It’s exactly what it means. You are discriminating based upon race.
Most definitions of racism involve a belief of the superiority of inferiority of a particular race. “ism” after all is a suffix that indicates a belief system or practice of system.
I think that one of the problems is that “racist hiring practices” implies that the racism is intentional and overt. The system itself is unintentionally racist. There are fewer voice actors of color, meaning fewer are cast and fewer are getting experience. With more experience, you get better. When a new opportunity comes up, they hire the best available actor. Since there are fewer voice actors of color with experience, fewer get hired. This isn’t an OVERT racism, it’s an unintentional racism. By rejecting the roles, Slate and Bell are trying to help correct this unintentional racism.
Cleveland Brown being voiced by a white actor is ABSOLUTELY THE SAME as the cast of Hamilton being people of color BECAUSE THE ROLES WERE WRITTEN THAT WAY. Same thing with the role of Edna in Hairspray; same thing with the role of Mary Sunshine in Chicago (which the movie ignored) - these were all roles written SPECIFICALLY to be played by a person of the opposite… whatever. Seth McFarlan wrote Cleveland to be THE WHITEST black guy ever, and the Cleveland Show plays off of the differences between Cleveland and his new family. Hamilton was written to translate the white history for a non-white culture. Edna, well, John Watters is a weird guy who loved transvestites. I applaud the musical version keeping a male in that role. Mary Sunshine was historically played by a man to play off of the line “things are not always what they seem”.
That’s a very good point. I didn’t mean to imply that racism isn’t an insidious systemic issue in my post. So I do appreciate the corrective.
There are tons of no-name voice actors, of all races, who can do the job well and for not a lot of money. But they still go after these celebs, who don’t do any better a job, and sometimes worse, and charge more, because of name-recognition. Sometimes “celebrity” IS what makes them “most qualified.” I hate that, but I guess it makes money.
How did these people become celebrities? Well, unfortunately, that probably has something to do with race. People like to watch people they can relate to, and race plays a part of that. And there are more white people, so more white characters are going to be written. So, catch-22.
Even if a black character is onscreen, their character was most likely written by a white person. The fact of the matter is, to fix this problem with what we see and hear on the screen, we’re going to need a lot more black people behind the scenes first. This appears to be slowly occurring, if not quickly enough.
Well, if we really believe that past policies sucked, ISTM that we need to do something to redress the persistent unfairness that the past policies produced. Not just declare a reset and disallow any differences in future policies while complacently leaving all the inherited advantages from the past policies firmly in place.
Let’s say, by analogy, that historically the Smith and Robinson families have got their water from a shared well. The Smiths made laws stipulating that determining water use is the God-given right of Smiths, that Robinsons aren’t allowed to approach the well except when Smiths say so, that Robinsons have to live five miles away from the well on the other side of a big thorn hedge. Meanwhile, the Smiths build their house just a few steps from the well and can draw water from it whenever they please.
Eventually, due to resistance on the part of the Robinsons and some Smiths developing a conscience, those explicitly anti-Robinson laws are unmade. It’s formally acknowledged that both Smiths and Robinsons have equal rights to the well’s water and neither is allowed to prevent the other from accessing the well by a right-of-way. Sounds much more fair, right?
But of course, the Smiths still live just a few steps from the well and can easily get all the water they want while the Robinsons still live five miles away on the other side of the thorn hedge, and the property in between still belongs to the Smiths. How fair is that?
What’s going on here is that Jenny “Smith” Slate has decided to take a couple buckets of well water a little ways down the path to make water access a trifle less onerous for the Robinsons, and you’re howling that that’s unjust to the Smiths.
If racism involves a feeling that one race is superior to another how can a practice be unintentionally racist?
The issue is not that Slate did, she can take whatever roles she wants. The issue is whether there should be a policy that denies voice over jobs for certain parts because of the actor’s race. Such a policy would be discriminatory and wrong regardless of which race the actor was.
In your analogy the issue is not whether one Smith decides to hump water toward the Robinson’s house, but whether the new rule should be that the Smiths now have to walk five miles before getting water. Not only that the Smiths and Robinsons are not the ones who made the rules and built the houses but the descendants of those who did. This is just collective punishment, that assumes because people share a race they share responsibility for the good and bad things done by people of the same race.
I think you’ve cut to the core of the problem with these discussions/debates, Thudlow. One side is speaking to a systemic issue and the other side is countering with specific examples. It often goes like this:
Person A: American society makes life harder for black women.
Person B: Oh, yeah? Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire!
Yes, those are both true statements, but the second point does not refute the first point. There are always exceptions, but a few exceptions to a systemic problem do not equate to a solution.
Well, institutional or societal racism is built on the belief that one race is superior to another, but it can be unintentionally supported and perpetuated even by people who don’t share that belief.
For instance, maybe your workplace used to put all the black employees in offices on a separate corridor with its own restroom, originally because white employees didn’t want to share a restroom with black employees they considered “inferior”. If you as the current boss continue putting all new black employees on that same corridor just because you’re habituated to thinking of it as “their space”, then you’re engaging in a racist practice even if you completely reject racist claims about inferiority of black people. Voila, unintentional racism practiced by someone who has absolutely no desire or intention to be racist.
