You said it. Ya know, I’m sick of this whitewashing and it all boils down to White supremacy. Because white -or light, the closest you can get to it- is right. Right?

When it comes to Whitewashing, people love to downplay the very significant and telling act of taking one of the few if not only PoC characters and making them outright White or “White-Tan”. Then you call it out and they throw it in your face with this “why is it soo important that they be Blackkk.” Well, why is it so important that they be White?!

White (or what I call light) washing Christina is a racist, violent act of erasure that perpetuates the lack of acceptance Black women, particularly dark-skinned Black women, have in this world. Because if they’re not deemed acceptable to even play themselves, what does that say about their acceptance at all?

This shit happens way too much for people getting so little representation.

And I blame all those responsible for these movies, but also the authors who write the books they’re based upon. I don’t care if it’s no longer “Theirs” anymore because they do have an extent of control. An extent of a voice that’d at least show that they were trying. A sad reality, but they must stress that they wish their characters to not be whitewashed…but do they often do this? No.

Warm Bodies’ author excused his book’s adaption making the Ethiopian friend character White in the movie with some bullshity it was the best actress for the jobbb bleh bleh. Guess there were no Black/Ethiopian girls good enough for the job then.

And Veronica Roth put on an act with this ohh it’s real important that they don’t whitewash my characters but when Tobias was cast as a White actor and despite her clearly saying he was biracial, she gushed over the casting of this White guy. And she’s gushed over Christina’s casting too. Psh. Please. Hypocritical author is a hypocrite.

I haven’t read him yet, but Neil Gaiman is someone I can fucks with, though. HBO (?) told him upright that they were gonna change his Black characters because “Black people don’t like fantasy” and so he did not sell to them. Here’s that quote. He said them even mentioning changing his characters to White was their fatal mistake. Fatal. I don’t hear many authors defending their books being whitewashed like that. In fact, all I hear is silence.

So these authors toss us a pinch of representation and expect us to be grateful, which we are…but then you take our one spot of representation away and what do we have left? A cycle of intolerance and lack of empathy for PoC and a whole lot more White people who weren’t supposed to be there, oncemore proving that White people can be anywhere and anyone while People of Color are supposed to sit back and enjoy how they shun us.