Would Hollywood Love Me If I Were White?

An indie filmmaker comments on Hollywood's continuing issues with whitewashing and racism.

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Complex Original

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When I was a struggling 23-year-old actress, an agent trying to give it to me straight said, “Scarlett Johansson has already been doing this for ten years. What makes you think you can start now?” I used to tell that anecdote to illustrate the ridiculous ageism and sexism in Hollywood (the only place besides gymnastics competitions and sweatshops in which being a 23-year-old female is considered old), but looking back on that conversation now, I’m completely flabbergasted that that agent didn’t also mention my race.  

If he had really wanted to be brutally honest about Hollywood and my prospects in it, he could have added, “Oh, and she’s also white. I mean, more white women have won Oscars for playing Asian women than actual Asian women. Isn’t that nuts?” I’m pretty sure that was the only time anyone ever thought of me and Scarlett Johansson in the same breath (if you don’t count the time an ex-boyfriend tried to convince me that he found us “equally attractive in different ways”).

But let us compare and contrast. Scarlett Johansson is a world-famous, in-demand, A-list actress who makes millions of dollars. I am a freelance filmmaker whose parents send smoked turkeys in the mail because they’re afraid I don’t have enough money to eat. When we were kids, Scarlett Johansson was going to auditions and attending the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, while I was watching movies on my parents’ VHS player in a Detroit suburb and taking ballet classes in a strip mall.

But even if we had been given the same opportunities and I too had started working professionally as an actor before I got my first period, it’s absurd to think that Scarlett Johansson and I would ever have ended up in the same place. In an ideal world where everyone gets a fair shake, we might have been up for many of the same parts. Okay, the girl in Girl with the Pearl Earring was explicitly white, but many of Scarlett Johansson’s early, career-defining roles didn’t necessarily require that the person playing them actually be of a particular race.

Lost in Translation is about an American woman feeling isolated in a foreign country. Wouldn’t casting someone of Asian descent who isn’t Japanese add an interesting layer about identity? Or what about Match Point? Wouldn’t an Asian American woman also feel like an outsider amongst the British upper crust? And wouldn’t she also be perceived as a socially ambitious upstart? Sadly, these are all just naive fantasies and of course, I was never in the running for any of those roles. I was across town auditioning for Massage Parlor Worker #3 in an episode of Law and Order. Scarlett Johansson would go on to become one of the biggest stars in the world, and I currently have no dental insurance.

I’m happy with and grateful for my life, but sometimes I wonder what sort of career I might have had as an actress if I had been white like Scarlett Johansson. Whenever a character is just a human being—written totally non-race specific—no one ever thinks to cast an Asian American person. It’s like Hollywood can’t be bothered to click on the drop down menu and they’re just stuck on white as the comfortable default.

Years ago, I accepted the fact that people in the movie industry weren’t ever going to cast me in anything worthwhile, so I went to film school and started writing my own scripts and directing and producing my own movies independently. It seemed obvious to me that Hollywood wasn’t interested in telling stories about Asian people. I was wrong about that. For a second it looked like a genie had granted my wish! But there was a perverse twist. Hollywood is interested in Asian stories—they just don’t want any actual Asian people to be in them. 

When the controversy erupted over the casting of Scarlett Johansson as an Asian character in the movie adaptation of the beloved Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell, a screenwriter named Max Landis posted a YouTube video in which he spent several painfully condescending minutes trying to justify the decision and then he said, “You should be asking why we don’t have any A-list Asian celebrities in America right now. That’s the big question.”

Maybe I don’t know how the industry works as well as Max Landis does (he certainly speaks in a manner patronizing enough to suggest he knows a whole lot), but how are Scarlett Johansson's casting in Ghost in the Shell and the lack of A-list Asian celebrities two separate issues? If you went to a coffee shop and asked for a donut and they gave you a gluten-free muffin instead and said, “I know you asked for a donut and we actually have thousands of fresh, delicious donuts, but they’re in the kitchen and I don’t feel like going back there to look, and we keep all the muffins in this display case here in the front. If there aren’t any donuts in this glass case because I didn’t bother to put them there, we can’t sell them to you because they’re not in the glass case,” wouldn’t you be pissed off at the sheer laziness and stupidity? Go get me a donut!

So where do we go from here? Asian Americans are stuck in the same terrible cycle as someone trying to get a job waiting tables in New York: you can’t get hired unless you have experience and you can’t get experience if you can’t get hired. It's bad enough when Asian American actors aren’t considered for roles that were probably written for white people anyway, but it’s downright infuriating when we can’t even get roles where the character is actually Asian. How do we ever work our way up to the A-list if no one will ever cast us in anything?

The truth is, I don’t have any good answers or easy solutions for dismantling institutionalized racism. Whenever I screen my movies at film festivals and colleges, aspiring Asian American filmmakers often ask me for advice on how to make it in the movie industry. First, I tell them I haven’t made it, because I’m still paying for my semi-annual teeth cleaning out-of-pocket. Then I tell them to stop waiting around, hoping to be discovered. Go out and make your own films, I say. No one else can tell your unique story. Not even Scarlett Johansson.   

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