TBH I find that Avatar casting just as misguided as the original white bread casting, only in a different way.
The first error is "ethnicity doesn't matter and white people sell more tickets, bitches."
The second error is: "ethnicity does so matter! but um, this actor isn't the same ethnicity as the inspiration... fuck it the actor's got some Asian in him and all Asians are pretty much the same with their squinty eyes, right?"
I think both spring from ignorance, not malice, but I don't think "Let's cast a half Chinese girl as an Inuit" is any more racially aware than casting a "plain white" girl as one. If you condemn one out of hand, you must condemn the other.
It just gets into what I call "census fail", where people think that the only categories are those that are checkmarks on the census within high immigration countries like Australia and North America. So white people are all interchangeable, and black people, and Asian people, but never never never interchangeable with each other!!!
It's possible to have an Italian believably play a Spaniard, for instance, and the same goes with related Asian ethnicities, but to think that Kristin Kreuk or Maggie Q could believably play Inuits better than the supposedly cast white actress is dumb. None of them look Inuit. (And I found it curious that she chose so many hapas, too--that gets into another curiosity, where anyone who is half-white half-something else is never considered white, but always called the something else; witness Barack Obama, who is invariably called an African-American [has anyone ever called him a Caucasian-American?].)
But I'm not an Avatar fan so I don't really have a dog in the fight, lol.
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The first error is "ethnicity doesn't matter and white people sell more tickets, bitches."
The second error is: "ethnicity does so matter! but um, this actor isn't the same ethnicity as the inspiration... fuck it the actor's got some Asian in him and all Asians are pretty much the same with their squinty eyes, right?"
I think both spring from ignorance, not malice, but I don't think "Let's cast a half Chinese girl as an Inuit" is any more racially aware than casting a "plain white" girl as one. If you condemn one out of hand, you must condemn the other.
It just gets into what I call "census fail", where people think that the only categories are those that are checkmarks on the census within high immigration countries like Australia and North America. So white people are all interchangeable, and black people, and Asian people, but never never never interchangeable with each other!!!
It's possible to have an Italian believably play a Spaniard, for instance, and the same goes with related Asian ethnicities, but to think that Kristin Kreuk or Maggie Q could believably play Inuits better than the supposedly cast white actress is dumb. None of them look Inuit. (And I found it curious that she chose so many hapas, too--that gets into another curiosity, where anyone who is half-white half-something else is never considered white, but always called the something else; witness Barack Obama, who is invariably called an African-American [has anyone ever called him a Caucasian-American?].)
But I'm not an Avatar fan so I don't really have a dog in the fight, lol.