‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and the Problem With Colorblind Casting - The New York Times

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Late June brought news that the animated shows “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” “Big Mouth” and “Central Park” would recast characters of color who have been played by white actors.

A week later “Hamilton” dominated the cultural chatter on Independence Day weekend when Disney+ premiered the film version of the Broadway phenomenon.

In both situations performers inhabited characters of racial backgrounds that were different from their own, often referred to as “colorblind casting.” But one provoked the usual apologies and promises to do better while the other was celebrated anew as being a bold exemplar of diversity — though it ultimately presents a set of more complex concerns.

Still, the difference between the two lies in their approaches to the all-encompassing nature of whiteness in American industries and narratives. Whereas the world of voice-acting for animation is just another dominated by white workers, casting a person of color as a typically white character is an act of subversion, a normalization of something other than the white standard. The Black and brown founding fathers of “Hamilton” make the story of America something that can finally be owned by people of color, as opposed to the reality, which so often refutes the relevancy of their lives and contributions.

Though egalitarian in theory, colorblind casting in practice is more often used to exclude performers of color. It’s a high-minded-sounding concept that producers and creators use to free themselves of any social responsibility they may feel toward representing a diverse set of performers.

The history of the practice in live-action takes is more egregious, and has been well-documented: Mickey Rooney’s notorious Asian landlord in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; Alec Guinness’s Arab prince in “Lawrence of Arabia”; Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello. In the past decade alone, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson, among others, played characters onscreen who were of Asian descent in the source material.

And though this trend so often favors white actors — if you have a few hours, or days, to kill, Google “whitewashing controversy” — it certainly isn’t limited to them. People of color are often tagged in to represent an identity different from their own, as though Chinese is synonymous with Korean or Mexican is synonymous with Indian.

It seems needless to say, and yet, here it is: Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation. It is an act of minstrelsy.

Kristen Bell, who voiced the biracial Molly Tillerman in the Apple TV+ show “Central Park”; Jenny Slate, who voiced the biracial Missy Foreman-Greenwald in “Big Mouth”; and Mike Henry, the voice of the Black “Family Guy” and “The Cleveland Show” character Cleveland Brown, each announced their decisions to gracefully bow out in the name of proper representation. Hank Azaria, who for years voiced the Indian “Simpsons” character Apu, stepped away from the role earlier this year — last month the show announced that it will no longer use any white actors to play characters of color.

Mike Henry, who played Cleveland on “Family Guy,” was one of several white actors who recently announced that they would stop voicing animated characters of color.Credit...Fox, via Associated Press

Despite this recent trend, actors and creators have defended such choices with purportedly merit-based arguments. Earlier this year, in fact, Loren Bouchard, one of the creators of “Central Park,” explained Bell’s casting by saying “Kristen needed to be Molly; we couldn’t not make her Molly.”

More often than not, when the defense rings out in the chord of “they were the best person for the job,” that “best person” is white. That is no coincidence.

Another popular defense that pops up, most often in internet discourse, involves canon: The story, the holy text, must be preserved as written. Even if this defense didn’t presuppose that anything canon should not be open to challenge or reinterpretation, it would still fail to recognize that in many stories the character’s whiteness is incidental to the narrative. So why not use that opportunity to re-create the character as someone who doesn’t fall into the majority?

The fact that Ariel is white has nothing to do with her story about wanting to be with her love and walk on land. The casting of a Black actress to play Hermione Granger in the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” provoked howls from many fans, but the character’s whiteness never had any bearing on her brilliance. In fact, stories that do not take their characters’ whiteness as a given may find fresh relevance and invite new audiences into their sphere, because for so many people of color, they don’t get to see themselves represented in the media they consume.

For me, it was “The Wiz,” starring Diana Ross as a Black Dorothy; I loved it so much more than the original “Wizard of Oz.” And in 1997, it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Cinderella” film, which was completely colorblind. The singer-actress Brandy was a Black Cinderella, with a white stepmother (Bernadette Peters) and a Black stepsister, as well as a white one. The prince was of Filipino descent, with parents who were Black and white (Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber). And Whitney Houston was a glamorous fairy godmother.

The whole movie was a visual feast, with bright costumes and playful dance numbers, and it never explained the puzzling genealogies of its characters. It simply allowed the audience to soak in the story and characters as they were.

A 1997 film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Cinderella” starred Brandy as the title character and Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother.Credit...Disney

But however well-intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn’t otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a Black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress — even when cast without any regard to their race — can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another.

And then there’s also the “Hamilton” problem. The show may place diverse bodies on the stage, but productions that would subvert a narrative traditionally owned by white characters must not just tag in actors of color but reconsider the fundamental way the new casting changes the story. In “Hamilton,” the revision of American history is dazzling and important, but it also neglects and negates the parts of the original story that don’t fit so nicely into this narrow model. The characters’ relationship to slavery, for example, is scarcely mentioned, because it would be incongruous with the triumphant recasting of our country’s first leaders. (The “Hamilton” star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda responded to this criticism this week, calling it “valid.”)

The trouble of a colorblind production might not be the casting itself, but the fact that the casting may still erase the reimagined characters’ identities. (If Willy Loman is Black, wouldn’t he have a more complex understanding of the American dream?) Careless colorblind casting — in animated roles, in live-action roles on TV, movies or the stage — assumes that identities amount to nothing and that all experiences are transferable, which is far from the reality.

In a 1996 speech, the playwright August Wilson spoke out against colorblind casting overall, saying:

To mount an all-Black production of a “Death of a Salesman” or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as Black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.

Wilson called not for colorblind casting, but for institutions that invite art by and for people of color, to tell their own stories and not simply ones adapted for them. He doesn’t call for blindness, but visibility: people of color seen on stages and behind the curtains. This applies to all art forms — people of color should be on movie screens, on the TV and in recording booths giving voice to stories about them.

It’s hard not to see his point. Even times when it’s employed with good intentions, colorblind casting often fails in the execution. It’s a larger problem of the narrative of our nation, which frequently refuses people of color their own stories, reflexively opting for a white purview or offering stories written for white characters but with people of color haphazardly slotted in. We’re forever fighting our America’s racial default.

Blindness is no excuse. In a moment when we’re reassessing everything surrounding representation, perhaps it’s time for all of us to finally open our eyes.

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‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and the Problem With Colorblind Casting - The New York Times
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