Importance of white representation in fiction

[AmazonQueen]

Not a fan of any of those changes myself. (Actually, elk and boar weren't the worst - those mountain goats and rabbits really made me roll my eyes).
But as you said yourself, Tauriel is a major character with an entire side arc, stretching an already hopelessly overstretched story by another half an hour.
Lot more visible than some animals we only see for seconds.

A major character but female elves aren't lore-breaking. Elves rode horses in the books and dwarves walked or rode ponies,

 

[RobAnybody]

Okay, fine. I've just figured out how to appease you. Let's ban all white people from TV, movies, stage, comics, graphic novels, and as computer game characters, regardless of the source material.

But then who would play the bad guys?

 

[Birdjaguar]

This is not moving the goal posts. From the beginning, my thinking is that more representation is good and trying to reduce it for whatever reason, personal aesthetic preferences included, is bad.

You might think that speaking loudly about something that can, if realized, reduce diversity cannot constitute trying to convince others to join you. But I'd say that insofar as they are directed towards the people who create those works, they are intended to convince in a manner that could realize that bad outcome.

Superior, or has it simply had more time and resources to develop? Are you one of those who would deny that past dominance and monopoly over resources creates an outcomes gap that takes time to bridge (i.e., a position against affirmative action)?

I am certainly not opposed to more representation, but my personal aesthetic does not affect that. Even if I were to post the details of what I prefer here in all caps, it would not influence any content creators. Now if I had 1million TikTok followers, that would be different.

"...original works that reach those heights are not easy to come by"

Your words and they seem to imply excellence, not superiority. For a hundred years we have seen significant changes in both literacy and demand for content (books, radio, movies, TV, streaming, podcast, etc.) Content providers first look to what is either free or at hand. And over those 100 years they found (in the west) stuff created mostly by European and American white men. That is what became dominant. And the stories they told were good and entertaining and thought provoking. Globalization opened the doors for new sources of content from different cultures and those have been increasingly sourced and used. WW2 was a huge influence on globalization.

Am I "one of those who would deny that past dominance and monopoly over resources creates an outcomes gap that takes time to bridge (i.e., a position against affirmative action)?" No. As I have said many times, change happens over time going in any direction one chooses to track it looking for good or ill effects. I was in HS as integration happened in Baltimore. I supported it then and have supported affirmative action since its inception. Change moves across the many dimensions of culture at different rates and can go slowly for a while then pick up speed. Gay rights didn't/hardly exist until the 80s. Progress was slow for 25 years, then Bingo! gay marriage approved as law. It took 70% of the US population to approve of gay marriage to make it happen. They did so because as more people they knew came out and didn't rape little boys, they understood that being gay was just fine. It was normalized. The same has to happen for all the other changes people want. That takes time. Integration was traumatic and violent in the US from the 50s through the 80s. But the Millennials grew up in an integrated culture and "race mixing" at all levels seemed normal to them. That is the future. Yes, it takes time and usually it takes a lot of older folks to die. Generations can rewrite the cultural script. The economic script will be difficult and take time. Changing the attitude towards wealth will take time.

 

[RobAnybody]

Black Panther was a pretty good recent example of this. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew who went to see the movie had never heard of the character before he was introduced in the MCU. I will admit that I haven't researched it, but I'd wager that most of the people who saw the movie were not already faithful, versed "fans" of the comic book character and had probably never laid eyes on a Black Panther comic book.

Surely Black Panther would have had the same cultural relevance if the cast was a melting pot of all races, right? I mean, by your own reasoning, Wakanda isn't real, so anything can be done, & if squirrels can have different coloration, then the population of Wakanda can, too without impacting the story.

 

[aelf]

I am certainly not opposed to more representation, but my personal aesthetic does not affect that. Even if I were to post the details of what I prefer here in all caps, it would not influence any content creators. Now if I had 1million TikTok followers, that would be different.

