Let’s face it. Hollywood has never had a stellar track record when it comes to race and representation. Well, unless you’re like super into white people. If you are, Hollywood’s bent over backwards to give you the white folks you crave. Heck, the film industry has even plunked white actors in non-white roles over and over again to ensure MAXIMUM whiteness. Thrilling news for David Duke, not so much for the rest of us.
As #OscarsSoWhite has shown, Hollywood still has a long way to go when it comes to showcasing and celebrating non-white performers, creators, characters and viewpoints. This week, ScreenCrush performed a valuable public service by whipping up a video supercut exhibiting the movie industry’s tendency to cast white actors in non-white roles. It’s a queasy ride through history complete with tons of film luminaries (like Katherine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier) attempting to embody another ethnicity on the big screen. If you think that phenomenon is just a thing of the past, be prepared to get bummed out by the number of 2010s clips that made it into the final cut.
An uneasy mix of the uncomfortable and uncomfortably familiar, this supercut serves as a fascinating document for displaying the different ways Hollywood has dunked their productions in whiteness. A lot of the depictions featured in this video come across as too ridiculous to be true, but entries from Pan, Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings demonstrate that whitewashing is still alive and well in a slightly tweaked format. Hit play on the video at the top of the post and let the cringing begin!
(via AV Club)
