Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Note, I am not looking for direct answers to any of those questions. I am pointing out that defining what acceptable representation is and the principles involved allows us to answer each of those questions by deriving the answer from the principle.
Different principles lead to potentially different results, like assuming the numbers are ok - i.e, there are many minority faces represented throughout all levels Hollywoo - any of the following three scenarios might follow:
Changing the ethnicity of a character based on a historical person is wrong, changing the ethnicity of a fictional character is fine.
Things are never so black and white, though. Casting a black man as Mercucio in Romeo + Juliet isn't going to ruffle as many feathers as say, a white woman as Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. Take these things on a case by case basis. When one of the main characters of West Side Story is named "Maria" and you cast a white woman to play her, it may have been fine 50 years ago but not today. The issue isn't and hasn't been about completely making things equal. It's about giving people something to identify with in movies and TV. Like, the story of "21" could have been empowering for people of Asian descent, but instead they once again made the lead a white dude.
From the leaked Sony emails, a producer on a Denzel Washington movie was called our for comments on how Denzel's movies would never do well overseas. When asked about it, he responded with this:
“I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in general pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas,” the producer wrote. “But Sony sometimes seems to disregard that a picture must work well internationally to both maximize returns and reduce risk, especially pics with decent size budgets.”
I really don't see how that is anything more than ignorance.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Note, I am not looking for direct answers to any of those questions. I am pointing out that defining what acceptable representation is and the principles involved allows us to answer each of those questions by deriving the answer from the principle.
Different principles lead to potentially different results, like assuming the numbers are ok - i.e, there are many minority faces represented throughout all levels Hollywoo - any of the following three scenarios might follow:
Changing the ethnicity of a character based on a historical person is wrong, changing the ethnicity of a fictional character is fine.
Both are fine.
Both are objectionable.
No broad principle exists with regards to whitewashing either form of character. It's a matter of context, both for the meaning of that specific work and for the overall state of representation.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Note, I am not looking for direct answers to any of those questions. I am pointing out that defining what acceptable representation is and the principles involved allows us to answer each of those questions by deriving the answer from the principle.
Different principles lead to potentially different results, like assuming the numbers are ok - i.e, there are many minority faces represented throughout all levels Hollywoo - any of the following three scenarios might follow:
Changing the ethnicity of a character based on a historical person is wrong, changing the ethnicity of a fictional character is fine.
Both are fine.
Both are objectionable.
No broad principle exists with regards to whitewashing either form of character. It's a matter of context, both for the meaning of that specific work and for the overall state of representation.
That is simply saying the principle is "context must be accounted for in the following ways..."
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I can't tell if you're trying to get everybody else to stake out exactly the kind of position you want so that you can argue against them, or if you're "just asking questions" or what. Maybe you could start by giving your own views on what you're asking of others? Or linking them, if you've already done so? (I've read the whole thread but I don't remember if you have.)
But why is it better to have non 75% white levels? Presumably because it is in keeping with some principle. It would be better if it were 74% or 65%, perhaps? Does it then follow that it would be better if it were 0% white? I assume not!
And yes, we can absolutely evaluate things as separate from historical instances of similar things. Affirming the consequent isn't valid.
Empathy. Giving a damn about other people. Valuing the experiences of others. Recognizing privilege and inequity and desiring to mitigate it.
If there are 10 movies per year and purple people make up 99% of the population make a damned movie about orange people anyway.
That's not answering the question either. You're proposing remedies, not defining the conditions under which we should be satisfied. I mean, there are other factors too - what classes of division and identification need to be considered? Is "Asian" enough, or should it be Chinese American, Japanese American, etc., what about other divisions like transgender, abledness, fat/not, ugly/not, age?
You could make the same criticism about any complex social problem, from environmental policy to labor laws to health care. Complex problems have complex remedies.
Or heck, apply your criticism to entertainment in general. When people claim that Michael Bay is derivative, what specific conditions does Michael Bay need to meet to satisfy critics? What if a movie is criticized for being unoriginal, or unfunny?
The other problem is that you're demanding a formal benchmark for an informal request. If the government threatened to shut down Hollywood if Hollywood didn't diversify, then demanding a formal benchmark would be completely fair. But right now, the biggest consequence is that people are unhappy. So in place of a formal benchmark, I've already presented several informal milestones that would prevent a lot of the unhappiness from happening in the first place.
For instance, Aaron Sorkin wants to do an adaptation of "Flash Boys." As a sign of progress, he refuses to even consider whitewashing the main characters. Unfortunately, even though he wants to cast the main characters as Asian, he has trouble coming up with any Asian actors who can bring people to the box office. So even when people want to do the right thing, they find themselves unable to.
So one major milestone is when no one is able to use "There aren't any Asian movie stars" as an excuse to not cast Asian.
Or let's put it another way: Suppose you live in a town that has 5% Chinese people, but no Chinese restaurants, no matter how hard you look. Wouldn't you find that rather odd? When people look for a Chinese restaurant, there's not asking "What proportion of the available restaurants on Yelp serve Chinese food?" They're simply asking, "Does a decent selection of Chinese restaurants actually exist, to the point where people should have no trouble finding a Chinese restaurant to their liking?"
Focus on achieving the critical mass of "decent selection" first. Actual representation comes after that.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
On Facebook, Ms. Wu ticked off a list of recent films guilty of the practice and said, “I could go on, and that’s a crying shame, y’all.” On Twitter, she bit back against Hollywood producers who believe their “lead must be white” and advised the creators of lily-white content to “CARE MORE.” Another tip: “An easy way to avoid tokenism? Have more than one” character of color, she tweeted in March. “Not so hard.”
It’s never been easy for an Asian-American actor to get work in Hollywood, let alone take a stand against the people who run the place. But the recent expansion of Asian-American roles on television has paradoxically ushered in a new generation of actors with just enough star power and job security to speak more freely about Hollywood’s larger failures.
And their heightened profile, along with an imaginative, on-the-ground social media army, has managed to push the issue of Asian-American representation — long relegated to the back burner — into the current heated debate about Hollywood’s monotone vision of the world.
“The harsh reality of being an actor is that it’s hard to make a living, and that puts actors of color in a very difficult position,” said Daniel Dae Kim, who stars in “Hawaii Five-0” on CBS and is currently appearing in “The King and I” on Broadway.
Mr. Kim has wielded his Twitter account to point to dire statistics and boost Asian-American creators. Last year, he posted a cheeky tribute to “the only Asian face” he could find in the entire “Lord of the Rings” series, a woman who “appears for a glorious three seconds.”
Other actors lending their voices include Kumail Nanjiani of “Silicon Valley,” Ming-Na Wen of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and Aziz Ansari, who in his show, “Master of None,” plays an Indian-American actor trying to make his mark.
They join longtime actors and activists like BD Wong of “Gotham”; Margaret Cho, who has taken her tart comedic commentary to Twitter; and George Takei, who has leveraged his “Star Trek” fame into a social media juggernaut.
“There’s an age-old stereotypical notion that Asian-American people don’t speak up,” Mr. Wong said. But “we’re really getting into people’s faces about it.”
To be fair to Lord of the Rings, its basically a story in Europe. Which is, you know, the very definition of whiteness.
IIRC the Easterlings were either from the Middle East or Asian equivalent (forgot which ethnicity), they weren't white. But the audience never know that from the movies since they barely got any screen time. And it's not like it was impossible for the casting to get more creative, like they did with The Hobbit.
You're stripping away too much here. Yes, ideally all nationalities would be represented. The point isn't completely and totally equal representation. It's just gotta be beter than "75% white people" levels. I am not the arbiter of what is perfect equality. We just can do better than we currently are. If you're changing race just to pacify an investor or some imaginary racist movie goers, that isn't a very good reason.
It matters because of the extensive history of whitewashing, and to that end furthering the ideals behind blackface and yellowface. Casting a white dude as another race has a historical context as being racist as all get out, and we can't ignore those roots.
I think a cultural responsibility to represent all nationalities is far too grand, and would be more inclined towards representing all significant minority groups within the country. Responsibilities towards other nations vis a vis representation in art are complicated. What claim does the nation of China have to representation in the cinema of all other countries?
This is exactly the difficulty I am wanting to highlight.
But there are added wrinkles of course, like the fact that governments don't tend to be in the business of making movies, so talking about countries is already relying on a lot of assumptions, Hollywood isn't even a single entity it is a collection of private entities. And they commission creative types to create movies corresponding to some hybrid of a commercial and creative vision. Presumably to appease the desires of the audience who give them money to do so.
Who is responsible, what are they obligated to do?
Are audiences obligated to want more diverse casts regardless of their own ethnicity, for example? If market research shows that this particular movie will do 15 million dollars better with a particular white lead contra the source material, are the directors, or studios or all of the above obligated to take the potential 15 million dollar hit? Can you "make up" the representation issues by casting more diverse supporting characters, or other films with non-white leads? If a movie based on true events would do better internationally by casting a white person as Chinese would that be ok?
If governments were in the business of making movies, what would that mean?
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
Don't think it was posted but Doug Walker did an editorial this week about whitewashing in Hollywood. It's interesting.
Things are never so black and white, though. Casting a black man as Mercucio in Romeo + Juliet isn't going to ruffle as many feathers as say, a white woman as Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. Take these things on a case by case basis. When one of the main characters of West Side Story is named "Maria" and you cast a white woman to play her, it may have been fine 50 years ago but not today. The issue isn't and hasn't been about completely making things equal. It's about giving people something to identify with in movies and TV. Like, the story of "21" could have been empowering for people of Asian descent, but instead they once again made the lead a white dude.