One person saying it would do nothing, yes. But thousands of people persistently saying it - that can affect things. The silver lining here is that studios or whatever will likely look at audience numbers and not noise when making decisions, but we don't know that for sure. They may worry about sustainability, that going on with what they're doing is too risky.

And I'm not consequentalist enough to hold that just because a bad outcome cannot be achieved, trying to achieve that outcome is therefore morally neutral.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I mean, by your own reasoning, Wakanda isn't real, so anything can be done, & if squirrels can have different coloration, then the population of Wakanda can, too without impacting the story.

Well changing the story/character is, by definition, "impacting" the story, but to your larger point... Yes, correct. Exactly correct. You put that very well. The Black Panther character can be portrayed in any race, any gender and any sexual orientation, and I have no doubt whatsoever that I would be able to enjoy it. Wakanda could be rewritten/reimagined as country with mostly Asian, Hispanic or European inhabitants, and I could still enjoy it. Wakanda is made up. And I am Black and a supporter of BLM and Democrat and generally politically (Murican) liberal and so on. Wakanda is still pretend. It can be changed to whatever. I just don't have the racial hangup about fiction that some folks do. Even about something as near and dear to black folks as Wakanda. So again, if you have that hangup about characters being white in perpetuity, its your hangup. Mentioning fictional characters who were originally presented as black does not remotely resonate with me. You want the white characters to stay white because that's what you want. I'm perfectly fine with characters changing race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever else, regardless of wehether they were originally presented as black guys like me.

Surely Black Panther would have had the same cultural relevance if the cast was a melting pot of all races, right?

This statement is about as perfect of an example as I can imagine of why I find this thread such a great topic. What do you mean by "cultural relevance"? Even if I make certain assumptions about what you mean by "cultural relevance" (ie mean as much to black people or to the presentation of black actors in major film, or as superheroes or similar) then I still have to ask what you mean by "if the cast was a melting pot of all races"... Did you see Black Panther? Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman had MAJOR roles in that film. In case you're not familiar with them, those are two extremely famous A-list actors who I'm pretty sure you and anyone else would consider white. They are stars in the film. Sebastian Stan has a major reveal cameo in an Easter Egg (he's also as white as the driven snow), and there are numerous other non-black actors who share screentime in the film. Watch these scenes from the movie for, in the terms I have to speculate you mean, a cast that is "a melting pot of all races"

So essentially, what I am saying, is your premise is wrong. The cast of Black Panther is already, in fact, a "melting pot of all races"... you just didn't notice it because you are experiencing something that is very typical for white people that are very accustomed to forms of media/entertainment that feature all or mostly white people, by white people, for white people. When there is one or two non-white characters present, that satisfies their threshold of "diversity". Any more than that, let alone a cast that is mostly non-white, and they don't even see the white characters anymore. The movie/show/story starts to become "ALL" black, Asian, hispanic etc., to their sensibilities. There are a multitude of non-black actors in Black Panther including featured roles. So your challenge to me is fundamentally flawed, because you didn't even recognize that Black Panther featured a diverse cast, a veritable "melting pot" to use your term, and still managed to be, again in what I imagine you meant by "cultural relevance" an extremely "culturally relevant" film..

 

[Farm Boy]

You should see local theater crews in regional hwhite cities(or at least social circles) putting on plays from not whitesville/whitewhen. If there was any money in it, it'd be scandalous.

 

[aelf]

Btw, that's a great example of Asian casting that is not faithful to the setting. The Asian actress with speaking lines speaks Korean in a way that is unrecognisable to Korean-speakers. This is clearly immersion-breaking for a scene set in Korea.

This is normal in the industry and, IMO, it's worse than just swapping skin colour. You can think of all kinds of reasons why someone with a different skin colour might be somewhere (e.g. migration, different natural selection mechanism, etc.), especially if it's not a historical setting. But someone who speaks so oddly in a locale and is supposed to be native there is unexplainable.

