Linkspam: #WhitewashedOut

[davidgillon]

By the time I was three tweets into #WhitewashedOUT I wanted to beat my head against a wall.

The initial focus was Hollywood's whitewashing of several recent prominent Asian roles, Scarlett Johanssen as Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in Doctor Strange, as a symptom of a wider problem within the movie industry, but it turned into an outpouring of experience of racism. @BethPhelan, who just organised #DVpit,  tweeted about her experiences as a child, and that really struck home because of the parallels with disability related bullying I experienced as a kid. Different otherness, identical hate.

The number of people tweeting about trying not to appear Asian as a kid was heartbreaking.

And the number of writers/screenwriters tweeting about being told to white out asian characters was truly disturbing.

There were the usual handful of idiots railing against it. and proving its point, but two things about them disturbed me. (I looked at a bunch of profiles, you usually find about half are blank, pointing at professional bigots running pure attack accounts, but half weren't). First, the number identifying as Trump supporters, second, the number who seemed to have some link to fandom. That 'social justice warrior' tag beloved of the Puppies was very prominent.
 

George Takei has a good take on Marvel's defence of their Doctor Strange casting: They must think we're idiots

Comments

[the_rck]

Ms Marvel and Captain Marvel are two separate characters. Right now, in the comics, Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers (who used to be Ms Marvel), and Ms Marvel is a teenager named Kamala Khan who greatly admires Captain Marvel. So far as I know, Ms Marvel isn't going to be in the movie. I would love it if she was, but nobody's said she will be.

[maramcreates]

Yeah, I was aware of the Khan as Ms. Marvel bit of the lore, but I didn't realize that Danvers had taken on the Captain mantle.