From the leaked Sony emails, a producer on a Denzel Washington movie was called our for comments on how Denzel's movies would never do well overseas. When asked about it, he responded with this:
“I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in general pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas,” the producer wrote. “But Sony sometimes seems to disregard that a picture must work well internationally to both maximize returns and reduce risk, especially pics with decent size budgets.”
I really don't see how that is anything more than ignorance.
I think you could probably add accurate.
One of Denzel's most successful film overseas was his most recent, The Equalizer.
Domestic: $101,530,738 52.8%
+ Foreign: $90,800,000 47.2%
The splits for his other recent movies
2 guns 57/43
Flight 58/42
Safe House 61/39
Unstoppable 48/51
Book of Eli 60/40
Here are other action movies that came out in 2014, the same year as The Equalizer. Some more 'big budget' some a bit more comparable in terms of US gross.
The only film that did worse in its US/Foreign split is American Sniper, which occurred for a couple of different reasons imo, neither of which was the main actor.
If Denzel did better overseas, up to say a 45/55 split, that would be an extra 30 million in gross for The Equalizer. Across the rest of those movies, you are looking at maybe an extra quarter billion dollars in the last 5-6 years alone.
You can call it unenlightened or small minded or myopic, but I don't think you can call it ignorant. People like to keep making these accusation over and over. That hollywood is racist and doesn't understand the market, that there is all this money they are just leaving on the table, but when you get right down to it these people/companies are placing multi-million dollar bets every time they greenlight a movie. You think maybe, these directors/producers/execs of various kinds with their years and decades of experience could possibly understand the business better than say random people on the internet? That maybe they have people who look at these things?
Honestly, a lot of this discussion reminds me of the armchair GM/Coaching you see online for sports. Uhh Smith doesn't know what the fuck he is doing, we should have switched back to a 4-3 and cut Daily and moved Johnson to outside linebacker. Then the Browns would have won the Super Bowl.
Casting ScarJo instead of some lesser known asian actress probably cost them an extra 5+ million dollars in base salary and probably some % of the gross. Do they give that up just because? Or do they give that up because they look at Lucy in one hand and The Equalizer in the other and go "Yep the attractive white person in R rated action movie vs attractive black person in R rated action movie" and see an extra $200+m in foreign gross on the one side of the scales?
tinwhiskers on
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
You're stripping away too much here. Yes, ideally all nationalities would be represented. The point isn't completely and totally equal representation. It's just gotta be beter than "75% white people" levels. I am not the arbiter of what is perfect equality. We just can do better than we currently are. If you're changing race just to pacify an investor or some imaginary racist movie goers, that isn't a very good reason.
It matters because of the extensive history of whitewashing, and to that end furthering the ideals behind blackface and yellowface. Casting a white dude as another race has a historical context as being racist as all get out, and we can't ignore those roots.
I think a cultural responsibility to represent all nationalities is far too grand, and would be more inclined towards representing all significant minority groups within the country. Responsibilities towards other nations vis a vis representation in art are complicated. What claim does the nation of China have to representation in the cinema of all other countries?
This is exactly the difficulty I am wanting to highlight.
But there are added wrinkles of course, like the fact that governments don't tend to be in the business of making movies, so talking about countries is already relying on a lot of assumptions, Hollywood isn't even a single entity it is a collection of private entities. And they commission creative types to create movies corresponding to some hybrid of a commercial and creative vision. Presumably to appease the desires of the audience who give them money to do so.
Who is responsible, what are they obligated to do?
Are audiences obligated to want more diverse casts regardless of their own ethnicity, for example? If market research shows that this particular movie will do 15 million dollars better with a particular white lead contra the source material, are the directors, or studios or all of the above obligated to take the potential 15 million dollar hit? Can you "make up" the representation issues by casting more diverse supporting characters, or other films with non-white leads? If a movie based on true events would do better internationally by casting a white person as Chinese would that be ok?
If governments were in the business of making movies, what would that mean?
Actually, many governments are in the business of making movies, or at least funding them. Off the top of my head, Britain and Ireland both have funds that give money to selected projects to encourage native cinema--often with quotas as to how much of the cast/crew can be from outside the country. I'm pretty sure Canada does the same thing. We all know how much China has a hand in the films that get made there. Even in the US, multiple state governments give significant tax incentives for productions to film and hire crew locally, all of them continually competing against one another to offer the most attractive packages. (I forget what state is on top now, but for a while Georgia was drawing in a lot of business that way.)
As audience members and Twitterers we approach film as an art form and look for representation for the purposes of emotional validation and social justice (not knocking those); but there's another side to this discussion, where Hollywood is simply a business with arguably racially unfair hiring practices. From that perspective, the government has both the responsibility and, it seems, the ability to step in and fix things, if the industry can't do that on their own.
You can call it unenlightened or small minded or myopic, but I don't think you can call it ignorant. People like to keep making these accusation over and over. That hollywood is racist and doesn't understand the market, that there is all this money they are just leaving on the table, but when you get right down to it these people/companies are placing multi-million dollar bets every time they greenlight a movie. You think maybe, these directors/producers/execs of various kinds with their years and decades of experience could possibly understand the business better than say random people on the internet? That maybe they have people who look at these things?
Honestly, a lot of this discussion reminds me of the armchair GM/Coaching you see online for sports. Uhh Smith doesn't know what the fuck he is doing, we should have switched back to a 4-3 and cut Daily and moved Johnson to outside linebacker. Then the Browns would have won the Super Bowl.
Sure. The thing is - they're not perfect. They fuck up sometimes, and have their own blind spots or their investors do. Being professionals in a business does not mean everyone in the industry is immune to criticism. Or do you think B vs S and Catwoman weren't obvious cluster fucks that they shouldn't have seen coming?
edit: This is ignoring Hollywood's open secret about being terrible with race relations, which is bought up every time the industry deals with race other than white people in casting.
Casting ScarJo instead of some lesser known asian actress probably cost them an extra 5+ million dollars in base salary and probably some % of the gross. Do they give that up just because? Or do they give that up because they look at Lucy in one hand and The Equalizer in the other and go "Yep the attractive white person in R rated action movie vs attractive black person in R rated action movie" and see an extra $200+m in foreign gross on the one side of the scales?
The movie likely would have happened without Scarlett, remember she was their second best choice. Their first was Margo Robbie, who's hardly been setting the box office on fire. If Scarlett said no they probably would have found another blonde actress to fill the slot, or not. The latter happens all the time in movies, too. Hollywood also could have tried hiring other popular actors in the support cast for their Asian/Japanese Motoko, like they do everywhere else. Except the industry crippled this option significantly by letting it be very difficult for Asian actors to get that far, because Asian actors need to prove themselves to be worthy of star roles without getting access to star roles for some reason.
You're stripping away too much here. Yes, ideally all nationalities would be represented. The point isn't completely and totally equal representation. It's just gotta be beter than "75% white people" levels. I am not the arbiter of what is perfect equality. We just can do better than we currently are. If you're changing race just to pacify an investor or some imaginary racist movie goers, that isn't a very good reason.
It matters because of the extensive history of whitewashing, and to that end furthering the ideals behind blackface and yellowface. Casting a white dude as another race has a historical context as being racist as all get out, and we can't ignore those roots.
I think a cultural responsibility to represent all nationalities is far too grand, and would be more inclined towards representing all significant minority groups within the country. Responsibilities towards other nations vis a vis representation in art are complicated. What claim does the nation of China have to representation in the cinema of all other countries?
This is exactly the difficulty I am wanting to highlight.
But there are added wrinkles of course, like the fact that governments don't tend to be in the business of making movies, so talking about countries is already relying on a lot of assumptions, Hollywood isn't even a single entity it is a collection of private entities. And they commission creative types to create movies corresponding to some hybrid of a commercial and creative vision. Presumably to appease the desires of the audience who give them money to do so.
Who is responsible, what are they obligated to do?
Are audiences obligated to want more diverse casts regardless of their own ethnicity, for example? If market research shows that this particular movie will do 15 million dollars better with a particular white lead contra the source material, are the directors, or studios or all of the above obligated to take the potential 15 million dollar hit? Can you "make up" the representation issues by casting more diverse supporting characters, or other films with non-white leads? If a movie based on true events would do better internationally by casting a white person as Chinese would that be ok?
If governments were in the business of making movies, what would that mean?
Actually, many governments are in the business of making movies, or at least funding them. Off the top of my head, Britain and Ireland both have funds that give money to selected projects to encourage native cinema--often with quotas as to how much of the cast/crew can be from outside the country. I'm pretty sure Canada does the same thing. We all know how much China has a hand in the films that get made there. Even in the US, multiple state governments give significant tax incentives for productions to film and hire crew locally, all of them continually competing against one another to offer the most attractive packages. (I forget what state is on top now, but for a while Georgia was drawing in a lot of business that way.)
As audience members and Twitterers we approach film as an art form and look for representation for the purposes of emotional validation and social justice (not knocking those); but there's another side to this discussion, where Hollywood is simply a business with arguably racially unfair hiring practices. From that perspective, the government has both the responsibility and, it seems, the ability to step in and fix things, if the industry can't do that on their own.
Yeah, I was going to raise the tax incentive structure, if it were established that, for example, government involvement entails operating according to a different balance of values.
