Hypocritical Race-Baiting Media 'Whitewashes' Truth

The Los Angeles Times has a sordid history of race baiting in its effort to pump up its progressive bonafides, despite a historic lack of diversity in their own staff. Their latest diatribe is a recent attack on Hollywood for “whitewashing” the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender. They were quickly followed in lock step by the Huffington Post, publishing an AP article that seemed to be cribbed from the Times. And then the industry blog The Wrap took things a step further by calling this a “White Summer” for the “lack of diversity” in Hollywood films this season. Hear that Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, Common, Jaden Smith, Queen Latifah? You don’t have any movies this summer. Uh, wait.

Here’s the crux of their discontent. Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have male leads played by white actors; Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia and Noah Ringer as Aang in ‘The Last Airbender. So, like the predictable hacks they are, they jumped on the racism argument. Dancing around the “R” word by reciting the industry’s history of casting white actors in non-white roles.

Yes, that did happen a lot in the past, and it does happen on occasion now. But here’s where the stupidity starts. Persians, aka Iranians, are ethnically white. In fact, most people of Eurasian stock are considered ethnically white. Casting a white actor as a Persian is hardly a racially insensitive move. And the Last Airbender is directed by Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan, who took exception to the criticisms his movie has gotten on this subject.

“Ultimately, this movie, and then the three movies, will be the most culturally diverse tent-pole movies ever released, period,” he told the Los Angeles Times last summer.

The cast of the film includes people of all races. But the politically correct police aren’t satisfied.

This selective outrage is typical for the identity politics junkies who desperately look for something to ride their high horse over. If they were really concerned about the wrong race being cast in movies, why didn’t they get upset at Marvel and Kenneth Branagh, who cast black actor Indris Elba as the Norse God Heimdall in the upcoming Thor movie. They also cast Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano as one of the Warriors Three from the same film (all Norse gods originally). And don’t forget casting Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury, a long time white character in the comics (except in the alternate time line of the Ultimate Avengers). Funny, but we’re not seeing any outrage there.

In fact, over the years Hollywood has seriously considered casting Will Smith as Superman, and even cast him as Jim West in the execrable Wild, Wild West movie. The biggest protest heard over that flick was from people wanting their money back because it was so craptacular. Hollywood has played with casting black actors in white roles before, or even done things like have white and black actors play relatives as in Charlie’s Angels II, where Bernie Mac portrayed Bill Murray’s brother.

In film and the theater there’s a long history of casting actors in roles that may be “against type” in order to do something fresh. Actors are supposed to be able to take a character and bring them to life so you don’t question them as real. Sometimes Hollywood will throw in minority actors to round out a cast. In the case of the two films above, they were going for actors they thought might be more bankable. Asian kid actors haven’t yet hit the big time internationally. So they went with a more generic white kid in Airbender. The character in question doesn’t really have to be of any race. It’s not that important to the story. In the case of the Prince of Persia, they just needed a good-looking leading man with dark hair who can pull off the stunts. It seems Gyllenhaal fit the bill nicely.

There’s nothing really complex or surprising about that. But newspapers and blogs like to create controversy whenever they can to sell stories. Leftists especially like to play the race card whenever possible, as long as it’s done to make white people look bad. If a white actor is given a job playing an ethnic role, it must be racism. But if they cast a minority in a traditionally white role, that must be “progressive.” No wonder they’re losing readers.

We’ve seen many a black actor from Eddie Murphy to the Wayans Brothers put on white face to mock Caucasians in films and that’s accepted without question. Compare that to the hysterical scolding of these films where the characters are heroic and you can see the “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” rule still applies.

Hollywood will cast actors who are available and bankable first. Race is less of an issue than it has ever been. They know that. We know that. They know that we know that.

The more the press continues to spout these absurd lies, the more they expose their own racist problem.