It hasn't stopped Asians from enjoying Hollywood productions.

 

[Farm Boy]

I have to admit, while I was enjoying the admittedly overly-evil depiction of communist-party secrecy/bureaucracy from my early childhood memories -- while I still like the show, HBO's Chernobyl really sort of pisses me off once somebody pointed out that the normal/government people got Russian accents and the long-suffering scientists got British ones.

Edit: It's been a while since I watched it. I think Michael Jordan nails "nah" better in that film than I've ever seen it. It's just right.

 

[Zardnaar]

Well changing the story/character is, by definition, "impacting" the story, but to your larger point... Yes, correct. Exactly correct. You put that very well. The Black Panther character can be portrayed in any race, any gender and any sexual orientation, and I have no doubt whatsoever that I would be able to enjoy it. Wakanda could be rewritten/reimagined as country with mostly Asian, Hispanic or European inhabitants, and I could still enjoy it. Wakanda is made up. And I am Black and a supporter of BLM and Democrat and generally politically (Murican) liberal and so on. Wakanda is still pretend. It can be changed to whatever. I just don't have the racial hangup about fiction that some folks do. Even about something as near and dear to black folks as Wakanda. So again, if you have that hangup about characters being white in perpetuity, its your hangup. Mentioning fictional characters who were originally presented as black does not remotely resonate with me. You want the white characters to stay white because that's what you want. I'm perfectly fine with characters changing race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever else, regardless of wehether they were originally presented as black guys like me.This statement is about as perfect of an example as I can imagine of why I find this thread such a great topic. What do you mean by "cultural relevance"? Even if I make certain assumptions about what you mean by "cultural relevance" (ie mean as much to black people or to the presentation of black actors in major film, or as superheroes or similar) then I still have to ask what you mean by "if the cast was a melting pot of all races"... Did you see Black Panther? Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman had MAJOR roles in that film. In case you're not familiar with them, those are two extremely famous A-list actors who I'm pretty sure you and anyone else would consider white. They are stars in the film. Sebastian Stan has a major reveal cameo in an Easter Egg (he's also as white as the driven snow), and there are numerous other non-black actors who share screentime in the film. Watch these scenes from the movie for, in the terms I have to speculate you mean, a cast that is "a melting pot of all races"

So essentially, what I am saying, is your premise is wrong. The cast of Black Panther is already, in fact, a "melting pot of all races"... you just didn't notice it because you are experiencing something that is very typical for white people that are very accustomed to forms of media/entertainment that feature all or mostly white people, by white people, for white people. When there is one or two non-white characters present, that satisfies their threshold of "diversity". Any more than that, let alone a cast that is mostly non-white, and they don't even see the white characters anymore. The movie/show/story starts to become "ALL" black, Asian, hispanic etc., to their sensibilities. There are a multitude of non-black actors in Black Panther including featured roles. So your challenge to me is fundamentally flawed, because you didn't even recognize that Black Panther featured a diverse cast, a veritable "melting pot" to use your term, and still managed to be, again in what I imagine you meant by "cultural relevance" an extremely "culturally relevant" film..

Wakanda is in Africa personally I think most of the people there should look the part.

Also upcoming Blade movie. Anyone who isn't Wesley Snipes is weird but they should make an effort to cast the right actor.

I'm not to nitpicky if that actor is from America, Africa or elsewhere but they should be black imho.

It would be weirder if Wakanda wasn't black.

Mostly about quality as well. BP was one if the better MCU movies and I'm not a big fan of Superhero movies that much but a like some of them (Batman 1989 and Heath Ledger one, Blade 1&2, GotG pt 1, BP).

Would rather see a fantasy Mali/Kilwa/Axum inspired story vs race swapping something else. Ye Olde Not Europe's also a bit played out/overdone.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If that argument winds up meaning everyone on screen is white and a reversal of the trend for greater diversity, then isn't it practically the same thing?


What does that mean?