You're stripping away too much here. Yes, ideally all nationalities would be represented. The point isn't completely and totally equal representation. It's just gotta be beter than "75% white people" levels. I am not the arbiter of what is perfect equality. We just can do better than we currently are. If you're changing race just to pacify an investor or some imaginary racist movie goers, that isn't a very good reason.
It matters because of the extensive history of whitewashing, and to that end furthering the ideals behind blackface and yellowface. Casting a white dude as another race has a historical context as being racist as all get out, and we can't ignore those roots.
I think a cultural responsibility to represent all nationalities is far too grand, and would be more inclined towards representing all significant minority groups within the country. Responsibilities towards other nations vis a vis representation in art are complicated. What claim does the nation of China have to representation in the cinema of all other countries?
This is exactly the difficulty I am wanting to highlight.
But there are added wrinkles of course, like the fact that governments don't tend to be in the business of making movies, so talking about countries is already relying on a lot of assumptions, Hollywood isn't even a single entity it is a collection of private entities. And they commission creative types to create movies corresponding to some hybrid of a commercial and creative vision. Presumably to appease the desires of the audience who give them money to do so.
Who is responsible, what are they obligated to do?
Are audiences obligated to want more diverse casts regardless of their own ethnicity, for example? If market research shows that this particular movie will do 15 million dollars better with a particular white lead contra the source material, are the directors, or studios or all of the above obligated to take the potential 15 million dollar hit? Can you "make up" the representation issues by casting more diverse supporting characters, or other films with non-white leads? If a movie based on true events would do better internationally by casting a white person as Chinese would that be ok?
If governments were in the business of making movies, what would that mean?
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
That's not answering the question either. You're proposing remedies, not defining the conditions under which we should be satisfied. I mean, there are other factors too - what classes of division and identification need to be considered? Is "Asian" enough, or should it be Chinese American, Japanese American, etc., what about other divisions like transgender, abledness, fat/not, ugly/not, age?
You could make the same criticism about any complex social problem, from environmental policy to labor laws to health care. Complex problems have complex remedies.
Or heck, apply your criticism to entertainment in general. When people claim that Michael Bay is derivative, what specific conditions does Michael Bay need to meet to satisfy critics? What if a movie is criticized for being unoriginal, or unfunny?
The other problem is that you're demanding a formal benchmark for an informal request. If the government threatened to shut down Hollywood if Hollywood didn't diversify, then demanding a formal benchmark would be completely fair. But right now, the biggest consequence is that people are unhappy. So in place of a formal benchmark, I've already presented several informal milestones that would prevent a lot of the unhappiness from happening in the first place.
For instance, Aaron Sorkin wants to do an adaptation of "Flash Boys." As a sign of progress, he refuses to even consider whitewashing the main characters. Unfortunately, even though he wants to cast the main characters as Asian, he has trouble coming up with any Asian actors who can bring people to the box office. So even when people want to do the right thing, they find themselves unable to.
So one major milestone is when no one is able to use "There aren't any Asian movie stars" as an excuse to not cast Asian.
Or let's put it another way: Suppose you live in a town that has 5% Chinese people, but no Chinese restaurants, no matter how hard you look. Wouldn't you find that rather odd? When people look for a Chinese restaurant, there's not asking "What proportion of the available restaurants on Yelp serve Chinese food?" They're simply asking, "Does a decent selection of Chinese restaurants actually exist, to the point where people should have no trouble finding a Chinese restaurant to their liking?"
Focus on achieving the critical mass of "decent selection" first. Actual representation comes after that.
Firstly, I don't see the analogy to health or environmental policy as being a well supported one as there are relatively obvious metrics for governments to follow - i.e. reduce emissions, reduce hospital waiting time, minimise fatalities from treatable conditions. It's also different because if we are talking about policy then we're referring to governments, so we know who has the obligations, governments as public institutions have relatively well understood obligations toward its citizens with regard to inclusivity etc. There are not such equivalences in the case of hollywoo and representation.
A comparison with Michael Bay movies and criticism thereof is an even less obvious analogy I don't know how you think it informs the question at all. Plus it seems like an invidious comparison at that - aesthetics are generally considered to be subjective or relative to a particular person's dispositions and preferences, exactly the sort of thing that would remove any sort of normative force from the anti-whitewashing, pro-representation position.
I don't follow the restaurant analogy at all. At this point in particular relying on analogy is an impediment to understanding not a source of assistance.
With regard to the Sorkin example (or hypothetical, I don't know) this is a good example of the sorts of things I am expecting, though it is still remarkably under defined. What makes it "the right thing"? What sort of expectation of a bench of A-List minority actors to choose from is appropriate? Who bears the responsibility for supporting these minority actors? If Hollywoo tries but the audience is not receptive, what then? You're dealing with a population of exceptional people - as in exceptions to rules, who are rare, against a large population of hopefuls and an even more massive general and worldwide population. Mathematically, they are unlikely to be representative simply because A-listers are rare. There's a lot of other things to define about the limits and expectations against the background of he numbers and economic concerns that "more Asian movie stars" simply doesn't do.
The formal vs informal distinction is utterly bizarre to me. I'm not asking you for a policy proposal, what I am asking is for an explanation of what "under-representation" actually means, it wasn't me that first used the word, nor me who identified it as a problem. The various questions I have asked have been entirely in service of getting a clear definition of what factors matter. "People are unhappy" doesn't help - people can be unhappy about exactly opposite things, and I presume that certain peoples' opinions don't get a look in at all - say, white supremacists. This doesn't define a moral principle - Hollywood is in the business of making movies and making money from those movies - under what principle does "making people not unhappy" become a responsibility of Hollywoo? If the answer is "they need to make people not unhappy to make money/the most money" I would counter that they are indeed making money and couching it as economic pragmatism does very little to offer the sort of normative or moral force that is a cornerstone of the anti-whitewashing proponents.
Or, to put it another way, why are we interested in there being "critical mass"?
This is for hippofant. Well, that doesn't answer the question either, it still doesn't say what proportional representation is.
But it is interesting - certainly it appears that at least part of the anti-whitewashing argument is that representation in film IS an inequality and remedying that is an end in and of itself. What inequality do you suggest is it a proxy for?
I wouldn't consider the question of what precisely proportional representation is to be relevant, given that it shouldn't actually be the objective of equity movements, in my consideration, regardless of how one defines it. Equity is about equal opportunity; unless we have some a priori reason to believe that equal opportunity will necessarily result in a specific racial proportioning of positions, there is no real point in debating what that specific proportioning would be. Even if we did, it would certainly be on a case-by-case basis, highly dependent on context, and certainly a lengthy, technical debate.
For example, 100% of maternity leave is taken by females; is that inequitable or is there a good reason why there is disproportional participation of the sexes in that program? The answer is the latter, obviously. Less obvious is that more parental leave is taken by women; is that inequitable or is there a good reason for it? If there is a problem, does it lie within parental leave provisions, which would imply that they should be changed to fix the gender bias, or does it lie outside instead? It would be absolutely trivial, at least in principle, to force any particular program or field to have any specific proportional participation rate that we wanted, but that wouldn't mean that we've actually solved the inequity problem, and we might be causing more problems than we fixed.
On the flip-side, there can definitely be cases where we might expect that representation/participation would be roughly proportional to population, if equal opportunity prevails. We might expect that lottery winners would be proportionally divided by race, gender, religion, etc.. It might not; it might turn out that, say, 70% of lottery winners are men, and then surely we'd know that there was a problem there, although we wouldn't necessarily be able to infer what the problem was at first glance; it could be that lotteries are particularly targeting men with their advertising, in which case we might say that there was sexist practice against men, or it could be that lottery workers are primarily men and the lottery is rigged, in which case the main problem would be that the lottery is rigged, though there would also be a secondary question of why lotteries are hiring primarily men.
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To bring this back to the discussion on whitewashing, I believe the origin of this line of discussion was that some posters were questioning why whitewashing was a problem at all. There was at least one post that I recall asking why it was "okay" for Hamilton to portray originally white characters with Hispanic and black actors, but not "okay" for Ghost in the Shell to portray originally Asian characters with white actors. This is where I think the discussion about racial representation in Hollywood comes up, because it's not an equal exchange here; the harm inflicted on white people by the phenomenon of white characters being portrayed by ethnic actors is non-existent compared to the harm inflicted on Asian people by the phenomenon of Asian characters being portrayed by white actors, as well as the tokenization of Asian characters, which is an edge effect that isn't really possible with white characters since they're so plentiful.
It's not an equity conversation at this point; it's more a conversation about moral/ethical imperatives, and the impact of the minimization of ethnic roles in mainstream media has on society, and whether it's a "problem" or not.
The next step of that conversation then goes into why this is the case that Asian characters are underrepresented and/or tokenized in Hollywood. One might say, "Fine, men are taking less parental leave than women are, and this might have some negative effect on our society, by reinforcing certain gender stereotypes about child-raising responsibilities and work prioritization or whatever, but is this a problem that is worth fixing or will the cure cause more harm than the disease?" Similarly, one might suggest, "Okay, there are few Asian characters on TV, but is that just because there are no Asian actors because they all just want to be engineers and doctors, and we can't 'solve' that problem except by forcing them to be actors instead, and that's stupid." And so then the conversation gets steered back towards whitewashing and financial incentives and the experiences of Asian actors being unable to find substantive, non-tokenizing roles, etc..
So the inquiry as to whether inequity exists here now comes to rest on one (or a few) question(s): Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less interested in acting? Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less able at acting? And if neither of these answers are, "Yes," then, based on their under-representation in Hollywood, presumably we have an access issue, and then the inquiry shifts to what those access issues are and how/whether it's worth it to fix those access issues. (See the current line of discussion on the marketability of minority actors.)
