A Look Back at Racebending and the Academy Awards
The Academy Awards’ gross under-recognition of performances by people of color, end of the line documentary both in terms of nominations and wins, is pretty much universally acknowledged . Check this thorough list from Your Media Has Problems on tumblr if you had any doubts.
One of the interesting dimensions covered in that piece is that the majority of people of color nominated for Oscars played roles that “had” to be portrayed by a person of that race. This is a sad reflection on the limited roles available for actors of color.
But what s even sadder is the fact that Hollywood has a long history of squeezing that limitation even further by casting white people as PoC characters. From Racebending.com ‘s crucial “What is racebending?” primer :
The term “racebending” refers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, end of the line documentary 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. In the past, practices like blackface and yellowface were strategies end of the line documentary used by Hollywood end of the line documentary to deny jobs to actors of color… Because characters of color were played by white actors, people of color were hardly represented at all and rarely in lead roles. end of the line documentary While white actors were freely given jobs playing characters of color in make-up, actors of color struggled to find work.
(The term “racebending” is also used refer to the usually positive and exciting practice of casting a person of color in a role previously/traditionally played by a white person, but this article focuses on the sadly much more common dark side of racebending.)
I decided to take a look back at the acting nominations in the Academy Awards’ 86-year history to see how many examples of racebending were honored with nominations or awards. The results are unsurprising, end of the line documentary yet still incredibly disappointing.
There end of the line documentary are a few distinct forms of the bad kind of racebending. The most obvious and arguably most egregious is black/brown/yellow/red-face, where a white actor plays a person of color by wearing makeup.
Then there is the strange Hollywood treatment of all “vaguely ethnic” actors as interchangeably cast-able in any PoC role. In the past, this meant actors we’d now code white playing characters of color, e.g. George Chakiris as Bernardo in West Side Story , but this lives on today with brown is brown! casting, e.g. Maori actor Cliff Curtis ‘s globe-spanning character roster. There’s some overlap between this and the first category.
Each of these types of racebending are represented in Academy Award-nominated and -winning performances. My list below is most likely incomplete. Lists on Wikipedia and TV Tropes and articles by Michelle I. on Racebending and Tanya Ghahremani on Complex.com got me started. I then attempted to thoroughly review the complete lists of winners and nominees to find other instances. I am sure I missed some, particularly end of the line documentary in the whitewashing category. If you can think of other examples, please share in the comments!
There are also “gray area” examples such as mixed-race Indian Brit Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi in heavy brown makeup, Siberian Russian Yul Brynner playing the King of Siam, and Robert Downey Jr.’s role as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris in Tropic Thunder , which was meant to parody this entire phenomenon, but, you know, was still a white actor in blackface receiving an Oscar nomination in 2008 . I’ve left these examples in the list but with asterisks.
Luise Rainer’s Oscar-winning yellowface performance in The Good Earth 1937 Best Actress: Luise Rainer as O-Lan in The Good Earth 1959 Best Supporting Actor: Hugh Griffith as Sheikh end of the line documentary Ilderim in Ben-Hur 1982 Best Supporting Actress: Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living end of the line documentary Dangerously *1982 Best Actor: Ben Kingsley (light-skinned mixed race Indian in makeup) as Mohandas Gandhi in Ghandi
Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! 1937 Best Supporting Actor: H.B. Warner as Chang in Lost Horizon 1944 Best Supporting Actress: Aline MacMahon as Ling Tan s Wife in Dragon Seed 1952 Best Actor: Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata end of the line documentary in Viva Zapata! 1955 Best Actress: Jennifer Jones as Han Suyin in Love is a Many Splendored Thing 1959 Best Supporting Actress: Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane Johnson in Imitation of Life 1965 Best Actor: Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello *2008 Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris (a white character in blackface, meant to parody this phenomenon, still offensive to many cultural commentators )
Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ *1956 Best Actor: Yul Brynner (Russian of Buryat/Mongolian descent) as King Mongkut (Thai) in The King and I 1961 Best Supporting Actor: George Chakiris (Greek American) as
The Academy Awards’ gross under-recognition of performances by people of color, end of the line documentary both in terms of nominations and wins, is pretty much universally acknowledged . Check this thorough list from Your Media Has Problems on tumblr if you had any doubts.
