies two arguments that, while evident to some (who have been repeating the same complaint over and over again), are conveniently dismissed by the majority of the public:
It’s hard out there for ethnic minority actors.
Some folks would pull out statistics now and say, “Well, isn’t the majority of the population in North America White? So shouldn’t all the movies, television shows, music video, print publication, online publications, mainstream newspapers be populated by White people?" Call me a liberal pinko, but an all-White media doesn’t adequately reflect the real world. People from various ethnicities, cultures, genders and sexual orientations intermingle with each other every day. There are real stories and shared commonalities that all people have. The problem is, is that when it comes to mainstream entertainment outlets, it is more acceptable if those stories come from a singular point of view.
Because of this, stories that originally were based on ethnic minority characters are often played by White actors in film and television -- which means less work for ethnic minority actors. Actor Angelina Jolie pissed off a lot of brown folks playing Marianne Pearl, a biracial woman, in A Mighty Heart. Though Jolie's partner Brad Pitt said this about the role: “We hope the film can increase understanding between people of all faiths"), many actors tend to shy away from addressing their controversial decisions regarding the intricacies of race- based casting in mainstream media. From Racialicious:
Clearly, pictures of Mariane Pearl show that she has brown skin, curly hair and other features that indicate she is a brown woman. There are few good roles for women of color in Hollywood; thus I find it disturbing that Jolie would take this role.
Will Jolie tan her skin or apply burnt cork? Will she curl her hair