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The TL;DR of it is this: in any given situation, is there a good reason to expect disproportional representation across any demographic lines? (Statistical variation would count.)
If not, is there (obviously) disproportional representation?
If so, is that disproportional representation harmful in some way?
If so, then we have a situation where we have an unexpected outcome that's causing harm, and we should probably figure out why and fix it if we can.
Maybe it's because I'm from a STEM background, but this is a pretty natural way of thinking for me: Is this the outcome I expected? Is this outcome a bad outcome? Okay, then I don't know what's going on but whatever's going on is bad, so I need to figure out what's going on and fix it, if I can. (Note, outcomes I expect might also be bad - silly geese do silly geese shit - and outcomes I don't expect can be good - I have no clue why my code works but it does - and the imperatives to investigate and fix may still exist in those cases, but are less powerful. (I.e. I don't have the power to turn silly geese into serious ducks, or I won't ever need to work with this code again so fuck it YOLO.))
A comparison with Michael Bay movies and criticism thereof is an even less obvious analogy I don't know how you think it informs the question at all. Plus it seems like an invidious comparison at that - aesthetics are generally considered to be subjective or relative to a particular person's dispositions and preferences, exactly the sort of thing that would remove any sort of normative force from the anti-whitewashing, pro-representation position.
So you don't think the idea of social justice has any subjective components?
I don't follow the restaurant analogy at all. At this point in particular relying on analogy is an impediment to understanding not a source of assistance.
The point I made was simple and stated outright: Focus on achieving critical mass first, and then the specific percentages will seem less important. The restaurant analogy is simply an example of this principle.
With regard to the Sorkin example (or hypothetical, I don't know) this is a good example of the sorts of things I am expecting, though it is still remarkably under defined. What makes it "the right thing"?
You're asking why casting an Asian actor to play a real life Asian person in a movie he bought the rights for is "right"?
If Hollywoo tries but the audience is not receptive, what then?
You could make this same criticism about literally any movie that's ever been created.
You're dealing with a population of exceptional people - as in exceptions to rules, who are rare, against a large population of hopefuls and an even more massive general and worldwide population. Mathematically, they are unlikely to be representative simply because A-listers are rare.
And what attributes makes Hollywood actors so rare, pray tell? This isn't like Moneyball, where you rate actors based purely on their ability to score hits.
Let's make a list of four things:
1) Talent: This is important, but it's not the limiting factor. There's no shortage of highly talented Hollywood actors.
2) Looks: Hollywood is extremely shallow. But is anyone going to argue that there are no attractive Asian people?
3) Exposure: A-listers are popular because of the movies they've done in the past.
4) Appropriate roles: Starpower is meaningless if you don't have a good role to showcase it. i.e., imagine switching Tom Hanks with Tom Cruise.
The two biggest limiting factors are the last two, which are both entirely within Hollywood's direct control.
Or, to put it another way, why are we interested in there being "critical mass"?
Because having a better selection for casting directors is a good thing.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
Woooosh.
Being born of the most common vaginas doesn't make your desires inherently more important. It *does* make them more efficient to profit from, assuming a generally equal distribution of wealth, but that would be where the math fights the ideal.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
Woooosh.
Being born of the most common vaginas doesn't make your desires inherently more important. It *does* make them more efficient to profit from, assuming a generally equal distribution of wealth, but that would be where the math fights the ideal.
If there's nine of X and one of Y, X is nine times as important as Y from a strictly utilitarian standpoint.
I feel like the only way to debate this is to reject the whole philosophical framework that underpins it.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
Woooosh.
Being born of the most common vaginas doesn't make your desires inherently more important. It *does* make them more efficient to profit from, assuming a generally equal distribution of wealth, but that would be where the math fights the ideal.
If there's nine of X and one of Y, X is nine times as important as Y from a strictly utilitarian standpoint.
I feel like the only way to debate this is to reject the whole philosophical framework that underpins it.
Incenjucar professes Nihilism so a utilitarian response is probably misguided in that isn't what he intends. As I understand it his argument is not predicated upon normative force but instead upon the assumption that people share his preferences and thus acting in the fashion he recommends is in our/their self interest.
Such s position has virtues of not being susceptible to common critique but it is also extremely unclear as to what "important", "ideal" et al mean within such a framework.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
Woooosh.
Being born of the most common vaginas doesn't make your desires inherently more important. It *does* make them more efficient to profit from, assuming a generally equal distribution of wealth, but that would be where the math fights the ideal.
If all people's desires are equally important, more common desires will need to be fulfilled more often, as the same resources can lead to increased good per unit of resource expended. This is true even accounting for a system of utility than assures utility floors for (almost) all and avoids utility monster problems.
Assuming an equal distribution of wealth, profitability exactly measures social good*, as money paid for a good / service directly scales with its benefits. The reason why capitalism doesn't produce nearly perfect outcomes is primarily due to a difference in wealth.
* Well, this needs some other caveats, but I'd argue many of them are going to be near guaranteed if we see an equal distribution of wealth.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
The idea that if there are more white people, there are going to be more good white actors than good non-white actors is not necessarily true, because there may be cultural attitudes among races that (for example) encourage/discourage acting as a career.
But it's also meaningless when talking about Hollywood, because the available talent pool far exceeds the finite number of roles, because non-actors can enter the field and do well, and because the kinds of people who are visibly succesful in the industry in part determines who applies. If Hollywood decide to cast next year's movies as 100% black, they'd be able to find enough actors, and even if they couldn't at first, the result would be an influx of new black aspiring actors from other parts of the country.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
This is for hippofant. Well, that doesn't answer the question either, it still doesn't say what proportional representation is.
But it is interesting - certainly it appears that at least part of the anti-whitewashing argument is that representation in film IS an inequality and remedying that is an end in and of itself. What inequality do you suggest is it a proxy for?
I wouldn't consider the question of what precisely proportional representation is to be relevant, given that it shouldn't actually be the objective of equity movements, in my consideration, regardless of how one defines it. Equity is about equal opportunity; unless we have some a priori reason to believe that equal opportunity will necessarily result in a specific racial proportioning of positions, there is no real point in debating what that specific proportioning would be. Even if we did, it would certainly be on a case-by-case basis, highly dependent on context, and certainly a lengthy, technical debate.
For example, 100% of maternity leave is taken by females; is that inequitable or is there a good reason why there is disproportional participation of the sexes in that program? The answer is the latter, obviously. Less obvious is that more parental leave is taken by women; is that inequitable or is there a good reason for it? If there is a problem, does it lie within parental leave provisions, which would imply that they should be changed to fix the gender bias, or does it lie outside instead? It would be absolutely trivial, at least in principle, to force any particular program or field to have any specific proportional participation rate that we wanted, but that wouldn't mean that we've actually solved the inequity problem, and we might be causing more problems than we fixed.
On the flip-side, there can definitely be cases where we might expect that representation/participation would be roughly proportional to population, if equal opportunity prevails. We might expect that lottery winners would be proportionally divided by race, gender, religion, etc.. It might not; it might turn out that, say, 70% of lottery winners are men, and then surely we'd know that there was a problem there, although we wouldn't necessarily be able to infer what the problem was at first glance; it could be that lotteries are particularly targeting men with their advertising, in which case we might say that there was sexist practice against men, or it could be that lottery workers are primarily men and the lottery is rigged, in which case the main problem would be that the lottery is rigged, though there would also be a secondary question of why lotteries are hiring primarily men.
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To bring this back to the discussion on whitewashing, I believe the origin of this line of discussion was that some posters were questioning why whitewashing was a problem at all. There was at least one post that I recall asking why it was "okay" for Hamilton to portray originally white characters with Hispanic and black actors, but not "okay" for Ghost in the Shell to portray originally Asian characters with white actors. This is where I think the discussion about racial representation in Hollywood comes up, because it's not an equal exchange here; the harm inflicted on white people by the phenomenon of white characters being portrayed by ethnic actors is non-existent compared to the harm inflicted on Asian people by the phenomenon of Asian characters being portrayed by white actors, as well as the tokenization of Asian characters, which is an edge effect that isn't really possible with white characters since they're so plentiful.
It's not an equity conversation at this point; it's more a conversation about moral/ethical imperatives, and the impact of the minimization of ethnic roles in mainstream media has on society, and whether it's a "problem" or not.
The next step of that conversation then goes into why this is the case that Asian characters are underrepresented and/or tokenized in Hollywood. One might say, "Fine, men are taking less parental leave than women are, and this might have some negative effect on our society, by reinforcing certain gender stereotypes about child-raising responsibilities and work prioritization or whatever, but is this a problem that is worth fixing or will the cure cause more harm than the disease?" Similarly, one might suggest, "Okay, there are few Asian characters on TV, but is that just because there are no Asian actors because they all just want to be engineers and doctors, and we can't 'solve' that problem except by forcing them to be actors instead, and that's stupid." And so then the conversation gets steered back towards whitewashing and financial incentives and the experiences of Asian actors being unable to find substantive, non-tokenizing roles, etc..
So the inquiry as to whether inequity exists here now comes to rest on one (or a few) question(s): Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less interested in acting? Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less able at acting? And if neither of these answers are, "Yes," then, based on their under-representation in Hollywood, presumably we have an access issue, and then the inquiry shifts to what those access issues are and how/whether it's worth it to fix those access issues. (See the current line of discussion on the marketability of minority actors.)
