Tag Archives: whitewashing

Blacktober: There Is No Such Thing as Blackwashing

Laurie and Debbie say:

Neither of us are really anime fans; we’re just both admirers without a lot of deep knowledge. Debbie has been aware of Inktober, the month-long art challenge, for some years, and has known some people who have participated.

From that distance, we missed the controversy about “Blacktober,” so we are grateful for Nicole M. thoughtful and detailed report on Medium. The initial invitation called it “a month-long exclusive event where Black creators get to turn their favorite characters into someone who looks like them.”

As an artist and writer who have spent some 35 years working to provide images that look like the people who need to see them, we could not celebrate this more. The event was started by Celi (art above) and Cel C. (art below).
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Harley Quinn by Cel C.

Of course, you would expect controversy over something like this from the white supremacist noise machine, and Cel C. and Celi were certainly prepared for that. Nicole M. focuses on the more upsetting complaints from white people who should know better, many of whom were upset about seeing their favorite characters “blackwashed.”

Let’s clear something up: blackwashing isn’t a thing. It never has been. People would complain about blackwashing when a Black actor plays the role of a character who was originally White. Yet many of those same people will dismiss whitewashing of any kind. Whitewashing has been present in Hollywood and media sources for years and it hasn’t just affected black people, it’s affected people of color in general. It excludes people of color from most roles, even if those roles were specifically talking about our culture, our history, or even our struggles.

She goes on to list examples of Hollywood and other media whitewashing (which is a thing). Making a favorite character Black is a way of stepping into that character’s skin in a media landscape which makes Blackness such an invisible quality. Making a character of color white erases their identity; making a white (or Asian or Latin) character Black widens their scope. This is what the Blacktober artists know in their bones.
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Death the Kid, Liz and Patty are beautifully drawn here thanks to rasmen

Yes providing representation and giving small-time Black artists exposure was part of the goals for this event. But overall, Blacktober was just harmless fun. It was an escape to just forget about how terrible the world is and continues to be. There was no need for people to try and ruin it. White people have so many characters in media and they don’t have to worry about being the next George Floyd. So Blacktober wasn’t racist. If you had a problem with it, that was on you.

The only thing we would add to Nicole M’s summation is that harmless fun and escape that also build identity and provide people with empowering images are not just harmless fun: they are a restorative step toward the world we should be living in.

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Does This Mean We Don’t Have to Whitewash Stonewall?

Debbie says:

Anyone with more than the slightest acquaintance with gay/queer history in the United States in the last fifty years knows about the Stonewall “riots” (I would call them response to police terrorism, myself) of 1969. Anyone who pays attention knows that the leaders of the disturbances were mostly cross-dressing people of color, including Sylvia Rivera, Stormé DeLarverie and Miss Major Griffen-Gracy.

Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and other Stonewall heroes marching in 1979.
Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and other Stonewall heroes marching in 1979.

Stonewall’s story has been repeatedly whitewashed in the intervening 45 years, and activists have repeatedly been forced to step up and remind whatever segment of the mainstream is providing this misinformation that this story is not a story of white men.

Now, Hollywood is getting into the act, with Stonewall, scheduled to release in September, starring a bunch of cis white men. Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, among others), who has been honored by GLAAD for fighting media defamation of LGBT people (!), is covering himself with the opposite of glory (I don’t know about you, but I think of the opposite of glory as being brown and stinky and unwelcome in polite company).

Mey at Autostraddle previewed the film and says it is ” a false, whitewashed and ciswashed version, a version that the establishment could find respectable enough to be a mainstream story.” Mey also interviewed Miss Major Griffen-Gracy, a Black activist trans woman who participated in the Stonewall Riots:

My first thought is: how dare they attempt to do this again? A few years ago they did another Stonewall movie, and I swear if I saw a black person, it had to be a shadow running against the face of somebody who was white!

It’s absolutely absurd — you know, young people today aren’t stupid. They can read the history, they know that this is not the way it happened. These people can’t let it go! Everybody can’t be white! This is a country of different colors and people and thoughts and attitudes and feelings, and they try to make all of those the same for some reason.

It’s just aggravating. And hurtful! For all the girls who are no longer here who can’t say anything, this movie just acts like they didn’t exist.

And these were wonderful, marvelous, smart, intelligent girls. Yeah, we couldn’t get jobs making sixty thousand dollars a year, oh well. But we lived our true selves. We enjoyed our lives. We did what we had to do to survive. And we did! And now they’re acting like, “we’re so grateful that you did this and we’re going to take it from here because you stupid bitches don’t know how to do this.” Yeah, okay. Because I’m not white, I didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, and my parents don’t have money. What does any of that have to do with the facts? Nothing.

Read the rest of Miss Major’s interview, which provides a lot of honest, honestly colored history and context for Stonewall.  I wish I believed Roland Emmerich was ashamed of himself.