Casual racism or AIBU

[Kooksadooks]

Hello. I have a lot on my mind today but hope you are having a nice New Years Eve…
We (me, DP, MIL, FIL, DS ect) were sat around the TV over Christmas period.
The Channel 5 advert featuring Anne Bolelyn played by black actress Jodie Turner-Smith comes on and MIL starts complaining that she ‘doesn’t understand all this’ and ‘Anne Bolelyn wasn’t black’ and doesn’t understand ‘why white people cannot play black people’…
I bit my tongue, I appreciate that I am surrounded by people who agree with her and there’s no point in arguing with them about what I think, also not wanting to cause drama over Christmas but AIBU to feel uncomfortable at MIL’s comments?
I mentioned it to DP afterwards and he agrees with MIL

@Ellowyn

I really couldn't get into a movie if Tom Hanks was playing Martin Luther King.

This too!

I watched the first episode and didn't think it was particularly good. I was surprised at the casting and read up on it. Ann Boleyn whilst white was a product of the French court rather than the English Court and was therefore different and in some ways othered at the time. Her views about protestantism were also radical.

I could understand the rationale behind the casting having read that and thought it was cleverly metaphorical and presented a thoughtful representation about the obstacles faced by people perceived as different.

I think a point can be made for just having actors play parts. That being said someone white playing MLK would be completely unacceptable. But as we don't really know the origins of a lot of historical figures(people assume they're white to fit in with racist ideals) we shouldn't just assume every figure was white.

It really depends on whether your MIL has made other seemingly racist comments. I find it distracting in historical programmes when the actor somehow doesn’t fit the role.

I agree mostly with colour blind casting.
But not where either it is based on a real person, or if it would make a different story due to it. If you've got a character like, for example, Anne of Green Gables (red hair), who has some important feature that has limited ethnicities then it would change the story not to have that. Hermoine Granger, I can totally buy into her being a different ethnicity as the only features we're told about is "bushy" hair and sticking out teeth, and it wouldn't change her character in any way.

I think there are a lot of stories where you could change the ethnicity of a character without it being an issue. What if the Famous Five weren't white, for example? Is there anything that says they should be white. Anne is traditionally fair, but I'm not sure it says so in the books. So could they be non-white? They're clearly a middle class family in the 50s, so likely to be white-Caucasian, but not exclusively so. Aunt Fanny's family have clearly been there for centuries, so again that increases the likelihood of being white, but I think you could get away with it.

My biggest concern is that if you have that way round, what about white actors portraying non-white roles? That will come-perhaps with less of a fanfare.
Then you get the decision that it really didn't work well having the non-white actor portraying a white character, but not the other way round. So you now get the white actors having the full choice of roles whereas the non-white actors having no more roles and having to compete with white actors for their traditional roles.

I feel the same about casting women in traditional male roles. It may be great for those first few women, but ultimately it will probably work out negatively for women.

I agree with your MIL. It's like when someone says James Bond should be a woman and someone disagrees because James Bond is a man, is that sexist?

Your MILs comment was absolutely not racist, that term is thrown around too much these days.

Sadly, a black woman would never have been queen in that century.

@RosesAndHellebores

I watched the first episode and didn't think it was particularly good. I was surprised at the casting and read up on it. Ann Boleyn whilst white was a product of the French court rather than the English Court and was therefore different and in some ways othered at the time. Her views about protestantism were also radical.

I could understand the rationale behind the casting having read that and thought it was cleverly metaphorical and presented a thoughtful representation about the obstacles faced by people perceived as different.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's a good metaphor as it suggests that racism can be compared to coming from a different court. It can't as is much more damaging, has caused the murder of many millions of people of colour and continues to shape out societies in awful ways. I think the comparison minimises racism.

I think there a massive difference between racial hatred and someone saying something isn't portrayed factually correct .

I do find in some historical dramas made these days they have a lot of BAME actors so they’re represented which is great as these races were in western society in various ways.

However, I don’t agree with Anne Boleyn being black, if anything yes, a Mediterranean looking actress would be better as more believable. I can see why this actress was cast in the Anne Boleyn role but I just think it confuses people as not historically accurate and winds up the racists.

In the 1961 film of West Side Story, Rita Moreno, who was the only actual Puerto Rican actor playing one of the Puerto Rican roles, was still put into darker-skinned make-up to reflect a particular blinkered view of the racial makeup of Puerto Rico — when she objected, the makeup artist asked her if she was ‘racist’. (That’s leaving aside the ‘brownface’ of Natalie Wood, George Chakiris and lots of others in the cast.)

I think what I’m saying is that you can be non-white, playing a role that is your own ethnicity, and still need to be tweaked to reflect your era’s stereotypical ideas about your race or racial mix.

I’m not sure that white actors playing other ethnicities has stopped being ok very long ago — Angelina Jolie played Marianne Pearl in 2007, Juliette Binoche played a Chilean woman in 2016.