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The TL;DR of it is this: in any given situation, is there a good reason to expect disproportional representation across any demographic lines? (Statistical variation would count.)
If not, is there (obviously) disproportional representation?
If so, is that disproportional representation harmful in some way?
If so, then we have a situation where we have an unexpected outcome that's causing harm, and we should probably figure out why and fix it if we can.
Maybe it's because I'm from a STEM background, but this is a pretty natural way of thinking for me: Is this the outcome I expected? Is this outcome a bad outcome? Okay, then I don't know what's going on but whatever's going on is bad, so I need to figure out what's going on and fix it, if I can. (Note, outcomes I expect might also be bad - silly geese do silly geese shit - and outcomes I don't expect can be good - I have no clue why my code works but it does - and the imperatives to investigate and fix may still exist in those cases, but are less powerful. (I.e. I don't have the power to turn silly geese into serious ducks, or I won't ever need to work with this code again so fuck it YOLO.))
This is a pretty solid basis for approaching these sorts of questions and largely reflects my own approach, though our intuitions likely don't match so we diverge in practice. It's exactly the sort of answer that I was looking for to start answering my questions.
I think it highlights most of my major points, directly and indirectly:
We have to determine the domain for any statistical assessment - such as proportionate representation, which is in part a value judgement about what does and does not count. The question is which population and which demographic - presumably the fact that the ethnic make up of the US Senate doesn't match the demographics of Thailand isn't important because the senate isnt supposed to represent the interests of the Thai people but it is significant that it doesn't match the demographics of the US. We should be clear about which populations and which demographics we are comparing and be able to argue why that one of the significant comparisons. If we say "Hollywood is underrepresents Asians at the expense of White people" it isn't clear if it is true, false, relevant or otherwise until we specify which population and which demographic.
The point that determining whether disproportionate representation is a problem is bang on. It is entirely informed by moral judgements about how things should be, and questions of harm and how we ought respond are exactly within that domain. In such a case we should be able to argue what the nature of that moral judgement is - and assuming we are using a harm based moral framework define the harm (or dispute it is harm).
The question of 'what if Asian people prefer to be engineers and doctors?' is an interesting one - as an undergrad I got taken to task for such a question by an instructor because one of the assumptions of that particular strand of feminist thought was that everyone should want to pursue career paths it roughly the same proportion. Under such a framework Asian Americans should pursue acting in the same proportion as the rest of the population otherwise social coercion is going unaddressed. I think that this view is bonkers, but it goes to show that our normative assumptions entirely change what we define as the problem, how it should be addressed and whether we agree that there is a problem in the first place.
The Hamilton question is interesting because the response raises the issue of for whom there is a problem. Is the group to which we have a responsibility Asian audiences or aspiring Asian actors? Or both? Or neither? In any case, the questions become very different - do we have a responsibility to ensure that fame is available to anyone who wants it, and if so, who has that responsibility - if Hollywood tries to up the number of A-List Asian actors but audiences do not respond then do we then criticise the audience for not supporting diversity, or do we consider the audience preferences as normative? Arguing for an underserved market is an entirely different argument to criticising a lack of opportunity.
All of which is to say, if we don't define the principles that inform our criticisms it isn't even clear that we're having a conversation at all. If we don't define the principle being violated it isn't clear what the solution is.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
A comparison with Michael Bay movies and criticism thereof is an even less obvious analogy I don't know how you think it informs the question at all. Plus it seems like an invidious comparison at that - aesthetics are generally considered to be subjective or relative to a particular person's dispositions and preferences, exactly the sort of thing that would remove any sort of normative force from the anti-whitewashing, pro-representation position.
So you don't think the idea of social justice has any subjective components?
I don't follow the restaurant analogy at all. At this point in particular relying on analogy is an impediment to understanding not a source of assistance.
The point I made was simple and stated outright: Focus on achieving critical mass first, and then the specific percentages will seem less important. The restaurant analogy is simply an example of this principle.
With regard to the Sorkin example (or hypothetical, I don't know) this is a good example of the sorts of things I am expecting, though it is still remarkably under defined. What makes it "the right thing"?
You're asking why casting an Asian actor to play a real life Asian person in a movie he bought the rights for is "right"?
If Hollywoo tries but the audience is not receptive, what then?
You could make this same criticism about literally any movie that's ever been created.
You're dealing with a population of exceptional people - as in exceptions to rules, who are rare, against a large population of hopefuls and an even more massive general and worldwide population. Mathematically, they are unlikely to be representative simply because A-listers are rare.
And what attributes makes Hollywood actors so rare, pray tell? This isn't like Moneyball, where you rate actors based purely on their ability to score hits.
Let's make a list of four things:
1) Talent: This is important, but it's not the limiting factor. There's no shortage of highly talented Hollywood actors.
2) Looks: Hollywood is extremely shallow. But is anyone going to argue that there are no attractive Asian people?
3) Exposure: A-listers are popular because of the movies they've done in the past.
4) Appropriate roles: Starpower is meaningless if you don't have a good role to showcase it. i.e., imagine switching Tom Hanks with Tom Cruise.
The two biggest limiting factors are the last two, which are both entirely within Hollywood's direct control.
Or, to put it another way, why are we interested in there being "critical mass"?
Because having a better selection for casting directors is a good thing.
The questions and final statement are the operative parts, and my answers are:
Yes, that is exactly what I am asking. There are multiple possibilities that have been mooted in this thread and they each have different consequences.
No, I don't think social justice has subjective components. Claims about social justice are moral claims, i am a moral realist. I don't think that the claims are relativist in nature and cannot imagine a coherent relativist reading.
In what sense is a better selection for casting directors a good thing?
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
In what sense is a better selection for casting directors a good thing?
From an aesthetic standpoint, movies are made through a series of choices. Having more options, and a wider variety of options, often results in a better end product.
From a social justice standpoint, one of the reasons given for racially disproportionate casting is that productions often don't have access to a proportional number of non-whites during the casting process. So if we achieved a critical mass of, say, B-level Asian actors, casting directors looking to bring up a B-level actor into an A-list part would be more able to accomplish that for an Asian actor. And A-list actors drive the culture.
The Hamilton question is interesting because the response raises the issue of for whom there is a problem. Is the group to which we have a responsibility Asian audiences or aspiring Asian actors? Or both? Or neither? In any case, the questions become very different - do we have a responsibility to ensure that fame is available to anyone who wants it, and if so, who has that responsibility - if Hollywood tries to up the number of A-List Asian actors but audiences do not respond then do we then criticise the audience for not supporting diversity, or do we consider the audience preferences as normative? Arguing for an underserved market is an entirely different argument to criticising a lack of opportunity.
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I dug up the numbers in the OscarsSoWhite thread, but the actual answer to this question is basically Hispanics. They are represented at a slightly lower rate than Asians but make up something like 3-4 times the share of the US population. Basically the entirety of the over-presence of white actors is from this difference. There's some caveats or discounts to take as for example exclusively spanish speakers are not really part of Hollywood's audience- but as that number dwindles as a % of US Hispanics, it becomes less and less meaningful.
Which is something I honestly think will change in the next decade or so. As there have been substantial inroads in behind the camera areas, and demographics will make them if not an audience as large as the white audience at least one that has a substantial fraction of its size.
It discusses the real world historical origin of a lot of Asian stereotypes that proliferate the media.
For instance, historical laws that prevented Asian men from being allowed to marry in the 1800s, thus making Asian men seem less desirable as romantic leads.
It might be more relevant to look at LEADING roles rather than just roles. Page 16 indicates that of the 100 top films, 2 had Asian leads, 8 had black leads, and 2 had Hispanic leads (plus 5 with unspecified mixed-race leads). It's not clear to me, however, how they define leads or what the appropriate denominator would be, but the %s would be significantly below population percentages.
There are also some indications that taking the average across all movies might be distorting. The report notes that there were many movies with very few ethnic minorities. That would then suggest that to counteract those below average films, there must be films with a relatively high percentage of blacks and Asians. The overall figure for blacks, I imagine, is driven up by movies like Straight Outta Compton. Not sure where the figure for Asians would be made up, since I can't think of many movies focused on Asian casts from 2014 - I'm not much of a movie buff - but maybe they're distributed differently; I'd be interested to know if, for example, Life of Pi or Lost in Translation just completely distorted the numbers for those years. (If so, how would we interpret that, considering the differences between those three movies?)
The report also mentions that 17 of those 100 films had no speaking black characters, and 40+ had no speaking Asian characters. Which ... first, I want to know why they say 40+, like they just stopped counting after 40 or something, but second, it points to questions about the quality of role and how many films would we expect to have such characters. Obviously, if you're making a movie about ancient Rome, an Asian character would be fairly out of place; but having a quota on the number of ancient Rome movies we can/should make per year would be weird.
There are some very interesting statistics in that report that speak for themselves, i.e. re. women or queer characters, and minority directors. The ones on character race are actually rather hard to interpret, I think.
(They also count animated movies? I could imagine considering those more OR less significant. Not sure.)
A comparison with Michael Bay movies and criticism thereof is an even less obvious analogy I don't know how you think it informs the question at all. Plus it seems like an invidious comparison at that - aesthetics are generally considered to be subjective or relative to a particular person's dispositions and preferences, exactly the sort of thing that would remove any sort of normative force from the anti-whitewashing, pro-representation position.
So you don't think the idea of social justice has any subjective components?
I don't follow the restaurant analogy at all. At this point in particular relying on analogy is an impediment to understanding not a source of assistance.
