Grassroots Oppression

sfoster

Staff Member
Moderator
Society is so weird these days.

If I make a movie with a bunch of white men I'll get accused to nepotism or whitewashing.
If I make a movie with a bunch of hispanics then I'll get accused of cultural appropriation.

You can't win no matter what you do there's going to be a grassroots movement telling you that you're offensive for making it.
 
At the indie level I think you're good, this usually comes up at the mainstream level as far as being diverse with cast and awards having diversity. I mean, if your film calls for it, it calls for it! So don't cave to PC at this level. Wait until you're under the microscope and then have this argument with yourself. ;)
 
I think most projects benefit from including people from a range of backgrounds.

But don't be afraid of pissing people off - objections and protests could be just the thing to kick start your career. Billy Joel's career was help tremendously by the Catholic Church's objections to his song "Only the Good Die Young," and plenty of newer artists have benefited from the attention created by similar objections.
 
Society is so weird these days.

Nah. Political correctness is, at its core, much less about trying not to offend anyone and much more about being a decent human being. One could argue that it's about not being an asshole.

Whitewashing is taking a role that's orginally of a non-caucasian character and casting a white person to play that role. See recently: "Ghost in the Shell". It can be subversive in its ignorance and insensitivity (like GitS) to downright racist (Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", anyone?).

Following what indietalk said, for your level of indie films you aren't part of a corporate cookie factory that makes mostly vanilla cookies as an industry practice.

You can't win no matter what you do there's going to be a grassroots movement telling you that you're offensive for making it.

And that's nothing new. It's just easier to see now because those fringe groups can Tweet or Instagram it in an instant. Those groups have been there for a long, long time, in some form or another, but they can communicate faster to a larger audience now. Nothing in this world is capable of making everyone happy.
 
The whole cultural appropriation things has my head spinning a little bit. Like i'm not allowed to write a story that isn't about white people. Someone told me this the other day!!! How are people supposed to make art thinking like that?

You guys are right though it's a much bigger deal when you're a production company doing this stuff instead of a writer/director.
 
You might be under more scrutiny but it doesn't mean you can't make a movie about Hispanics. They might just be afraid that you won't have the proper perspective to do them justice, or you just want to profit from them. So address those concerns & show them that you'll give proper respect to the subject & give truth to the movie. I assume you'll want to get their opinions & input as you write. You might give them some writing credit if it's warranted, or include them as crew members to show inclusiveness. Show them as real fleshed out people, not stereotypes. I guess it depends a lot on your story too.

Cary Fukunaga is part white & part Japanese, & he made Sin Nombre (really good) & Beasts of No Nation. I don't think he was accused much of appropriating. In another person's hands, those characters could've been stereotypical but I think he did them justice.
 
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It's only white washing if you take a character that was originally another ethnicity and make them white for the sake of commercialism.

I've seen some recent movies where there was outrage over casting of some characters, but I thought they were balanced out by another decision. Take Doctor Strange for instance. The Ancient One was originally an Asian man, but they turned him into a white women. I think changing the gender balanced out the race issues. Also Mordo went from being a Transylvanian man to being black English-Nigerian. Wong was played by a guy actually named Wong. There were complaints about The Ancient One, but I think making the cast overall more diverse in both race and gender balanced it out.

With Ghost in a Shell the character is not even human, so there is some false outrage. Synthetic people don't have race. Real people don't either, but that's another conversation.

There was recent complaints about the casting in Aladdin, but A) Agrabah is a fictional place and B)The people they did cast had historic interaction during the Sassanian Empire, the Mughal Empire, and the Abbasid Empire C) Aladdin in 1001 Arabian nights was originally set in China before Hollywood changed the setting. The People who complained said "Hollywood just thinks all brown people are interchangeable" when in fact they are the ones ignorant of both the original tale and history and think that the European Drawn Colonial lines meant anything before the European Colonial period.

NEVER go full Mickey Rooney. Or Bugs Bunny. There were some insanely racist stuff in media until about the mid 60s when it started to die down. The Batman and Robin WWII Serial is especially horrendous. It's a miracle anything is watchable between the 1930s and 1950s.

Cultural appropriation is if you steal something. Like Elvis and Perry Como's whole deal was that they would take songs written by African Americans and they would make covers. The covers would be played on white radio stations and would make more money than the originals.

However, Cultural Appropriation is an overused phrase nowadays. Modern society expects us to be multi-cultural, but there are a bunch of loud mouths who get offended over everything and just throw out the term Cultural Appropriation. You can't have diversity and multiculturalism without cultural exchange.

As AccousticAl said just be a decent person and have some level of sensitivity on certain heated political tender spots. As a film maker it is an objective to be only intentional. So, the last thing you want to do is make some unintended mistakes in your work. Think about everything on all levels and you'll be guided pretty well. If it's something you're worried about consult someone who is an expert on the subject.
 
My experience has been writing scripts, usually sci-fi. As for who ended up playing the parts, it came down to who could do it. I didn't write any role to be a particular race, but rather a type of part, like a marine, an astronaut, or a police officer. What nationality they were was simply decided by who was willing to be in this no pay or low pay acting job.

We're indies, so often we take the best of who we can get. Sometimes, that is just a pool of one person for that role. I wouldn't over-think it. I will say that my most widely distributed movie had a range of people - Italian, Irish, hispanic, and black. That just happened to be the people that wanted to do it. It felt like a crew from STAR TREK. Though I wasn't thinking about race, some people commented on the diversity of the cast. A follow up sci-fi movie had all white people, but that was just the way the cards fell. I didn't hear anyone complain about the makeup of the cast.
 
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