Why I won't be watching the Last Airbender movie...
...courtesy of Gene Luen Yang, who says it much, much better than I ever could.
Here's the thing. I love Avatar: The Last Airbender so goddamn much. I treasure it. I plan to spend August re-watching it after buying the seasons I don't already own on DVD. It's one of the most epic adventure stories ever told, which happens to be a kid's story, as a cartoon, on Nickelodeon.
It also happens to be a very, very Asian story, peopled by Asian (and Inuit) characters. This last part is key, because of the larger context of the last several hundred years' worth of Asian stories being appropriated by white people. A lot of the time you'll get that via "What these people need is a honky" stories. The setting and the culture is so exciting, but we need a stand-in for the (white) audience to introduce them to the setting and culture! (And then to be the hero of the piece, because of course the white dude who just learned this stuff will be So Much Better At It than everyone who've only lived with it their entire lives.)
So we have a lot of stories where white people run around being the heroes of Asian culture, because actually being Asian is clearly not as interesting as being white and getting to add on the bits of Asian culture-- often mixed-and-matched between countries as if they're interchangeable-- as if they're bedazzling a jean jacket. (And yes, it's just that tacky.) On top of that, we have a long history of deciding to act as if we can have white actors in Asian roles, and usually in the most amazingly stereotyped ways possible. Full on yellowface, in which, as the linked article says, "Asian actors ... usually only get roles as houseboys, cooks, laundrymen, and crazed war enemies, with the rare "white hero's loyal sidekick" roles going to the big name actors. When the script called for a larger Asian role, it was almost inevitably given to a white actor." I love The Mikado and The King And I as much as anyone, folks, but let's not kid ourselves: they were written by white people, for other white people to perform, for an audience of other white people, in a culture that was all about appropriating the nifty "exotic" bits of other cultures to use for their own entertainment.
That's the context we're looking at here. Or rather, this is the context that is easy to see, unless of course you're white and don't have it constantly rubbed in your face. We white folk don't have to bother noticing, because we see "white" as a default, a neutral place. White accents are neutral (see also Arizona's most recent bullshit laws). White background is neutral (see also the questions about her background that Judge Sotomayor had to endure on the way to the Supreme Court). And white faces are neutral-- we seem to have had it drilled into our heads that going all the way to blackface is unacceptable (well, sane people have had it drilled into their heads), but brown- or yellowface is still treated like it's no big deal. The logic seems to be: if the actor can approximate that with a tan, instead of actually painting themselves, then hey, all's fair.
White is not neutral. We are not raised to think that, not at all; we are raised to think that our backgrounds are normal (neutral), our features are normal (neutral), our attitudes are normal (neutral), our accents are normal (neutral), and so forth. It's everybody else that is different. The thought that our features, accents, beauty standards (oh boy), attitudes and backgrounds might not be neutral to other people is a baffling one; it's a thought that needs to be actively thought, not one that comes to us automatically. We're not raised to think of our color and our heritage as anything at all except "normal", which, I think, is a major missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to dealing with racism, and a huge blind spot. Because we white folks grow up thinking that, essentially, we don't have a race, then we do stupid things like saying "the race card" (as if we ourselves don't unconsciously play our own race card, every day, by casually accepting the fruits of being part of the dominant race), or worrying that a Hispanic judge's background might make her more apt to sympathize with members of her own race (and then never, ever, check the mirror image of that question, where we wonder if white judges are more apt to sympathize with other white people), or think that it's perfectly okay to cast white people in Asian roles (especially the heroic roles). Because we are neutral, and it's everybody else who has the problem. Obviously.
The thing that makes me weep, that truly makes it so I can't think too hard about this, is that Avatar: The Last Airbender is such an epic, amazing story, and the characters are so vivid, and that the movie could have been so good, could have been the foundation of playtime mythology for a whole generation of kids the way that Star Wars was for my generation, and could have done that without any white actors whatsoever. But no, no. We need all the heroes to be white actors. (The villains, of course, don't have to be white; they can in fact be whatever kind of brown you've got on hand, since hey, who can tell the difference!) (This is not to say that when I found out Shaun Toub was going to be Iroh, I didn't have a terrible wobbly moment where I desperately wanted to see that with all my being.)
On a similar note, I'm not only going to avoid Prince of Persia because it's likely to be terrible (movies based on videogames: Never As Good An Idea As You Think! Really!), but because I find it appalling that when Hollywood decides to have an action-adventure movie set in ancient Persia, in an era where actors with Middle-Eastern ancestry spend very nearly 100% of their acting career playing menacing terrorist bad guys, all the good guys are played by white actors, most of whom are English, and in fact the titular Prince of Persia is played by a dude with the most Swedish last name Hollywood has to offer. CONTEXT. CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT WHEN MAKING THESE DECISIONS.