It means (for example) that if someone does a remake of The Cosby Show (I imagine they would use a different title, though, given Cosby's RL crimes), they would cast black people, not white or Asian or native American.

Ditto if Canada did a remake of Kim's Convenience (sitcom that stopped production last year). They'd use Korean actors as the primary cast, not (see the list above). Or Little Mosque on the Prairie - I should think that Middle Eastern actors would be required. Remaking Excuse My French! would require that the actors portraying the French characters be totally fluent in French. Remaking The Beachcombers would require at least some indigenous characters, as there were two in the main cast, and Chief Dan George guested occasionally as the grandfather of the other two characters (one of whom really is his RL granddaughter).

Just something that came to mind earlier. I'll use Henry V as an example as I mentionned it earlier in this thread. The title character of said play is, as the name would suggest a king. But both times I've seen the play, he was played by a commoner. And chances are, the same applies to the perfomances that anyone else here has seen. At best, it might have been a version with a life peer in the title role. But not actual royalty. You've got an actor playing a role which he is lacking one of if not the most defining characteristics of. And yet, I'd be suprised if many people would consider that a problem.

So why is having someone of the "wrong" class play King Henry acceptable but not the "wrong" race?

Seriously?

Shakespeare, in its own historical setting, was entertainment primarily for the commoners. Acting on the stage was something done by commoners. Writing plays was something done by commoners. Writing and acting were NOT considered "respectable" professions in Tudor times, even though the monarch appreciated plays and other forms of entertainment (for decades, the gossip that went around court was that Queen Elizabeth I was the bastard child of Mark Smeaton, one of Henry VIII's court musicians, just because he was part of Anne Boleyn's circle of friends). Back in Tudor/Renaissance times, wealthy people and monarchs commissioned works of art as forms of political propaganda, to make it clear to their enemies and commoners alike that they were great, wealthy, powerful people. Art, in this case, could be paintings, sculptures, plays, poems, works of music...

BTW, Kenneth Branagh was knighted in 2012. So it would appear that the "problem" is solved. We may now safely enjoy his movies, Henry V in particular. I realize that knighthood does not make one royal, but there are many knights over the centuries who were one step from the monarchy either by lineage or ambition.

Let me offer an example to hopefully add some different context. If an artist depicted god as a red haired woman with freckles and green eyes, sitting on an obsidian throne on the Moon, and someone complained to you that that was not a correct depiction of god... I think I can guess what your reaction to that would be and why. Does that make sense?

If you guess that my reaction would be that as an atheist, I don't care how "god" is depicted since I don't think such an entity exists, that would be correct. I'd quibble over a throne on the Moon, because physics and that the Moon has been extensively mapped and analyzed and no such thing has been discovered.

Back in the late '90s, my favorite TV show was The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (based on the movie that starred Brandon Lee, and don't think there wasn't plenty of squawking about how the TV series was developed over how the movie went, leaving aside that the movie was based on a graphic novel in which - unlike the movie and TV show - the protagonist was not Asian). I got into urban gothic fantasy for awhile back then (though no Buffy/Angel, thankyouverymuch; tried them, found them boring), and there was one episode in which Shelly Webster (dead herself, but still hanging around the entrance to the Land of the Dead because she's waiting for Eric Draven, who's still undead on Earth) meets a little boy (dead and passed into heaven, but comes back to her with a message). She asks him, "You've seen God?" His answer was that God was "sometimes a lady, sometimes a bunch of people". It depends on the perceptions of the believer him/herself.

You can keep saying that, but original works that reach those heights are not easy to come by. And the industry, an already unequal playing field to begin with, doesn't always take big risks with original stuff. So, in the end, if pushing your POV successfully means we end up with more white dominance, then you are creating harm.

Y'know, it doesn't seem to matter if the public would be okay with diverse casts for whatever production, if "the industry" relies too heavily on picked focus groups and concludes from their reactions that diversity would not result in the profits they want.

