Color blind casting

"If I get your basic position, and correct me if I don't, whites playing non-white roles is a kind of lying, but non-whites playing white roles isn't. Is that it, put bluntly?"

"But Dan makes a good point. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If it's not okay to send in the white guy to sub for the black guy 'cause it's historically inaccurate, then that blade cuts both ways."


Let me address both of these comments. Whites playing non-whites and non-whites playing whites, on the surface, are completely the same. I would defend a position that says that they are equivalent, in general. The differential numbers creates some oddness, but we could leave that out.

There are some characters who could easily be changed racially, without impact ("Kingpin" in Daredevil has no real ethnic identity. On the other hand, shouldn't "Thor's" alter-ego be plausibly Nordic?) Tennyson Hardwick is more molded by his sexual past than his race. I could see a scenario in which he was cast white. "Easy" Rawlins COULDN'T be changed to white without destroying his character. Angelina Jolie playing a mixed-race woman? O.K., if regrettable. Danny Glover playing Marlowe? I found it absurd. There was simply not enough reaction to his race for the time period. This was a vanity project, and an oddity I couldn't take seriously at all.
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Note something: NONE of these cases is a case of a black or Asian actor being made up to play another race (yeah, Eddie Murphy does it--as a joke). There is no equivalency to Chuin, Moto, Chan, Fu Manchu, etc. Or of white actors in blackface ("Check and Double Check", the Amos'n'Andy movie). As I've noted, as soon as white actors could not play these Asian roles, the roles disappeared altogether. So there is a bit of historical stuff here.
Still, I'd be happy for equal treatment--anything else could be considered unfair. My attitude here is the same as it is for Affirmative Action. Do I think it works? Hell, yes. Do I think there are some whites who were hurt by it? Yes, I do. Do I think that the levels of pain and pleasure are equal across the communities? Hell, no: a pinch on one side, a crippling on the other.

However, that doesn't change the fact that there are what I consider to be short-sighted historically myopic people who really don't get it. And then there are plenty of racists who hide behind the rhetoric of "fair play." So I'm not in favor of racially-based Affirmative Action, not because I don't believe it works, but because I don't pick battles I don't think I can win.

The same thing is true in film. No, I don't want James Bond cast black. It does mortify me that the last time there was a black character vaugely comparable to Bond was almost FORTY years ago ("Shaft In Africa"--good with his fists, got laid, spoke foreign languages, conversant with technology). If I really believed that roles would be cast color-blind, I wouldn't care. But they NEVER have been. Do it for real, and sure. Otherwise, I just have to haul up my rant about sexual apartheid in film for the umpteenth time, and eventually that's gonna piss me off.

So...either don't do it at all, or do it for real. Picking and choosing just gives the illusion of progress while preserving the real social boundaries.