What Are Actors Allowed?

It's happened again. Hollywood has cast a white person to portray a person of color. Which, if you pay attention to this sort of thing, really shouldn't surprise you. It should perhaps, at the very least, exasperate you.

Hollywood's history is the history of white actors taking roles of non-white characters. There's something a little extra insidious when the character they've been cast to play is based on a person of color. It's quite literally erasing an aspect of that character that likely played a key role in shaping who they are as a person.

You might be tempted to ask a question like, "Aren't actors pretending to be someone they aren't all the time?" or "So should actors only be allowed to act as their own race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation?" Focusing on what an actor does for a living, or what they should be allowed to do isn't really the right way to think about criticisms of casting in Hollywood. Criticizing a particular movie for casting white actors in roles that could have easily gone to actors of color, or Hollywood in general for whitewashing movies in a misguided attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator (otherwise known as the status quo), isn't an attempt to tell actors what roles they should go out for. It's also not the point.

The point of the discussions happening around issues of racism and racial bias in Hollywood are an attempt to point out what seems to be a fundamental assumption in casting directors' minds: if you're a white actor, you can play literally anything. It doesn't matter the background of the character you're playing if you're white—your whiteness isn't seen as a distraction for audiences, it won't make the character less believable, or unrelatable.

If you're a white actor, you are a blank canvas for audiences to paint their imaginations upon. You afforded enough agency and humanity that it seems natural to see you play characters from all arenas of life—you're found in positions of power, and at the lowest stations of life.

If you're a white actor, you are allowed and encouraged to play literally every character.

It's not so for actors of color. Actors of color are restricted in the roles they are allowed to take on. Actors of color are often given roles which are stereotypes of a specific race, and usually they're restricted to playing characters of their own race (though not always the same ethnicity; especially in the United States, race is primarily determined by skin color, not country of origin).

The issue isn't "white actors can't play a non-white person", the issue is "white actors are afforded more opportunities and bigger roles than actors of color".

Not coincidentally, the same holds for straight actors, cis actors, male actors—those qualities open up more desirable acting roles, and it you're not straight, cis, or male, the opportunities available to you are basically shit.

Criticizing Hollywood for casting yet another white actor to place a character of color is another way to point out how normalized being White is. Michael B. Jordan can't be Johnny Storm because Johnny Storm is the brother of a white woman. Idris Elba can't be Heimdall (another comic book character) without moviegoers raising a stink. But very few of the people criticizing these casting choices bat an eye when a white actor is cast as a character of color (or if a man is cast as a trans woman).

The bottom line is that there are different standards for white people in Hollywood. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it shouldn't prevent them from speaking up about it.