Well, that’s an exaggerated analogy for existing policy proposals, but I have to ask: How in the world do you see such a rule as “not fair”?
In your “new rule” scenario, the Smiths and the Robinsons both have equal rights to water, and the Smiths and the Robinsons both have to go five miles to get their water. Sounds entirely fair to me.
So what? I can’t agree with you that having one’s inherited unfair advantages somewhat diminished qualifies as “unfair”.
It’s not punishment, and it’s not about claiming that people nowadays are responsible for injustices perpetrated by their ancestors. It’s about the principle that people nowadays have the responsibility to try to counteract the continuing effects of past injustices.
If you think it’s too inefficient to require the Smiths to go five miles for their water from the well a few steps away, there are other measures you could take instead. For example, you could move the well to be 2.5 miles away from each family. Or you could set up a water delivery service for the Robinsons, provided by the Smiths from resources gained through their water-access advantages.
But just whining that the unfair status quo, by which today’s Smiths continue to benefit from the residual advantages built into the oppressively unjust system imposed by their ancestors, needs to remain in place or otherwise it’s unfair to the Smiths? Nah, I don’t think so.
“Collective punishment”? If it’s “collective punishment” for the Smiths now to be required to walk five miles in order to get water just as the Robinsons do, how is it not “collective punishment” of the Robinsons that they still have to walk five miles in order to get water?
Yes, there’s a saying that “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, but that doesn’t mean that equality actually is oppression.
Yes it is, black white, Jew, Catholic, why do we need these labels? If people were people, then what would happen?
Kimstu, you just perfectly identified a fair “equality of OUTCOME” scenario.
Congrats.
At this point I would find it hard to believe that a boss intentionally imposing segregation on an office would have innocent motives.
But what if instead of the boss imposing it, new hires were allowed to choose their offices, and the white hires chose the ones by the good bathroom and the black new hires preferred to be near other black people? This would result in segregation but everyone involved would be happy with their choice. That would be a legacy of racism but is it a problem to be solved?
The lack of black voice actors, if there is such a thing, may be similar. Acting is a profession where 1% are rich and famous, 9% are comfortable, and 90% are working other jobs to support their acting habit. People who come from situations where they are financially insecure are probably less likely to risk their effort on such a long shot. Is that a problem to be solved?
With the Smith and Robinsons the solution would be for Robinsons to move closer to the well. That would help the Robinsons without hurting the Smiths. That is what the Smiths did.
As Kearsen says you are trying to have a equality of outcome, not of opportunity. The problem is that in most situations equality of outcome is impossible.
That sounds as though you and Kearsen don’t understand the concepts of “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” at all. What determines equality of outcome in this case is whether the Smiths and the Robinsons end up actually obtaining the same amount of water, which is affected by all sorts of additional factors like the number of able-bodied water-fetchers in their families, etc.
If the Smiths and the Robinsons have equal rights to the water and live at equal distances from the water, then all that gives them is equal opportunity for water access, not equality of outcome in amount of water actually obtained.
As for demanding that the Robinsons move closer to the well, why should the Robinsons be burdened with physically moving just to equalize their opportunity of access to the water?
He was also good as a dude playing an Aussie dude disguised as a black dude in Tropic Thunder:
Tropic Thunder absolutely could not be made today.
There’s nothing racist about hiring a black person to play a black character. We do it in live action all the time. You have a character who needs to be black, so you hire a black actor. You don’t hire a white actor but make them appear black.
If you really think the white actor is the best for the art, then you make the character white, just like you would in live action.
Colorblind casting does not fix racial issues. Being unaware of race means you wind up picking the people who are more similar to you. That’s how human brains are hardwired–we like people who are like us. The only way to thwart this is to actively be aware of our own biases–which means we can’t ignore race.
That’s why colorblindness is a 1990s concept, made by white people who didn’t understand racism.
Whenever I get upset about people portraying characters of another race (i.e. white people doing black characters), I calm down by listening to my soundtrack of The Wiz.
This is all kinds of wrong.
First, the Robinson’s have the same access to water as the Smiths, that the Smith chose to live closer to the water does not affect the Robinson’s at all. In fact, as @Puddleglum alluded to, the Robinson’s COULD move closer if they chose. What you WANT done is to provide the outcomes of the two to be the same regardless of personal choice. I don’t care if the Robinson’s move close or far from the water but to move far away means that access (still the same) is less EASY.
If opportunity is equalized, that does not guarantee or even correlate with equality of outcome.
Maybe you thought that the three months’ delay in resuming this discussion would cause me to forget the actual conditions of the hypothetical as I originally laid it out? Nope:
Systemic racism is a hell of a drug. We have here a hypothetical situation in which the persistent inequality of opportunity in terms of access to the well is very clearly a direct legacy of deliberate, oppressive, legally imposed discrimination against Robinsons on the part of Smiths.
But you can still manage to spin that into an imagined neutral situation where the Smiths merely innocently “chose to live closer to the water” than the Robinsons did, conveniently eliding the fact that the Smiths stacked the well-access deck in their favor by blatantly oppressive measures, and are still benefiting from the inherited advantage they receive from that legacy of oppression.