‘Doctor Strange’, ‘Nina’ and the white-washing debate that plagues Hollywood

Hollywood recently had a taste of the “yellowface” controversy (white actors playing Asian roles).The actor Tilda Swinton sports a clean-shaven head to play a Tibetan monk in Doctor Strange. In the adaptation of the Japanese anime classic Ghost in the Shell, Scarlet Johansson’s features have been digitally altered to play the cyborg Motoko Kusanagi. Not too long ago, the actor Emma Stone played a Eurasian in Aloha, set in Hawaii.

A popularly held Hollywood argument for the absence of Asian American actors is that such actors are not bankable enough to ensure box-office success. But this view, as a recent piece suggests, has been sufficiently discredited. And yet it persists.

Yellowface continues the insidious erasure that blackface has traditionally presented in Hollywood. The latter phenomenon has by no means disappeared. Indeed, the debate over blackface in Hollywood – how black roles are depicted and who will enact these – has resurfaced with Zoe Saldana’s depiction of Nina Simone in the biopic Nina. Saldana, who is of mixed American parentage, wasn’t considered black enough to play the renowned singer. Controversy erupted over allegations that Saldana had to darken her face and wear face changing prosthetics.

Blackface had its historical beginnings in the 1840s, with the use of burnt cork by white actors to portray black roles in minstrel shows. The practice was meant to strictly separate the two races and over time it moved to how blacks themselves accepted and replicated their own portrayal.

Michael Rogin, in his book Black face, White Noise (1998), argues that blackface extended the separation between whites and African Americans that existed in political and economic spheres to the cultural domain. Though blacks were indispensable for the economy and domestic life, miscegenation was a fear that existed on real and subliminal levels. Blackface minstrelsy, and later on, films, only perpetuated that sense of intimacy and separation.

Elements of blackface minstrelsy moved onto motion pictures. Segregation was emphasised early on in DW Griffith’s silent film Birth of a Nation (1915). Set in the US Reconstruction period in the late 19th century, the movie pits blacks – freed men and slaves, depicted as savage and lustful – against the whites, who are determined to save their own, especially their women and set up the Ku Klux Klan. Not only did whites enact the black roles in Birth of a Nation, but also the movie showed in graphic detail their lynching, which bears out Rogin’s hypothesis of a separation between the groups in every sphere.

Almost a decade later, when the Fu Manchu films – derived from the British writer Sax Rohmer’s novels – were made, the role of the eponymous evil genius with stereotypical Asian features was played by British or American born actors, such as Harry Agar Lyons, Warner Oland, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. The Mask of Fu Manchu (with Karloff as Fu Manchu), made in 1932, was widely criticised for its racist portrayal of ‘Orientals’.

Blackface in motion pictures led to its opposite phenomena a decade later – race films, targeted specifically at African-American audiences. At times these were financed by Hollywood studios but there were also independent filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux (1884-1952) who made a series of race-oriented films. Evelyn Preer, the African American actor and blues singer rose to fame in some early Micheaux films such as The Homesteade, which reflects the taboo of miscegenation, and later, Within Our Gates, which was Micheaux’s response to the social unrest set off by Birth of a Nation. Micheaux’s movie was banned in some states and also censored for fear of inciting unrest.

In the 1930s, Hollywood did see its first African-American performers, but they were cast into specific roles. Charlene Regester in her book African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility 2010) talks of female actors of the time who soon found themselves marginalised.

Among an early generation of actors, Regester includes Hattie McDaniel (the mammy in Gone with the Wind) and Louise Beavers (active in the 1940s) who acted in such domestic roles but explained their decisions as keeping a clear front between professional enactments and real-life difficulties. Lena Horne and Hazel Scott, actors of a somewhat later generation, had roles independent of the main story line. They played feistier and more spirited characters. Soon, they were given just cameo roles that highlighted their sex appeal and race. Hazel Scott later in life became an outspoken activist on race matters.

A more recent book by Miriam Petty narrates how African American actors in mainstream Hollywood were successful in “stealing the show” (the title of her book too), using a mix of subversive humour, ingratiation and self-mockery to ridicule the very systems that oppressed them. The actor Lincoln Perry earned much criticism in his lifetime, but his screen career is now being more positively evaluated. As Stepin Fetchit, the lazy man role he enacted in several movies, Perry became popular and “stole the show” on many occasions. Bill Robinson was famous for his tap-dancing routine and his appearance with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel (1935) – the first inter-racial dance team.

The post WWII period and the later civil rights movement marked a watershed. Race-themed movies were made, such as Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave (1949) and Intruder in the Dust (all 1949) and Pinky (1950). But addressing the social problems of the time – inter-racial coexistence in neighbourhoods, and equal job opportunities, for example – in films hardly erased real divisions when discrimination persisted in various levels and segregation was widespread, especially in the American South.

It was during these years that examples of what in retrospect came to be known as yellowface first surfaced. Yul Brynner played King Mongkut of Siam in The King and I on stage with over 4000 Broadway performances and also on the screen (1956). While Brynner earned more acclaim than ire for passing himself off as Asian, it was Mickey Rooney’s appearance as the Japanese IY Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) that earned the actor considerable opprobrium. The role was referenced in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) to highlight not merely racism but also to effectively portray Lee’s own struggle for stardom.

Also in 1993, the social comedy Made in America (1993) starred Whoopi Goldberg and Ten Danson. Goldberg’s Sarah Mathews owns an independent African-American themed bookstore and her life comes a bit apart when her daughter, Zora, learns her sperm donor father is actually her mother’s very white, macho and chauvinistic boyfriend, played by Danson.

But it was what happened soon after that led to a furore: Danson’s blackface impersonation during a roast in Goldberg’s honour. For all of Goldberg’s protestations that the script was penned by her, the matter was criticised and later widely satirised. It was the same year Time had on its cover a future American born of the miscegenation of several ethnic groups and races that had migrated into the country. Computer graphics saw a final face being superimposed over several other faces, but as critics pointed out, it was apparent that the original Afro-American face had been considerably lightened.

Used in reverse ways, blackface remains contentious. In Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), a struggling television executive uses several episodes featuring blackface to create controversy. Instead, the move invites the most terrible of repercussions and a violent backlash.

In Tropic Thunder (2008), Robert Downey Jr plays the actor Lazarus, who black ups and fight in Vietnam during a film shoot. The actor’s defence was that his role drew attention to blackface, and was in fact a critique of blackface and racism itself.

The debate over whether white actors can play characters from another race will continue, even more so as Hollywood, that dominates the world’s film industry, sees more films with a global cast of characters. Representation (and colour is just one manifestation of this) speaks in many ways of a wider power struggle being enacted on celluloid. As for more recent mini-controversies, such as actors donning blackface during Halloween, this isn’t a gesture of empathy but more, of “reaffirming whiteness.” As long as discrimination remains and some groups feel left out, blackface and its other corollaries such as yellowface, will call attention to itself.