I agree with your MIL, and would think the same if historical figures such as Martin Luther King were played by white actors. I don’t think (but happy to be corrected) that this is racist…

I am mixed race and I also don't agree with it.
I think they should have been cleverer about it and have done a different spin - a black main character in a period drama or a mostly black cast or anything else that could have had a huge impact and got people thinking and challenging their own racist views. But to play a true character in history but cast her as black when she wasn't...to me actually is just a plain lazy way of trying to piggyback on the public's interest in challenging racist views. I actually find it a bit insulting - film challenging racial views (tick box). When really what you want is something thought provoking but instead what we get is what has happened in this thread - debate about whether a real character can be cast as a different race...not lets look at racism at the time or now.

@sst1234

But Ann Boleyn wasn’t black. It’s historically inaccurate to have a black actor play Ann Boleyn. This is the same nonsense as having a female James Bond - he wasn’t written as a woman. It’s just embarrassing virtue signalling to do this sort of stuff. Have stories of real black people ceased to exist? Is it impossible to write a story starting a real female spy? It’s actually racist to give minority and female actors the crumbs off the table, because it implies their own stories are not worthy of being told. It’s not racist to call out this nonsense.

I agree. I don't think what MIL said was racist in anyway and I agree. It's historically inaccurate.

Not racist. Anne Boleyn wasn't black.
Can you imagine Brad Pitt as Nelson Mandela? Or the Jamaican Bobsled Team as four white blokes?

It's a leap into colour blind casting to move forward an industry that has been primarily white.
I like colour blind casting it feels modern and fresh.

Because it is a fictional account, I want to be inspired by the acting and so the colour of skin has already become irrelevant. The character becomes alive to me black, white or brown.

I watched a black female officer inspect recruits at a military passing out parade. I felt immensely proud. We have come a long way from the 'fuzzy wuzzies' having no senior place in our armies because we fought them - something said to me by an MP some years ago.

Never noticed it all that much in British society tbh.

But people make SO much of virtually nothing now to "virtue signal" themselves into outa space. I think I find that more annoying.

Witness: Benny Hill is so "sexist" now you get warnings if you watch current re-runs. Yet the most abusive bestial kind of pornography gets a free pass!

The same with an actor or politician who touched a woman's knee under a table 20 years ago. Yet the worst kind of pornography goes uncommented on. In fact people think its cool to express and promote their "kinks" be it S&M, threesomes blah blah on MSM, even Mumsnet "Relationships" pages as kinda acceptable and cool (not vanilla which is the worst kind of sex, apparently!).

P.S. Anne Boleyn wasn't black. Anymore than women were blacksmiths in 17th century England. I think people should be more involved in creating the present than misrpresenting the past. Just sayin'

Also I dont see people saying about it being 'inaccurate'when it's a white person playing a different race.

If a film is about a real person, I don't think someone of a different ethnicity should play that person. So for a Black person: Anne Boleyn? No. James Bond? Yes.

Having said this...Historical inaccuracy doesn't stop me from watching and enjoying a film though, especially when the story has already been told many times as accurately as possible.

I don't care that much about it, as long as I enjoy the adaptation.

@toddybell

I'm black and I agree with your MIL. Anne Boleyn wasn't Black so should be played by someone who factually represented who she was re: ethnicity . I'd feel the same if someone white came along and played Martin Luther King or Mary Jane Seacole or Harriet Seacole or Mahatma Ghandi, etc.

That’s so refreshing. It seems cultural appropriation is a one way street.

I know that it’s theoretically possible but I’ve never heard someone start off like this and, if given the chance to expand on their thoughts, not end up spouting unarguably racist crap that would slide right into the Daily Fail comments section. Usually with reference to ‘political correctness gone mad’, ‘woke’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘the Muslims.’

This. Same with people who say “you can’t talk about immigration without being accused of racism” You absolutely can, I do it all the time. People who say this invariably come out with racist crap.

there’s no such thing as casual racism

Yes there is. Just like there is casual disablism and casual sexism. All isms have a sliding scale from the minor, slightly ignorant pervasive comments, to out and out, often violent, discrimination. None of it is ok, but it would be wrong to pretend OP’s Aunt and the KKK are the same.

@TrishM80

My apologies, I wasn't aware of Kingsley's Indian heritage! As a pp said though, they did bronze him up for the role. Still a great movie though.

He looks pretty much entirely European these days, so it's not obvious. Not sure about when he was younger.

I don't have a problem with Jodie being cast as Anne Boleyn, but I don't think disagreeing necessarily makes you racist.

This is a serious question, not a "gotcha": if a black man had been cast as Prince Philip in The Crown, and Charles and his siblings were played by biracial actors, would everyone who disagreed with the casting decisions be racist? If not, why is it different if the subject died centuries ago?

I do find it distracting when the actor is too physically dissimilar from the person they're portraying. I thought Cuba Gooding Jr. was an odd choice for the part of OJ Simpson. He's too short and his voice is too soft.

Witness: Benny Hill is so "sexist" now you get warnings if you watch current re-runs. Yet the most abusive bestial kind of pornography gets a free pass! The same with an actor or politician who touched a woman's knee under a table 20 years ago. Yet the worst kind of pornography goes uncommented on

This is completely true . If Benny Hill was the worst thing we had to contend with re. attitudes to women, we'd be laughing.

So if it's ok for a black actress to play a white queen, presumably it's ok if a white actor played Martin Luther King?

I don't like this comparison and it keeps coming up. Martin Luther King and Anne Boleyn are not equivalent historical figures.