Reasonable Doubt: Racebending, Media Representation, and Pushback

#BoycottStarWarsVII is straight up ridiculous and embarrassing. It’s also a trending hashtag right now. Trending in response to a female lead and a Black male holding a lightsaber (we don’t even know if he’s a Jedi) in the upcoming The Force Awakens. Like Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Natalie Portman, or Samuel L. Jackson’s characters never existed in the Star Wars universe. “Racebending” refers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color. Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Michael B. Jordan as Human Torch, Idris Elba as Heimdal. These are obvious cases where men of color have portrayed characters conceived originally to be white men. This kind of casting has been dubbed ‘racebending’ after M. Night Shymalan’s slow motion train wreck, The Last Airbender. Nicola Peltz as Katara, Jake Gyllenhall as The Prince of Persia, Al Jolson as The Jazz Singer, Mena Suvari in Stuck. Cases where white actors portray characters originally conceived (or born in Suvari’s situation (no chill) as people of color. Also cases defined as racebending. It’s a two way street, really. Websters’ defines Whitewash as ‘a deliberate concealment of someone’s mistakes or faults in order to clear their name’. Urban Dictionary defines it as “the entertainment industry’s attempt at m…