Whitewashing Controversies in Modern Cinema

Published: November 21, 2024 by Lori Kinney

The film industry, which began over a century ago, emerged during an era when opportunities for starring roles were heavily restricted. While racial discrimination persists even today, it was far more pervasive in the early 20th century. To accommodate scripts requiring leads to portray people of color, studios often resorted to methods and practices that, while considered acceptable at the time, are now widely recognized as inappropriate and offensive.

While some roles were available to actors of color, they were far from common. The 1914 film, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the first to feature a Black man in the lead, and MGM’s musical, “Hallelujah” featured an all-Black cast. However, these instances were exceptions rather than the norm. This lack of inclusivity led to the rise of whitewashing, a practice where characters originally written as one race — often in source material like novels — were reimagined to be played by white actors. This was also known as “racebending.” Even more controversial was the casting of white actors in roles meant for Black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, or other characters of color, perpetuating offensive stereotypes and erasing authentic representation.

Whitewashing has many different scenarios of which the most common, and most prevalent, was Blackface” which eventually gave way to “yellowface” While the use of this method is thankfully on the decline, in Hollywood the practice of casting white actors in non-white roles is still fairly common. Some of the more recent examples can be found in the 2017 film “Ghost in the Shell,” where Scarlett Johanssen plays the Japanese protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, and the 2016 film, “Doctor Strange,” which saw Tilda Swinton play a Tibetan man.

Other great examples of whitewashing can be seen in the movie, “21” (2008), a true story about Asian-Americans who used card counting to win at Black Jack in Las Vegas casinos. It was recast to make the card counters white, and again in “Hud” (1963), where Patricia Neal was cast as a white ranch housekeeper named Alma, rather than keeping the Black housekeeper named Halmea from the novel on which the film was based. Both practices, whether whitewashing or racebending, stem from the perception on the part of directors and studio executives that audiences wouldn’t be interested in films starring non-white people that aren’t known.

This is a practice that countless films have employed, and dates back to the silent film era when American actor Lon Chaney played a Chinese elder in 1927’s “Mr. Wu.” At the same time, the career of American actor Espera Oscar de Corti, who was of Italian descent, reinvented himself as a Native American named Iron Eyes Cody, launching a 60-year career playing movie and TV Indians, of which his most notable role was as Chief Iron Eyes in Bob Hope’s “The Paleface”.

To assemble a list of famous instances of whitewashing in contemporary cinema, 24/7 Tempo consulted numerous articles on the subject in publications including The Huffington Post, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, and other sites, as well as using editorial knowledge of film casting through the years. This list is only comprised of films in the latter part of the 21st century and doesn’t showcase movies made before 1950 that used this practice, although there are probably hundreds, if not more, of examples of whitewashing throughout movie history. (These are character roles that have garnered the most Oscar nominations.)

Here are whitewashing controversies in modern cinema: