How do all of you feel when they race swap characters?

The Wizard of Oz (1939) made me think about how we (as a society) are much more accepting of race changing in stage shows or movies when it's done across the board than when it happens to just one or two established characters. The Wiz (1978) is an example - no one really had a problem with an all-black version of a movie that originally had no black actors. Same with Hamilton (I'm assuming since I haven't seen it).

Where this doesn't work is where you're dealing with historical fact and the topic or point of the story is race. You could not, for instance, swap the races of the officers and the soldiers in the movie Glory (1989) - which tells the true story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of the Union Army's earliest African-American regiments in the American Civil War.

Most artworks take liberties with history and one is generally poorly advised to try to learn their history from musicals and movies. What I am really asking is whether you were morally offended by it.

I'll be definitive here and say maybe so, maybe no. These offenses are matters of degree and intent and being a mongrel myself, I try to not spend too much of my life worrying about it. Our contemporary filters on race, ethnicity, history, gender and offense are so narrow these days that it's pretty hard to not step in something.

My personal boundary for "moral offense" generally requires some obvious deliberate intent. If it's dumb or lazy, that's less obvious. Often in movies, it appears that script writers make a guess as to who they can afford to offend without too much blowback. Nazis, gangsters, arms smugglers and klansmen are pretty much always fair game but anybody with a bit more ambiguity than those boogey men can become like pirates (rehabilitated by Disney among others) or supposedly innocently convicted inmates (Shawshank). Overreaching scientists like Dr Strangelove can be connected to Nazis, magicians or alchemists defy church teachings, scientists, of course, created Frankenstein because they have no morals, and police seem to generally sit in a narrow boundary with corruption.

Movies need a villain, hopefully one that's established fairly quickly in the plot, but with all of these considerations, it seems like you have to just pick one and run with it. Let the lawyers weigh in on the legal problems and the producer decide on who we will offend with this flick.

What with my personal ethnic and genetic mix, I can almost always find somebody offensive in a movie, so that's why I stick with those matters of degree and intent. Don't even get me started on history, accuracy and interpretation.....I can go on way too long on that.

The reason why I ask is that you appeared to be morally offended at the idea of a black George Washington as this would muddy the historical waters of Washington's position as a white slave-holder. This appeared to be something more deeply wrong to you than an historical inaccuracy (which we all agree that it is). If so, how does this square with your moral assessment of the casting and writing of Hamilton?

Corax can go all night.

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A black version of Washington would be interesting but what would be the point? If it's an exercise in color blind casting, IMO, it would miss the historical facts in a way that make me wonder why would somebody cast like that. It wouldn't muddle history so much as it would muddle the movie, since I'd spend the first 30 minutes trying to figure out what they're up to. As an exercise in cultural appropriation, it just doesn't compute. While we're at it, they might as well make the slaves white, which would bring the movie to where it's like a 1960's gimmick intended to illustrate the point that slavery is bad.

As for Hamilton, I'd guess that most Americans don't even know who he is other than "Hamilton", the guy on the money. Again, some sort of alt-race version of this guy, the sort of device that's meant to push an allegory, confusing an audience. I understand that there are apocryphal tales about Hamilton's origin story, but as a historical character, if he presented to the world with a black appearance, somebody in that very race conscious world would have noticed and it would be a big story. Again, it leaves me with that "what are they up to" question more than, "what a liberation....anybody can play anybody".

I guess it leaves me with that cynical observation that we are not as advanced as we like to think.

Perhaps because the POC actor just looks right (passing not only for white, but also passing for Washington) or perhaps the POC actor is the best actor? Or perhaps it might be an artistic choice, inviting African Americans to see themselves in the personage. Or maybe we're just in a future where there aren't that many white-skinned people left as people worry less and less about "racial purity."

But would this be "pungent" or "cringe-inducing"?

Did Hamilton compute? Most people seemed be able to catch on and enjoy it just fine.

Or it could be a new gimmick? And perhaps the message might be that slavery was a complicated question at the time, that the founders had to choose between winning a war for independence or excluding slave-holding states from the early union?
This is a dangerous standard as "most Americans" know very little.

And yet the play got people interested in the actual history of Alexander Hamilton. It actually elevated public discussion and inquiry into the historical person. Who knew what hip hop could do?

Since Hamilton has become a main topic and since I haven't seen it, I'd like to ask what is the point?

I'm presuming it's something along the line of a story that takes place at a point in history where very few minorities could play a role since virtually all of the key figures in the specific story were white males - so the idea is to flip it and make all the actors minorities because in such a story no minorities could play a part?

If it's the artist choice to cast someone black/white/asian whatever that's cool. For example one of the best race swaps in cinema history was Morgan Freeman in Shawshank. Written as an Irish white dude. Director saw Morgan was right for the role and man did he nail it. It felt genuine and not forced upon the production for social/marketing purposes.

The problem, which has happen at a nauseating rate the last few years is doing it for the sake of representation/diversity instead of story/fit. It's disingenuous and it reflects in the recent movies. Probably why foreign places like Bollywood and Koren film are starting to beat Hollywood. They don't have to worry about socially making people happy and just focus on story, like Hollywood use to. Maybe we should start pressuring those markets to put white/black people in their movies. I feel underrepresented in Korean films.

