06.April.2020
Disclaimer: All thoughts and explanations written here come from a very personal place of the author and are not yet backed up by external sources. Hence why it is ,,a rant” on the topic.
When i write of whitewashing, i write of the cinematography-based definition.
This word does have other meanings, especially in a historical sense, and the film-based definition is to my knowledge not an official term, but one widely used by individuals and forums on the internet.
A Merriam-Webster definition of whitewashing in cinematography: [W]hitewashing refers to casting white actors as characters who are non-white or of indeterminate race […], over equally qualified people of color, as in the Oscar nominations.
(Note: i am not sure how i feel about the use of the word ,,race” in these types of dialogue. This word always seems inherently wrong to me.)
I just have to write this down. I watched an action movie with my family yesterday (I am spending some quality quarantine time with them) and of course, i was bugged by the usual: under-respresentation of wxmen and non-white folx, cisgendered heteronormativity, the normalisation of a violent, war-infiltrated, ableist, (post-?)colonialist reality because it is simply how ,,the world is”, and other things.
One thing bugged me specifically though, to the point where i decided to write about it.
There was one chapter where some characters went to somewhere on the ,,African Coast” because there was a very specific type of material you could get no where else. They went to the underground facility where the material was being handled and processed and after that ensued a long fight scene, both in the facility and then in the nearby town.
Now, first off, the underground facility did have Black men working on the raw materials, but they were only shown on screen for a few seconds at a time. Their leader was… guess what… white.
Fine, i thought, maybe it is realistic in a colonialist sense: the white foreigner sent by a first-world country to lead a facility to continue to exploit and plunder the resources of an already ,,poorer” place (don’t have to explain where this poorness comes from, do i?).
The fighting scene then moves to the city, where ultimately, civilians are seen running away and the police and military are shown approaching the situation. And this is where it gets very… illogical?
Yes, the majority of the crowd scenes show Black people running away and screaming but for every close-up of a Black person (leaving their car or screaming in fear or something similar), there is a close-up of a white person. Not to mention that the Blackness itself of those Black people is never more than in an ,,acceptable” degree of darkness. Plus, in many scenes where the Black civilians are in the forefront on screen, white people are shown in the background.
But wait, there’s more. When the police and consecutively the military show up, some are shown in close-up pointing their guns at the raging battle that is happening. And literally, more white people were shown in close-up than Black people. I think the proportion was about two to five (this number is a guessed estimate and is very possibly inaccurate, because i have not proof-checked it). That got me quite angry. For me, the entire scene (it was quite the long one) was a perfect example of whitewashing.
Now then, how was this chapter partaking in whitewashing? Last i checked, the ,,African Coast” is home to mostly Black individuals. Why would the makers of the movie have to compensate the displaying of a mainly Black society by over-representing white people, other than to avoid uncomfortableness of the viewer and perhaps the moviemakers themselves? Why can’t they just let Africa be Black?
It was, like most mainstream media up for consumption today, a US-American movie and from what i have gathered, anti-Blackness in the USA is still engrained in every surface and crevice of the societal structure.
I asked myself: why in the hell would every other place in this movie be more or less specified to a city and country and only here, in this chapter, would the location be narrowed down to a vague ,,on the African Coast”? Well, they needed a ,,foreign” place, far away and exotic, to explain the origin of this rare material, but in filming it they made sure it was not ,,too exotic”, lest anyone be ripped out of their comfort zones by seeing a Black society with little to no white people present.
Well, perhaps the thought behind this was ,,well-intentioned”. Perhaps, in their learned, most probably subconscious white-supremacist way of thinking (because that is simply how our dear Western civilisation is built. White supremacy is sadly a part of all our brains, no matter how inclusive we are, because it is in the very tissue of our societies and is what our world was built on), the makers thought ,,ah well we are making sure to be inclusive by paying attention to having Black people (and women) playing important and sub-important roles, so it is only logical that this inclusivity goes both ways, i.e. we have to include lots of white people in a mostly Black society”. But this way of thinking cannot be well-intentioned. It is extremely harmful and feeds to the self-sustaining anti-Blackness (and other non-whiteness threatening white supremacy) engrained in this system corrupted by decay.
It is a reflection of the white-colonialist way of thinking: that whiteness needs to be incorporated everywhere, that it needs to be seen and heard. I say to that: don’t worry, whiteness is seen and heard and felt plenty enough. It’s this reaction of fear: ,,if non-white communities are starting to elevate their voices, then we have to make sure that our white voices are elevated just the same amount!”, except that it is completely, utterly, totally disproportionate. It just suppresses the suppressed even more and makes sure that the white-supremacist system, built by and for brutal, misogynist, rich, violent (and frankly, in my opinion, psychopathic) individuals, stays intact.
Now i won’t go any deeper than this, because this is only an introduction to the topic, and also going deeper would require me to start citing sources and do some more specific research.
For now i only hope that this written text was a prod for your brain, an invitation to think of the existence of whitewashing and its harmfulness any time you watch a movie (or similar).
This is the very first time i try and write down my ,,critical thinking” instead of just thinking about it and staying silent, so it is not very structured and i just wrote it all down in a flow directed by emotion, letting my fingers write as my heart told me. I thank you if you have read this far! As i disclaimed in the beginning, this was not meant to be a definitive ,,explanation” of the topic, nor is it the Final Word. So feel free to make up your own thoughts on this, keeping in mind what privileges you have and don’t have, what privileges lead you to reacting a certain way to certain things, and which thoughts are simply the noxious mantras our system feeds to all of us as children! It’s a long journey, dismantling the violence of state-oppression we have been taught to inflict on upon ourselves and others, but it is ultimately also a journey of healing, and it is the one that leads us towards creating a new world. <3
NOTE: Yes, there are places in South-Africa that are more predominantly white. But the rest of the coast is much larger, and with such a non-specific indication of the location, is that the place one should automatically think of first?