One of the interesting dimensions covered in that piece is that the majority of people of color nominated for Oscars played roles that “had” to be portrayed by a person of that race. This is a sad reflection on the limited roles available for actors of color.
But what s even sadder is the fact that Hollywood has a long history of squeezing that limitation even further by casting white people as PoC characters. From Racebending.com ‘s crucial “What is racebending?” primer :
The term “racebending” refers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, end of the line documentary 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. In the past, practices like blackface and yellowface were strategies end of the line documentary used by Hollywood end of the line documentary to deny jobs to actors of color… Because characters of color were played by white actors, people of color were hardly represented at all and rarely in lead roles. end of the line documentary While white actors were freely given jobs playing characters of color in make-up, actors of color struggled to find work.
(The term “racebending” is also used refer to the usually positive and exciting practice of casting a person of color in a role previously/traditionally played by a white person, but this article focuses on the sadly much more common dark side of racebending.)
I decided to take a look back at the acting nominations in the Academy Awards’ 86-year history to see how many examples of racebending were honored with nominations or awards. The results are unsurprising, end of the line documentary yet still incredibly disappointing.
There end of the line documentary are a few distinct forms of the bad kind of racebending. The most obvious and arguably most egregious is black/brown/yellow/red-face, where a white actor plays a person of color by wearing makeup.
Then there is the strange Hollywood treatment of all “vaguely ethnic” actors as interchangeably cast-able in any PoC role. In the past, this meant actors we’d now code white playing characters of color, e.g. George Chakiris as Bernardo in West Side Story , but this lives on today with brown is brown! casting, e.g. Maori actor Cliff Curtis ‘s globe-spanning character roster. There’s some overlap between this and the first category.
Each of these types of racebending are represented in Academy Award-nominated and -winning performances. My list below is most likely incomplete. Lists on Wikipedia and TV Tropes and articles by Michelle I. on Racebending and Tanya Ghahremani on Complex.com got me started. I then attempted to thoroughly review the complete lists of winners and nominees to find other instances. I am sure I missed some, particularly end of the line documentary in the whitewashing category. If you can think of other examples, please share in the comments!
There are also “gray area” examples such as mixed-race Indian Brit Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi in heavy brown makeup, Siberian Russian Yul Brynner playing the King of Siam, and Robert Downey Jr.’s role as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris in Tropic Thunder , which was meant to parody this entire phenomenon, but, you know, was still a white actor in blackface receiving an Oscar nomination in 2008 . I’ve left these examples in the list but with asterisks.
Luise Rainer’s Oscar-winning yellowface performance in The Good Earth 1937 Best Actress: Luise Rainer as O-Lan in The Good Earth 1959 Best Supporting Actor: Hugh Griffith as Sheikh end of the line documentary Ilderim in Ben-Hur 1982 Best Supporting Actress: Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living end of the line documentary Dangerously *1982 Best Actor: Ben Kingsley (light-skinned mixed race Indian in makeup) as Mohandas Gandhi in Ghandi
Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata! 1937 Best Supporting Actor: H.B. Warner as Chang in Lost Horizon 1944 Best Supporting Actress: Aline MacMahon as Ling Tan s Wife in Dragon Seed 1952 Best Actor: Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata end of the line documentary in Viva Zapata! 1955 Best Actress: Jennifer Jones as Han Suyin in Love is a Many Splendored Thing 1959 Best Supporting Actress: Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane Johnson in Imitation of Life 1965 Best Actor: Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello *2008 Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris (a white character in blackface, meant to parody this phenomenon, still offensive to many cultural commentators )
Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ *1956 Best Actor: Yul Brynner (Russian of Buryat/Mongolian descent) as King Mongkut (Thai) in The King and I 1961 Best Supporting Actor: George Chakiris (Greek American) as
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