I don't understand what you think the average lifespan of humans vis-a-vis squirrels has to do with this particular issue but the fact that you didn't even know it and had to look it up yourself kind of underscores this. My point is that animals of the same species often come in different appearances, despite living in the same place, squirrels being just one of many examples. So when I heard your point about the hobbits all having to look the same, because they came from the same area, the first thing I thought about was how squirrels who live in the same area often look very different from each other.

But again, ultimately... Middle Earth is not real, so the real world rules about lifespan and evolution and so on, aren't anywhere near as relevant, and I for one certainly don't consider them sacrosanct. I mean... Smaug, Wizards, Uruk-hai, orcs, glowing swords, magical rings, ghost armies, etc.,... but we have to stick to the "evolutionary rules" when appreciating a made up story? Why? Just to make sure the hobbits are all white? Why? Its such a bizarrely arbitrary bit of minutia to get hung up on. The "evolutionary rules" of orcs and dragons and hobbits... living in an imaginary place? We are perfectly fine with the notion that a giant flying lizard can generate and project an unlimited stream of fire out of its mouth from inside its chest, or that a giant all-seeing eyeball can indefinitely suspend itself over the top of a giant stone tower... but god forbid a hobbit be black? That's the straw that suspends our disbelief? Not the giant ring that magically shrinks to fit the owner, or the army of the undead, or the herd of magical water horses? The Asian elf is the hill we want to die on? Why? Because its "not scientifically accurate"? What science? Its just individual personal preference for individual personal reasons, based on individual personal sensibilities. I think that referring to it as "out of story" for "modern sensibilities" can also just be a subconscious way of devaluing or delegitimizing the depiction/change. Its almost like saying that "the real" hobbits, for example, are white and these black hobbits are fake, less valuable, less worthy "out of story" hobbits being inserted for "modern sensibilities". But I do think that mentioning "modern sensibilities" also acknowledges the role that individual sensibilities play in this sort of thing, and it raises another thing to think about. If for example, Asian hobbits require "modern" sensibilities, then what kind of sensibilities would demand the hobbits are white? Obsolete sensibilities? Backward sensibilities? Can you see my point? Maybe describing it in terms of "modern" sensibilities is a little loaded. That's one reason I think that I prefer to look at it in terms of just individual sensibilities, rather than trying to make whatever reflects my personal sensibilities the correct one. It's challenging, because we all tend to want to think that we are "correct" in our thinking/perspective.

Genetics. Let's take a hypothetical scenario in which I am such a famous person that someone wants to make a movie of my RL. If this hypothetical production includes me marrying and procreating (something that never really happened, but this is a made-up thought exercise)... well, the guy that I was close to from high school onward is white, of German ancestry, and blond. His parents were also blond. I'm white, of Swedish/Norwegian ancestry, and blonde. My dad took after his maternal grandparents - blond Swedes. Both his parents were dark-haired Swedes/Norwegians.

So... how should our hypothetical children look? Probably pale-skinned and blond, right? But then there's the issue of my paternal grandparents being dark-haired, and oops, there's my mother's side of the family (didn't mention them because for familial purposes they basically don't exist for me). But genetically, my mother's side of the family are mostly red-haired and the family ancestry is Irish. So any hypothetical kid I might have could well be a red-haired child.

But whatever hypothetical child I might have would not be would be black, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Indian, native American, or any other ethnicity not common to Sweden, northern Norway, or wherever it was in Ireland my mother's ancestors came from (I've never cared to ask). It wouldn't make sense to the story, and I can guarantee that my hypothetical family would be asking questions.

Therefore, in the case of Hobbits and whoever else in LOTR, you're not going to have spontaneous appearances of different ethnicities represented in your offspring unless such ethnicities were already either present among the people or encountered somewhere along the way in the family history.