The point I made was simple and stated outright: Focus on achieving critical mass first, and then the specific percentages will seem less important. The restaurant analogy is simply an example of this principle.
With regard to the Sorkin example (or hypothetical, I don't know) this is a good example of the sorts of things I am expecting, though it is still remarkably under defined. What makes it "the right thing"?
You're asking why casting an Asian actor to play a real life Asian person in a movie he bought the rights for is "right"?
If Hollywoo tries but the audience is not receptive, what then?
You could make this same criticism about literally any movie that's ever been created.
You're dealing with a population of exceptional people - as in exceptions to rules, who are rare, against a large population of hopefuls and an even more massive general and worldwide population. Mathematically, they are unlikely to be representative simply because A-listers are rare.
And what attributes makes Hollywood actors so rare, pray tell? This isn't like Moneyball, where you rate actors based purely on their ability to score hits.
Let's make a list of four things:
1) Talent: This is important, but it's not the limiting factor. There's no shortage of highly talented Hollywood actors.
2) Looks: Hollywood is extremely shallow. But is anyone going to argue that there are no attractive Asian people?
3) Exposure: A-listers are popular because of the movies they've done in the past.
4) Appropriate roles: Starpower is meaningless if you don't have a good role to showcase it. i.e., imagine switching Tom Hanks with Tom Cruise.
The two biggest limiting factors are the last two, which are both entirely within Hollywood's direct control.
Or, to put it another way, why are we interested in there being "critical mass"?
Because having a better selection for casting directors is a good thing.
The questions and final statement are the operative parts, and my answers are:
Yes, that is exactly what I am asking. There are multiple possibilities that have been mooted in this thread and they each have different consequences.
Okay, well I just gave you the two main limiting factors. Both are mainly being controlled by Hollywood itself.
No, I don't think social justice has subjective components. Claims about social justice are moral claims, i am a moral realist. I don't think that the claims are relativist in nature and cannot imagine a coherent relativist reading.
If you want to be a realist, we can take a consequential approach where we decide if the costs outweigh the risks. So far, you haven't actually outlined any real cost for hiring Asian actors. You can claim that hiring Asians carries risk, but exactly how much risk are we talking? Is it something you can quantify?
In what sense is a better selection for casting directors a good thing?
Look at Moneyball. Team strapped for cash considers baseball players that other teams overlook for superficial reasons. Hires players at a steep discount. Performs incredibly well. Forces other teams to do the same.
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You have misunderstood my first statement which was in response to "are you asking why casting a real life Asian person as white in a story based on real events is wrong?".
And my answer is "yes, I am asking that." I don't think your post about the factors that make a-listers rare addresses that.
You've misread me again, I am a moral realist in in sense that I believe that there are objectively moral or immoral actions, rather than a non-realist or relativist. I'm not saying "I'm a realist, not an idealist", I am saying I don't think morals and by extension social justice are relative or otherwise subjective. It doesn't commit me to any particular consequentialist approach or indeed consequentialism in general (or otherwise, for that matter).
So, the argument for better representation is an economic efficiency/artistic quality one? That's rather without normative force and doesn't really fit with the social justice positioning that has surrounded the argument.
The question of 'what if Asian people prefer to be engineers and doctors?' is an interesting one - as an undergrad I got taken to task for such a question by an instructor because one of the assumptions of that particular strand of feminist thought was that everyone should want to pursue career paths it roughly the same proportion. Under such a framework Asian Americans should pursue acting in the same proportion as the rest of the population otherwise social coercion is going unaddressed. I think that this view is bonkers, but it goes to show that our normative assumptions entirely change what we define as the problem, how it should be addressed and whether we agree that there is a problem in the first place.
Well, there's a next-level question that extends from this one, which is that if women aren't interested in being, say, politicians, their not wanting to itself may be a problem. If we, for example, filled Congress with misogynist sexual harassers and made woman-bashing a focus of every election, then of course women aren't going to want to be politicians, but I wouldn't then brush off the lack of women in politics as not an equity issue. It would seem to me a far more reasonable approach would be to assume that people should want to be <whatever> just as much regardless of race, gender, etc., unless there's a good reason to think otherwise, rather than the other way around, in which case we can say nothing because we know nothing.*
And frankly, it's not like we're actually considering every career and setting normative standards for each one; prototypically, we do this in reverse - we select careers that we consider important to society in which there isn't equal gender representation where equal gender representation would seem to be substantially important. Nobody's really bemoaning the lack of female bus drivers, for example, because we don't particularly consider unequal gender representation amongst our bus drivers to be problematic.
* Edit to add: this would correspond with John Rawls' theories of distributive (social) justice, which suggest that a just society arises if all policies for that society are established under the veil of ignorance - that is, we should pretend as though we don't know where we will end up in this hypothetical society while we're designing it - and we break ties in favour of the weakest/poorest in that society. I'm skimping on the details here obviously, but, for example, we would expect a priori that men and women would equally want to be in politics. We might also expect that people of all races will want to be actors equally, and if some do or don't, we should look to their relative positioning in the hierarchy of the society as part of whether a just remedy is required.
You have misunderstood my first statement which was in response to "are you asking why casting a real life Asian person as white in a story based on real events is wrong?".
And my answer is "yes, I am asking that." I don't think your post about the factors that make a-listers rare addresses that.
Because the underlying implication of that decision is, "We like what you did enough to make a movie of it, we just don't like the race you were born with."
Denying someone's identity because they weren't born the race you wanted them to be born with is not okay.
You've misread me again, I am a moral realist in in sense that I believe that there are objectively moral or immoral actions, rather than a non-realist or relativist. I'm not saying "I'm a realist, not an idealist", I am saying I don't think morals and by extension social justice are relative or otherwise subjective. It doesn't commit me to any particular consequentialist approach or indeed consequentialism in general (or otherwise, for that matter).
Can you come up with a similar issue where you can present an answer that you would find acceptable?
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Different principles lead to potentially different results, like assuming the numbers are ok - i.e, there are many minority faces represented throughout all levels Hollywoo - any of the following three scenarios might follow:
From the leaked Sony emails, a producer on a Denzel Washington movie was called our for comments on how Denzel's movies would never do well overseas. When asked about it, he responded with this:
“I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in general pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas,” the producer wrote. “But Sony sometimes seems to disregard that a picture must work well internationally to both maximize returns and reduce risk, especially pics with decent size budgets.”
I really don't see how that is anything more than ignorance.
No broad principle exists with regards to whitewashing either form of character. It's a matter of context, both for the meaning of that specific work and for the overall state of representation.
That is simply saying the principle is "context must be accounted for in the following ways..."
Empathy. Giving a damn about other people. Valuing the experiences of others. Recognizing privilege and inequity and desiring to mitigate it.
If there are 10 movies per year and purple people make up 99% of the population make a damned movie about orange people anyway.
You could make the same criticism about any complex social problem, from environmental policy to labor laws to health care. Complex problems have complex remedies.
Or heck, apply your criticism to entertainment in general. When people claim that Michael Bay is derivative, what specific conditions does Michael Bay need to meet to satisfy critics? What if a movie is criticized for being unoriginal, or unfunny?
The other problem is that you're demanding a formal benchmark for an informal request. If the government threatened to shut down Hollywood if Hollywood didn't diversify, then demanding a formal benchmark would be completely fair. But right now, the biggest consequence is that people are unhappy. So in place of a formal benchmark, I've already presented several informal milestones that would prevent a lot of the unhappiness from happening in the first place.
For instance, Aaron Sorkin wants to do an adaptation of "Flash Boys." As a sign of progress, he refuses to even consider whitewashing the main characters. Unfortunately, even though he wants to cast the main characters as Asian, he has trouble coming up with any Asian actors who can bring people to the box office. So even when people want to do the right thing, they find themselves unable to.
So one major milestone is when no one is able to use "There aren't any Asian movie stars" as an excuse to not cast Asian.
Or let's put it another way: Suppose you live in a town that has 5% Chinese people, but no Chinese restaurants, no matter how hard you look. Wouldn't you find that rather odd? When people look for a Chinese restaurant, there's not asking "What proportion of the available restaurants on Yelp serve Chinese food?" They're simply asking, "Does a decent selection of Chinese restaurants actually exist, to the point where people should have no trouble finding a Chinese restaurant to their liking?"
Focus on achieving the critical mass of "decent selection" first. Actual representation comes after that.
There is no empathy-driven reason for the number of movies about a specific population to equal the percentage of that population. You are not more worthy and do not watch more movies just because there are more people who look like you.
If you have a world with 10 types of people, but 90% of them were from one type, and the rest were just 1% of the population each, all other things being equal, the give-a-damn thing to do is to make a roughly-equal percentage of movies for all groups regardless. Obviously there are mathematical concerns in the real world, but ideally you give everyone a chance to be represented in a number of ways just like anyone else because every single person who watches is an individual, and their experience is individual. Joe doesn't need fifty action films starring Joseph and Joey for every film that reminds Kicking Bear of himself.
IIRC the Easterlings were either from the Middle East or Asian equivalent (forgot which ethnicity), they weren't white. But the audience never know that from the movies since they barely got any screen time. And it's not like it was impossible for the casting to get more creative, like they did with The Hobbit.
If governments were in the business of making movies, what would that mean?
http://channelawesome.com/is-white-washing-really-still-a-thing/
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I think you could probably add accurate.
One of Denzel's most successful film overseas was his most recent, The Equalizer.
