Racebending

Racebending is a neologism that describes the changing of a character's perceived race or ethnicity during the adaptation of a work from one medium to another. Racebending was coined as a term of protest in 2009 as a response to the casting decisions for the live-action film adaptation of the hit Nickelodeon television series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The starring roles of the show (Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko) were intended to be of Asian (Inuit) descent but were rather filled by caucasian actors in the film, The Last Airbender (2010). The initial protests such as “Saving the World with Postage,” were created in a LiveJournal online forum that initially responded to the casting decisions by “inundating Paramount with protest mail.” However, the cast went unaltered and when production began, the leaders of this protest responded by founding “the advocacy group and accompanying website Racebending by playfully borrowing the concept of manipulating elements (bending) from the Avatar universe.”

The Racebending.com website defines “racebending” as, “situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color.” Despite the recent coining of the term and its lack of an official dictionary definition, the issue itself is not a modern one. The practice of whitewashing, “possesses a long tradition among the industry’s most successful and venerated productions. Film history is replete with ignominious examples of white actors portraying characters of color.” A less blatant form of racism, whitewashing, creates a space for minorities to go underrepresented in film and other media platforms.

Whitewashing

Whitewashing, particularly common in film, refers to casting a white actor for a character who, in the original work, was of another race.

The term "racebending" was coined by one of the founders of the website Racebending.com, which was created to protest the casting of white actors in the 2010 film The Last Airbender, where the originating TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender featured characters of East Asian appearance. The term "racebending" was derived from Avatar characters' ability to manipulate or "bend" the classical elements of water, earth, fire, and air.

In 2010, Racebending.com and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans urged boycotts of The Last Airbender as well as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time due to their practices of racebending. Prince of Persia was criticized for casting white actors for the leads instead of actors of Iranian or Middle Eastern descent.

Fan activism over The Last Airbender led to the term becoming prevalent and becoming the name of the activist movement. Activists used the term interchangeably with "whitewashing" to describe white actors being cast as non-white characters in adaptations of media.

Activism

The Last Airbender: After the producers of The Last Airbender announced their decision to cast white actors' Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone as the lead roles, the artists who had worked on the animated show created an anonymous LiveJournal website and started a letter-writing campaign. As a result of being ignored, two fans from the LiveJournal site created their own forum: Racebending.com.

Power Rangers Samurai: Racebending.com wrote a letter to Nickelodeon’s CEO Jeff Dunn regarding the audition restrictions for Power Rangers Samurai, the eighteenth season of the Power Rangers franchise. The producers of the show restricted auditions for the Red Ranger, who was played by Alex Heartman, to only white actors but the casting was re-opened in June 2010 to actors of all ethnicities.

Ghost in the Shell: Soon after Hollywood cast Scarlett Johansson as the lead for the Ghost in the Shell movie, a live-action adaptation of a popular Japanese manga, numerous fans signed a petition for a recast.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: This movie had received a lot of backlash on social media with the hashtag #BoycottExodusMovie due to white actors Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver being cast to play the roles of Egyptians.

Other uses

The Racebending website acknowledges that often the terms “whitewashing” and “racebending” are used interchangeably, but that occasionally, the effects of racebending can have a positive impact. Racebending can, at times, result in increased representation for minorities if a “white role” is altered to be played by a minority. The website gives the following as examples of positive racebending:

- Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel films

-Cinderella (Brandy Norwood) and Prince Christopher (Paolo Montalban) in The Wonderful World of Disney’s retelling of Cinderella (1997)

-Velma (Hayley Kiyoko) in Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (2009)

Although minimal, “For communities of color, these casting decisions meant representation and meaningful inclusion in the American storytelling landscape.”

Usage evolved, and by 2015, media studies academic Kristen J. Warner wrote that the term has "many definitions and contexts", from the film industry practice of color-blind casting to the amateur labours of love that are fan fiction. She describes how writers can "change the race and cultural specificity of central characters or pull a secondary character of color from the margins, transforming her into the central protagonist."

Paste's Abbey White said in 2016 that the term can apply to actors of color being cast in traditionally white roles. White said, "In the last several years, racebending has become a practice used more and more to help networks diversify their ensembles and capture a bigger audience. Not only has it resulted in more racial visibility on the small screen, but in a far more unexpected way, racebending can generate deeper and more significant depictions of characters."

Other Examples of Racebending and its Effect

Harry Potter received an addition to its installment with the screenplay for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It was revealed that the character Hermione would be played by Noma Dumezweni, an African actress residing in England. Many fans were displeased with this and called it reverse whitewashing, but J.K Rowling, the author of the original series, stated in a tweet that white skin was never specified in the making of the character Hermione. What was important about this was the fact that the color of the person's skin had nothing to do with the character itself, since Hermione is not known for being white, but rather for being intelligent and smart.

In another case, actress Scarlett Johannson portrayed an originally Asian character in the manga to film creation, Ghost in the Shell. Fans were furious that she would portray someone that was explicitly meant to be of Japanese descent, since the story line is located within Japan. Certain activists groups, such as The Media Action Network for Asian Americans, or MANAA, called out Scarlett Johannson for lying that she would never portray or attempt to play someone of a different race. Their anger lied in the idea that they believed Hollywood was not allowing Asians to portray Asian characters, and instead, was hiring white actors to take roles that could easily have been portrayed by an Asian actor and actress. Many Asian actors, such as Constance Wu and Ming-Na Wen, called for the boycott of the movie, not because they believed Scarlett Johannson was a bad actress, but because they thought that it was unfair that the role did not go to an Asian woman. The Founding President of MANAA, Guy Aoki, stated. "Hollywood continues to make the same excuses, that there aren't big enough Asian/Asian American names to open a blockbuster film. Yet it has not developed a farm system where such actors get even third billing in most pictures. Without a conscientious effort, how will anyone ever break through and become familiar enough with audiences so producers will confidently allow them to topline a film? When will we ever break that glass ceiling?" This movie spurned many different conversations on how to allow actors and actresses of minority groups to have the spotlight, as well as created discussions on how to end these endemic problems throughout Hollywood.

See also

• Whitewashing in film
• Blackface and Blackface in contemporary art
• Yellowface and Examples of Yellowface
• Redface

Bibliography

• Chu, Monica (2015). "From Fan Activism to Graphic Narrative". Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 978-988-8139-38-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hart, William (2015). "Racebending: Race, Adaptation, and the Films I, Robot and I Am Legend". In Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm; Pilkington, Ace G. (eds.). The Fantastic Made Visible Essays on the Adaptation of Science Fiction and Fantasy from Page to Screen. McFarland. pp. 207–222. ISBN 978-0-7864-9619-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Warner, Kristen J. (2015). "ABC's Scandal and Black Women's Fandom". In Levine, Elana (ed.). Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century. Feminist Media Studies. University of Illinois Press. pp. 32–50. ISBN 978-0-252-08108-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Young, Helen (2015). Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-85023-1.

Further reading

• Gilliland, Elizabeth (2016). "Racebending fandoms and digital futurism". Transformative Works and Cultures. 22. ISSN 1941-2258.
• Fu, Albert S. (2014). "Fear of a black Spider-Man: racebending and the colour-line in superhero (re)casting". Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 6 (3): 269–283. doi:10.1080/21504857.2014.994647. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• What is "racebending"? at Racebending.com
• PSA: Whitewashing A Character Is Different From Michael B. Jordan Being Cast As Johnny Storm at The Mary Sue, which contrasts racebending and whitewashing