Would a white person dating and then marrying another white person be perpetuating the dominance of white people over others? It is likely that one of their goals is to create more white people. Such individual "aesthetic preference" certainly would overshadow any concern over movie characterizations. How about music? Does not liking rap mean one hates black people and are oppressing them?

According to certain individuals here, it does.

You are making an awful lot of unspoken assumptions about the biology of a fantastic race to come to that conclusion.

Even in fantasy literature, consistency and common sense matter. You don't get to throw the idea of in-universe rules out the window just because something is classified as either science fiction or fantasy.

It's genetics. The basic idea says that offspring share traits with their parents/progenitors. If they don't, there had better be a damn good explanation that's more than "director's social agenda."

For instance, there's an original character I created for my King's Heir adaptation that I would really love to have magical abilities. It would enhance her in ways that would be rather poetic... however, due to the in-universe rules I already established to deal with the fact that the game developers chucked magic into this setting at the last minute, I can't justify it without breaking those rules. I can have her seem extraordinary in some ways, but I can't give her the same traits and abilities that the characters with the actual magical abilities have (at least without throwing her entire lineage into the trash heap and starting over, which would actually make the story worse, not better).

But then who would play the bad guys?

Yeah, about that tendency for some casting directors to use certain "types" to portray the villains...

Take the Norman Jewison production of Jesus Christ Superstar. A black man played Judas. Take other productions of that play, and ponder how many of them have cast a black man as Judas, for whatever reason. I'd hope that Jewison's production did it because of the actor's talent and not because of "symbolism."

I wasn't present at the auditions for the production I worked on in 1981, but a black man was cast as Judas. Again - I don't know if that was in homage to the movie, or simply because this guy had a fantastic singing voice and was very good at interpreting the part.

There are other productions in which Judas was not played by a black man. That was the case with two that I worked on - a brief vignette in A Dish of Cream and our second production of Jesus Christ Superstar, nearly 20 years after the first one we did.

Ideally, you don't need an actor of a particular ethnicity or appearance to play a bad guy. All three of our Judas-portrayers were different - one black, two white, and of the two white actors, one was young, the other a generation older, and they had very different accents.

 

[Yeekim]

Btw, that's a great example of Asian casting that is not faithful to the setting. The Asian actress with speaking lines speaks Korean in a way that is unrecognisable to Korean-speakers. This is clearly immersion-breaking for a scene set in Korea.

This is normal in the industry and, IMO, it's worse than just swapping skin colour. You can think of all kinds of reasons why someone with a different skin colour might be somewhere (e.g. migration, different natural selection mechanism, etc.), especially if it's not a historical setting. But someone who speaks so oddly in a locale and is supposed to be native there is unexplainable.

It hasn't stopped Asians from enjoying Hollywood productions.

Of course any one fail does not mean the entire film becomes unenjoyable - other good qualities may more than make up for it. But I take that you also see such breaking of immersion as something unambiguously negative - if only for people who can actually notice? FWIW, Russian in Hollywood productions usually sounds ridiculous as well.

 

[PhroX]

Seriously?

Shakespeare, in its own historical setting, was entertainment primarily for the commoners. Acting on the stage was something done by commoners. Writing plays was something done by commoners. Writing and acting were NOT considered "respectable" professions in Tudor times, even though the monarch appreciated plays and other forms of entertainment (for decades, the gossip that went around court was that Queen Elizabeth I was the bastard child of Mark Smeaton, one of Henry VIII's court musicians, just because he was part of Anne Boleyn's circle of friends). Back in Tudor/Renaissance times, wealthy people and monarchs commissioned works of art as forms of political propaganda, to make it clear to their enemies and commoners alike that they were great, wealthy, powerful people. Art, in this case, could be paintings, sculptures, plays, poems, works of music...

BTW, Kenneth Branagh was knighted in 2012. So it would appear that the "problem" is solved. We may now safely enjoy his movies, Henry V in particular. I realize that knighthood does not make one royal, but there are many knights over the centuries who were one step from the monarchy either by lineage or ambition.