Domestic: $101,530,738 52.8%
+ Foreign: $90,800,000 47.2%
The splits for his other recent movies
2 guns 57/43
Flight 58/42
Safe House 61/39
Unstoppable 48/51
Book of Eli 60/40
Here are other action movies that came out in 2014, the same year as The Equalizer. Some more 'big budget' some a bit more comparable in terms of US gross.
Domestic: $350,126,372 64.0%
+ Foreign: $197,300,000 36.0%
= Worldwide: $547,426,372
The Hunger Games MJ P1
Domestic: $337,135,885 44.6%
+ Foreign: $418,220,826 55.4%
= Worldwide: $755,356,711
Transformers:AoE
Domestic: $245,439,076 22.2%
+ Foreign: $858,614,996 77.8%
= Worldwide: $1,104,054,072
Guardians of the Galaxy
Domestic: $333,176,600 43.1%
+ Foreign: $440,135,799 56.9%
= Worldwide: $773,312,399
Captain American: TWS
Domestic: $259,766,572 36.4%
+ Foreign: $454,654,931 63.6%
= Worldwide: $714,421,503
X-Men Day of Future Past
Domestic: $233,921,534 31.3%
+ Foreign: $513,941,241 68.7%
= Worldwide: $747,862,775
Lucy
Domestic: $126,663,600 27.3%
+ Foreign: $336,696,463 72.7%
= Worldwide: $463,360,063
Edge of Tomorrow
Domestic: $100,206,256 27.0%
+ Foreign: $270,335,000 73.0%
= Worldwide: $370,541,256
300:Rise of an Empire
Domestic: $106,580,051 31.6%
+ Foreign: $231,000,000 68.4%
= Worldwide: $337,580,051
Exodus Gods and Kings
Domestic: $65,014,513 24.2%
+ Foreign: $203,161,118 75.8%
= Worldwide: $268,175,631
RoboCop
Domestic: $58,607,007 24.1%
+ Foreign: $184,081,958 75.9%
= Worldwide: $242,688,965
The only film that did worse in its US/Foreign split is American Sniper, which occurred for a couple of different reasons imo, neither of which was the main actor.
If Denzel did better overseas, up to say a 45/55 split, that would be an extra 30 million in gross for The Equalizer. Across the rest of those movies, you are looking at maybe an extra quarter billion dollars in the last 5-6 years alone.
You can call it unenlightened or small minded or myopic, but I don't think you can call it ignorant. People like to keep making these accusation over and over. That hollywood is racist and doesn't understand the market, that there is all this money they are just leaving on the table, but when you get right down to it these people/companies are placing multi-million dollar bets every time they greenlight a movie. You think maybe, these directors/producers/execs of various kinds with their years and decades of experience could possibly understand the business better than say random people on the internet? That maybe they have people who look at these things?
Honestly, a lot of this discussion reminds me of the armchair GM/Coaching you see online for sports. Uhh Smith doesn't know what the fuck he is doing, we should have switched back to a 4-3 and cut Daily and moved Johnson to outside linebacker. Then the Browns would have won the Super Bowl.
Casting ScarJo instead of some lesser known asian actress probably cost them an extra 5+ million dollars in base salary and probably some % of the gross. Do they give that up just because? Or do they give that up because they look at Lucy in one hand and The Equalizer in the other and go "Yep the attractive white person in R rated action movie vs attractive black person in R rated action movie" and see an extra $200+m in foreign gross on the one side of the scales?
Actually, many governments are in the business of making movies, or at least funding them. Off the top of my head, Britain and Ireland both have funds that give money to selected projects to encourage native cinema--often with quotas as to how much of the cast/crew can be from outside the country. I'm pretty sure Canada does the same thing. We all know how much China has a hand in the films that get made there. Even in the US, multiple state governments give significant tax incentives for productions to film and hire crew locally, all of them continually competing against one another to offer the most attractive packages. (I forget what state is on top now, but for a while Georgia was drawing in a lot of business that way.)
As audience members and Twitterers we approach film as an art form and look for representation for the purposes of emotional validation and social justice (not knocking those); but there's another side to this discussion, where Hollywood is simply a business with arguably racially unfair hiring practices. From that perspective, the government has both the responsibility and, it seems, the ability to step in and fix things, if the industry can't do that on their own.
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Sure. The thing is - they're not perfect. They fuck up sometimes, and have their own blind spots or their investors do. Being professionals in a business does not mean everyone in the industry is immune to criticism. Or do you think B vs S and Catwoman weren't obvious cluster fucks that they shouldn't have seen coming?
edit: This is ignoring Hollywood's open secret about being terrible with race relations, which is bought up every time the industry deals with race other than white people in casting.
The movie likely would have happened without Scarlett, remember she was their second best choice. Their first was Margo Robbie, who's hardly been setting the box office on fire. If Scarlett said no they probably would have found another blonde actress to fill the slot, or not. The latter happens all the time in movies, too. Hollywood also could have tried hiring other popular actors in the support cast for their Asian/Japanese Motoko, like they do everywhere else. Except the industry crippled this option significantly by letting it be very difficult for Asian actors to get that far, because Asian actors need to prove themselves to be worthy of star roles without getting access to star roles for some reason.
Yeah, I was going to raise the tax incentive structure, if it were established that, for example, government involvement entails operating according to a different balance of values.
If it is valid for people to like movies starring people who look like them, then assuredly, the 90% people ought get more than 1/10 of movies, as that will be utility maximizing. Partitioning a huge minority into a small minority of films is going to leave many of them unsatisfied from their entirely legitimate (as we decided earlier) want of movies with people like Joe.
Also, as a practical example, if acting skill is not exceedingly unusually distributed, most good actors will be from the majority, and thus this will be impractical, as well as undesirable.
Firstly, I don't see the analogy to health or environmental policy as being a well supported one as there are relatively obvious metrics for governments to follow - i.e. reduce emissions, reduce hospital waiting time, minimise fatalities from treatable conditions. It's also different because if we are talking about policy then we're referring to governments, so we know who has the obligations, governments as public institutions have relatively well understood obligations toward its citizens with regard to inclusivity etc. There are not such equivalences in the case of hollywoo and representation.
A comparison with Michael Bay movies and criticism thereof is an even less obvious analogy I don't know how you think it informs the question at all. Plus it seems like an invidious comparison at that - aesthetics are generally considered to be subjective or relative to a particular person's dispositions and preferences, exactly the sort of thing that would remove any sort of normative force from the anti-whitewashing, pro-representation position.
I don't follow the restaurant analogy at all. At this point in particular relying on analogy is an impediment to understanding not a source of assistance.
With regard to the Sorkin example (or hypothetical, I don't know) this is a good example of the sorts of things I am expecting, though it is still remarkably under defined. What makes it "the right thing"? What sort of expectation of a bench of A-List minority actors to choose from is appropriate? Who bears the responsibility for supporting these minority actors? If Hollywoo tries but the audience is not receptive, what then? You're dealing with a population of exceptional people - as in exceptions to rules, who are rare, against a large population of hopefuls and an even more massive general and worldwide population. Mathematically, they are unlikely to be representative simply because A-listers are rare. There's a lot of other things to define about the limits and expectations against the background of he numbers and economic concerns that "more Asian movie stars" simply doesn't do.
The formal vs informal distinction is utterly bizarre to me. I'm not asking you for a policy proposal, what I am asking is for an explanation of what "under-representation" actually means, it wasn't me that first used the word, nor me who identified it as a problem. The various questions I have asked have been entirely in service of getting a clear definition of what factors matter. "People are unhappy" doesn't help - people can be unhappy about exactly opposite things, and I presume that certain peoples' opinions don't get a look in at all - say, white supremacists. This doesn't define a moral principle - Hollywood is in the business of making movies and making money from those movies - under what principle does "making people not unhappy" become a responsibility of Hollywoo? If the answer is "they need to make people not unhappy to make money/the most money" I would counter that they are indeed making money and couching it as economic pragmatism does very little to offer the sort of normative or moral force that is a cornerstone of the anti-whitewashing proponents.
Or, to put it another way, why are we interested in there being "critical mass"?
I wouldn't consider the question of what precisely proportional representation is to be relevant, given that it shouldn't actually be the objective of equity movements, in my consideration, regardless of how one defines it. Equity is about equal opportunity; unless we have some a priori reason to believe that equal opportunity will necessarily result in a specific racial proportioning of positions, there is no real point in debating what that specific proportioning would be. Even if we did, it would certainly be on a case-by-case basis, highly dependent on context, and certainly a lengthy, technical debate.
For example, 100% of maternity leave is taken by females; is that inequitable or is there a good reason why there is disproportional participation of the sexes in that program? The answer is the latter, obviously. Less obvious is that more parental leave is taken by women; is that inequitable or is there a good reason for it? If there is a problem, does it lie within parental leave provisions, which would imply that they should be changed to fix the gender bias, or does it lie outside instead? It would be absolutely trivial, at least in principle, to force any particular program or field to have any specific proportional participation rate that we wanted, but that wouldn't mean that we've actually solved the inequity problem, and we might be causing more problems than we fixed.
On the flip-side, there can definitely be cases where we might expect that representation/participation would be roughly proportional to population, if equal opportunity prevails. We might expect that lottery winners would be proportionally divided by race, gender, religion, etc.. It might not; it might turn out that, say, 70% of lottery winners are men, and then surely we'd know that there was a problem there, although we wouldn't necessarily be able to infer what the problem was at first glance; it could be that lotteries are particularly targeting men with their advertising, in which case we might say that there was sexist practice against men, or it could be that lottery workers are primarily men and the lottery is rigged, in which case the main problem would be that the lottery is rigged, though there would also be a secondary question of why lotteries are hiring primarily men.