Here's the thing. I love Avatar: The Last Airbender so goddamn much. I treasure it. I plan to spend August re-watching it after buying the seasons I don't already own on DVD. It's one of the most epic adventure stories ever told, which happens to be a kid's story, as a cartoon, on Nickelodeon.
It also happens to be a very, very Asian story, peopled by Asian (and Inuit) characters. This last part is key, because of the larger context of the last several hundred years' worth of Asian stories being appropriated by white people. A lot of the time you'll get that via "What these people need is a honky" stories. The setting and the culture is so exciting, but we need a stand-in for the (white) audience to introduce them to the setting and culture! (And then to be the hero of the piece, because of course the white dude who just learned this stuff will be So Much Better At It than everyone who've only lived with it their entire lives.)
So we have a lot of stories where white people run around being the heroes of Asian culture, because actually being Asian is clearly not as interesting as being white and getting to add on the bits of Asian culture-- often mixed-and-matched between countries as if they're interchangeable-- as if they're bedazzling a jean jacket. (And yes, it's just that tacky.) On top of that, we have a long history of deciding to act as if we can have white actors in Asian roles, and usually in the most amazingly stereotyped ways possible. Full on yellowface, in which, as the linked article says, "Asian actors ... usually only get roles as houseboys, cooks, laundrymen, and crazed war enemies, with the rare "white hero's loyal sidekick" roles going to the big name actors. When the script called for a larger Asian role, it was almost inevitably given to a white actor." I love The Mikado and The King And I as much as anyone, folks, but let's not kid ourselves: they were written by white people, for other white people to perform, for an audience of other white people, in a culture that was all about appropriating the nifty "exotic" bits of other cultures to use for their own entertainment.
That's the context we're looking at here. Or rather, this is the context that is easy to see, unless of course you're white and don't have it constantly rubbed in your face. We white folk don't have to bother noticing, because we see "white" as a default, a neutral place. White accents are neutral (see also Arizona's most recent bullshit laws). White background is neutral (see also the questions about her background that Judge Sotomayor had to endure on the way to the Supreme Court). And white faces are neutral-- we seem to have had it drilled into our heads that going all the way to blackface is unacceptable (well, sane people have had it drilled into their heads), but brown- or yellowface is still treated like it's no big deal. The logic seems to be: if the actor can approximate that with a tan, instead of actually painting themselves, then hey, all's fair.
White is not neutral. We are not raised to think that, not at all; we are raised to think that our backgrounds are normal (neutral), our features are normal (neutral), our attitudes are normal (neutral), our accents are normal (neutral), and so forth. It's everybody else that is different. The thought that our features, accents, beauty standards (oh boy), attitudes and backgrounds might not be neutral to other people is a baffling one; it's a thought that needs to be actively thought, not one that comes to us automatically. We're not raised to think of our color and our heritage as anything at all except "normal", which, I think, is a major missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to dealing with racism, and a huge blind spot. Because we white folks grow up thinking that, essentially, we don't have a race, then we do stupid things like saying "the race card" (as if we ourselves don't unconsciously play our own race card, every day, by casually accepting the fruits of being part of the dominant race), or worrying that a Hispanic judge's background might make her more apt to sympathize with members of her own race (and then never, ever, check the mirror image of that question, where we wonder if white judges are more apt to sympathize with other white people), or think that it's perfectly okay to cast white people in Asian roles (especially the heroic roles). Because we are neutral, and it's everybody else who has the problem. Obviously.
The thing that makes me weep, that truly makes it so I can't think too hard about this, is that Avatar: The Last Airbender is such an epic, amazing story, and the characters are so vivid, and that the movie could have been so good, could have been the foundation of playtime mythology for a whole generation of kids the way that Star Wars was for my generation, and could have done that without any white actors whatsoever. But no, no. We need all the heroes to be white actors. (The villains, of course, don't have to be white; they can in fact be whatever kind of brown you've got on hand, since hey, who can tell the difference!) (This is not to say that when I found out Shaun Toub was going to be Iroh, I didn't have a terrible wobbly moment where I desperately wanted to see that with all my being.)
On a similar note, I'm not only going to avoid Prince of Persia because it's likely to be terrible (movies based on videogames: Never As Good An Idea As You Think! Really!), but because I find it appalling that when Hollywood decides to have an action-adventure movie set in ancient Persia, in an era where actors with Middle-Eastern ancestry spend very nearly 100% of their acting career playing menacing terrorist bad guys, all the good guys are played by white actors, most of whom are English, and in fact the titular Prince of Persia is played by a dude with the most Swedish last name Hollywood has to offer. CONTEXT. CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT WHEN MAKING THESE DECISIONS.