The focus on race/identity in Hollywood is killing the industry. Race/Identity is interesting aspects to a story but if it's the main theme it makes for very dull movies. Anyways my 2 cents.

I find it insulting to coloured people when characters have their races swapped.
You are telling me that there is no original black or brown or female or gay character good enough to have their own movies.


Cause the brave experiments have worked. I would rather have a Black Panther and similar black superheroes over a black Superman.
I would rather have an Atomic Blonde over a female James Bond.


There are plenty of writers (irrespective of their own race, gender, sexual orientation) out there creating original stuff with original minority characters. Back them instead of flipping genders or races.

You can't really culturally colonize unless you re-shape and re-purpose what is already there. If you add celebrating the birthday of Jesus alongside pagan festivals of Saturnalia and Yule (and other Winter Solstice "hits"), for example, then you simply have clutter and competition. If, however, you make the time of Winter Solstice into Christ's Birthday then you have displaced, conflated, and colonized your competition. This makes Christianity the only game in town.

Naah, disagree. We should rather back and trust the competition, and it will emerge out of it in shinning colours with its distinct narrative, which will be remembered for a longer time, instead of finding short term attention by dancing the same dance with only different clothes.

If the art is good enough, it will find viewers. There's a large and diverse audience asking for newer diverse stories.

I tend to agree, especially when it comes to historical characters, fictional ones less so, and fantasy characters even less, but even then, it depends on the context and the plot. It's not like any reasonably literate person doesn't know the racial and cultural context of these characters and it's not like we actually live in a society that somehow has managed to evolve to the point where we don't see race anymore. Maybe some day either that will happen or the inevitable blurring of lines and mixing of races will happen, but it's not this year yet.

The converse of the Washington-Hamilton constellation of characters would be a white portrayal of Frederick Douglas or Martin Luther King. I can imagine a horrified moral outrage over that portrayal along with suspicion that whoever did this is up to something.

After all, it's a movie and movies are probably 80% visual. The movie has 2 hours or thereabouts to introduce characters, lay out a plot and resolve it. Much of that time consists of establishing shots, pans, zooms, etc so it has to be compact in its verbal content.

I'd contrast that to live theater. There I've seen black Hamlets, Japanese Macbeths, etc. In fact, one of my favorite Macbeths was set in Japan with samurai knights. It worked really well. Aside from references to Hamlet as the "moody Dane", there's not much about that story that requires any particular place or race. Live theater is mostly verbal, with little action and no FX, so words and gestures count for a lot more than they do in a movie. Color blind casting can be fairly inconsequential.

The Hamilton question wasn't addressed to me, but I'll say something briefly because I had a conversation about this with someone else IRL awhile ago:

The use of minority actors to play the Founding Fathers doesn't bother me partially because they've achieved borderline-mythic status in the popular imagination. There is some nexus of both age and awareness at which the figure depicted, fictional or not, becomes so much larger than its source that it's not really possible to "violate" it. When enough legend has been built up around someone or something, it becomes less a person than a material that artists can work with.

There is no hard rule for when (or if) this happens that applies to all figures equally, but I'd say there's some kind of exponential increase in the required age/awareness if the thing being changed was particularly germane to their noteworthiness. MLK's race is completely inextricable from his noteworthiness, so the threshold there would be much higher. But we care about George Washington as a General and a President first (and he's got a couple of extra centuries on him), so it matters less there.

To answer your question it's stupid because people only do it to look politically correct everyone is worried about offending everyone they can't for the life of them make white people good guys isn't that stereotyping too since it shows that all white people are bad I guess they might be but it's hard to say because I neither know the color of my skin nor the color of my black neighbors.

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Thanks again, Mr Portridge.

My guess is - if they remade the musical 1776 and replaced just a few characters with ethnic minority actors, it would be seen as either confusing or a blatant attempt at forced diversity in Hollywood (or even tokenism). People would be searching for a reason why only one or two specific Continental-Congressmen (or their wives) were now being played by minority actors.

But if the entire cast were made up of ethnic minorities for all the roles (where originally all were white males with 2 white females in the cast), that would be more widely acceptable as it is with Hamilton.

Agree, disagree, thoughts?

The remake of Annie seemed to be unfairly uncontroversial despite Annie being the only one turned into a black character. The bad reviews were simply just about it being a badly made movie.

I think by this point you can pretty much do whatever you want with Annie and it would just be another Annie movie.

I never did answer the question. With my hands.

That was not his dream, however. His dream was that of a colorblind society in which his children would, "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content. of their character." If we hold that his race is what makes him great, or that it is somehow essentially tied to it, then we really deny his greatness (which was to transcend race with love and unity). There is only one race, the human race. Here is crazy old EJO making the point rather emphatically at the U.N.






If we truly honor Dr. King, then we should be open to him being portrayed by potentially anyone. If we ever get to the promised land he spoke just before he was murdered in Memphis, we will not, in the end, remember him as a black man, but rather as a man.