I know the history, I know Shakespeare's target audience. But that's not actually the question I was asking: why do some people, even some in this very thread, consider it OK for actors to play charaters for whom they are laking some aspects (e.g. class), but not others (e.g. race, gender)? What makes the latter aspects different from the former?

 

[aelf]

Of course any one fail does not mean the entire film becomes unenjoyable - other good qualities may more than make up for it.

You wouldn't be able to tell if you looked at the reactions of the extreme purists or anti-SJWs.

 

[Snowygerry]

I know the history, I know Shakespeare's target audience. But that's not actually the question I was asking: why do some people, even some in this very thread, consider it OK for actors to play charaters for whom they are laking some aspects (e.g. class), but not others (e.g. race, gender)? What makes the latter aspects different from the former?

People in the US primarily hung up on "race" - as in "skin colour" - probably has to do with their particular history,

just watched Louis de Funès play a stereotypical Jew caricature here :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Adventures_of_Rabbi_Jacob

Didn't seem to bother anyone in 1970s Europe...

 

[uppi]

Even in fantasy literature, consistency and common sense matter. You don't get to throw the idea of in-universe rules out the window just because something is classified as either science fiction or fantasy.

It's genetics. The basic idea says that offspring share traits with their parents/progenitors. If they don't, there had better be a damn good explanation that's more than "director's social agenda."

What in-universe rules are there on the genetics of Hobbits? For all we know, dark skin color could be a recessive trait for Hobbits.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

From the prologue of the Lord of the Rings, in the first part Concerning Hobbits, the Hobbits are described as "divided into three somewhat different breeds", with the Harfoots "browner of skin".

 

[Sommerswerd]

Btw, that's a great example of Asian casting that is not faithful to the setting. The Asian actress with speaking lines speaks Korean in a way that is unrecognisable to Korean-speakers. This is clearly immersion-breaking for a scene set in Korea.

This is normal in the industry and, IMO, it's worse than just swapping skin colour. You can think of all kinds of reasons why someone with a different skin colour might be somewhere (e.g. migration, different natural selection mechanism, etc.), especially if it's not a historical setting. But someone who speaks so oddly in a locale and is supposed to be native there is unexplainable.

It hasn't stopped Asians from enjoying Hollywood productions.

I get what you are saying and of course you are correct. I will also note that in a typical, Murican made film set in ancient Rome, a substantial percentage of the white actors are not going to be Italian, in a film set in France, there are going to be a bunch of actors, even featured ones, playing roles as French people who are not going to be French at all... and so on. Hell, even white Muricans get played by Aussies or Brits some of the time... and audiences just accept and enjoy it. Chadwick Boseman is from South Carolina, rather than any nation on the African subcontinent, where the fictional nation of Wakanda is supposed to be. His accent in the film is just acting.

 

[amadeus]

I suppose being an English-language forum most of the comments will be from white majority countries.

I dunno, I doubt you could cobble together enough white actors who could speak Japanese well enough to do stage productions, so anything Shakespeare or what have you is going to be all-Japanese. I know they have the revue show up in Takarazuka, but I’ve only ever been out that way once and that was just to walk around.

Productions here as far as I know, they don’t run into these kinds of race problems because I think a lot of what they do is based on their history, or contemporary drama.

Not much of a contribution, but something to chew on nonetheless.

 

[Yeekim]

I know the history, I know Shakespeare's target audience. But that's not actually the question I was asking: why do some people, even some in this very thread, consider it OK for actors to play charaters for whom they are laking some aspects (e.g. class), but not others (e.g. race, gender)? What makes the latter aspects different from the former?

The very job of an actor is to suspend our disbelief.
"Wrong" race and/or gender are immediately noticeable, unlike "wrong class", which can be successfully hidden - see Eliza Dolittle.

EDIT: One could probably apply CGI and/or makeup to pass someone off as another race or gender as well, but that is generally not done.