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To bring this back to the discussion on whitewashing, I believe the origin of this line of discussion was that some posters were questioning why whitewashing was a problem at all. There was at least one post that I recall asking why it was "okay" for Hamilton to portray originally white characters with Hispanic and black actors, but not "okay" for Ghost in the Shell to portray originally Asian characters with white actors. This is where I think the discussion about racial representation in Hollywood comes up, because it's not an equal exchange here; the harm inflicted on white people by the phenomenon of white characters being portrayed by ethnic actors is non-existent compared to the harm inflicted on Asian people by the phenomenon of Asian characters being portrayed by white actors, as well as the tokenization of Asian characters, which is an edge effect that isn't really possible with white characters since they're so plentiful.
It's not an equity conversation at this point; it's more a conversation about moral/ethical imperatives, and the impact of the minimization of ethnic roles in mainstream media has on society, and whether it's a "problem" or not.
The next step of that conversation then goes into why this is the case that Asian characters are underrepresented and/or tokenized in Hollywood. One might say, "Fine, men are taking less parental leave than women are, and this might have some negative effect on our society, by reinforcing certain gender stereotypes about child-raising responsibilities and work prioritization or whatever, but is this a problem that is worth fixing or will the cure cause more harm than the disease?" Similarly, one might suggest, "Okay, there are few Asian characters on TV, but is that just because there are no Asian actors because they all just want to be engineers and doctors, and we can't 'solve' that problem except by forcing them to be actors instead, and that's stupid." And so then the conversation gets steered back towards whitewashing and financial incentives and the experiences of Asian actors being unable to find substantive, non-tokenizing roles, etc..
So the inquiry as to whether inequity exists here now comes to rest on one (or a few) question(s): Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less interested in acting? Do you believe that Asian-Americans are less able at acting? And if neither of these answers are, "Yes," then, based on their under-representation in Hollywood, presumably we have an access issue, and then the inquiry shifts to what those access issues are and how/whether it's worth it to fix those access issues. (See the current line of discussion on the marketability of minority actors.)
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The TL;DR of it is this: in any given situation, is there a good reason to expect disproportional representation across any demographic lines? (Statistical variation would count.)
If not, is there (obviously) disproportional representation?
If so, is that disproportional representation harmful in some way?
If so, then we have a situation where we have an unexpected outcome that's causing harm, and we should probably figure out why and fix it if we can.
Maybe it's because I'm from a STEM background, but this is a pretty natural way of thinking for me: Is this the outcome I expected? Is this outcome a bad outcome? Okay, then I don't know what's going on but whatever's going on is bad, so I need to figure out what's going on and fix it, if I can. (Note, outcomes I expect might also be bad - silly geese do silly geese shit - and outcomes I don't expect can be good - I have no clue why my code works but it does - and the imperatives to investigate and fix may still exist in those cases, but are less powerful. (I.e. I don't have the power to turn silly geese into serious ducks, or I won't ever need to work with this code again so fuck it YOLO.))
So you don't think the idea of social justice has any subjective components?
The point I made was simple and stated outright: Focus on achieving critical mass first, and then the specific percentages will seem less important. The restaurant analogy is simply an example of this principle.
You're asking why casting an Asian actor to play a real life Asian person in a movie he bought the rights for is "right"?
You could make this same criticism about literally any movie that's ever been created.
And what attributes makes Hollywood actors so rare, pray tell? This isn't like Moneyball, where you rate actors based purely on their ability to score hits.
Let's make a list of four things:
1) Talent: This is important, but it's not the limiting factor. There's no shortage of highly talented Hollywood actors.
2) Looks: Hollywood is extremely shallow. But is anyone going to argue that there are no attractive Asian people?
3) Exposure: A-listers are popular because of the movies they've done in the past.
4) Appropriate roles: Starpower is meaningless if you don't have a good role to showcase it. i.e., imagine switching Tom Hanks with Tom Cruise.
The two biggest limiting factors are the last two, which are both entirely within Hollywood's direct control.
Because having a better selection for casting directors is a good thing.
Woooosh.
Being born of the most common vaginas doesn't make your desires inherently more important. It *does* make them more efficient to profit from, assuming a generally equal distribution of wealth, but that would be where the math fights the ideal.
If there's nine of X and one of Y, X is nine times as important as Y from a strictly utilitarian standpoint.
I feel like the only way to debate this is to reject the whole philosophical framework that underpins it.
Incenjucar professes Nihilism so a utilitarian response is probably misguided in that isn't what he intends. As I understand it his argument is not predicated upon normative force but instead upon the assumption that people share his preferences and thus acting in the fashion he recommends is in our/their self interest.
Such s position has virtues of not being susceptible to common critique but it is also extremely unclear as to what "important", "ideal" et al mean within such a framework.
If all people's desires are equally important, more common desires will need to be fulfilled more often, as the same resources can lead to increased good per unit of resource expended. This is true even accounting for a system of utility than assures utility floors for (almost) all and avoids utility monster problems.
Assuming an equal distribution of wealth, profitability exactly measures social good*, as money paid for a good / service directly scales with its benefits. The reason why capitalism doesn't produce nearly perfect outcomes is primarily due to a difference in wealth.
* Well, this needs some other caveats, but I'd argue many of them are going to be near guaranteed if we see an equal distribution of wealth.
But it's also meaningless when talking about Hollywood, because the available talent pool far exceeds the finite number of roles, because non-actors can enter the field and do well, and because the kinds of people who are visibly succesful in the industry in part determines who applies. If Hollywood decide to cast next year's movies as 100% black, they'd be able to find enough actors, and even if they couldn't at first, the result would be an influx of new black aspiring actors from other parts of the country.
This is a pretty solid basis for approaching these sorts of questions and largely reflects my own approach, though our intuitions likely don't match so we diverge in practice. It's exactly the sort of answer that I was looking for to start answering my questions.
I think it highlights most of my major points, directly and indirectly:
All of which is to say, if we don't define the principles that inform our criticisms it isn't even clear that we're having a conversation at all. If we don't define the principle being violated it isn't clear what the solution is.
The questions and final statement are the operative parts, and my answers are:
Yes, that is exactly what I am asking. There are multiple possibilities that have been mooted in this thread and they each have different consequences.
No, I don't think social justice has subjective components. Claims about social justice are moral claims, i am a moral realist. I don't think that the claims are relativist in nature and cannot imagine a coherent relativist reading.
In what sense is a better selection for casting directors a good thing?
From an aesthetic standpoint, movies are made through a series of choices. Having more options, and a wider variety of options, often results in a better end product.
From a social justice standpoint, one of the reasons given for racially disproportionate casting is that productions often don't have access to a proportional number of non-whites during the casting process. So if we achieved a critical mass of, say, B-level Asian actors, casting directors looking to bring up a B-level actor into an A-list part would be more able to accomplish that for an Asian actor. And A-list actors drive the culture.
I dug up the numbers in the OscarsSoWhite thread, but the actual answer to this question is basically Hispanics. They are represented at a slightly lower rate than Asians but make up something like 3-4 times the share of the US population. Basically the entirety of the over-presence of white actors is from this difference. There's some caveats or discounts to take as for example exclusively spanish speakers are not really part of Hollywood's audience- but as that number dwindles as a % of US Hispanics, it becomes less and less meaningful.
Which is something I honestly think will change in the next decade or so. As there have been substantial inroads in behind the camera areas, and demographics will make them if not an audience as large as the white audience at least one that has a substantial fraction of its size.
http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/Inequality in 700 Popular Films 81415.ashx
Actors Top 100 grossing movies 2014
US by Ethnicity
It discusses the real world historical origin of a lot of Asian stereotypes that proliferate the media.
For instance, historical laws that prevented Asian men from being allowed to marry in the 1800s, thus making Asian men seem less desirable as romantic leads.
It might be more relevant to look at LEADING roles rather than just roles. Page 16 indicates that of the 100 top films, 2 had Asian leads, 8 had black leads, and 2 had Hispanic leads (plus 5 with unspecified mixed-race leads). It's not clear to me, however, how they define leads or what the appropriate denominator would be, but the %s would be significantly below population percentages.
There are also some indications that taking the average across all movies might be distorting. The report notes that there were many movies with very few ethnic minorities. That would then suggest that to counteract those below average films, there must be films with a relatively high percentage of blacks and Asians. The overall figure for blacks, I imagine, is driven up by movies like Straight Outta Compton. Not sure where the figure for Asians would be made up, since I can't think of many movies focused on Asian casts from 2014 - I'm not much of a movie buff - but maybe they're distributed differently; I'd be interested to know if, for example, Life of Pi or Lost in Translation just completely distorted the numbers for those years. (If so, how would we interpret that, considering the differences between those three movies?)
The report also mentions that 17 of those 100 films had no speaking black characters, and 40+ had no speaking Asian characters. Which ... first, I want to know why they say 40+, like they just stopped counting after 40 or something, but second, it points to questions about the quality of role and how many films would we expect to have such characters. Obviously, if you're making a movie about ancient Rome, an Asian character would be fairly out of place; but having a quota on the number of ancient Rome movies we can/should make per year would be weird.
There are some very interesting statistics in that report that speak for themselves, i.e. re. women or queer characters, and minority directors. The ones on character race are actually rather hard to interpret, I think.
(They also count animated movies? I could imagine considering those more OR less significant. Not sure.)
Okay, well I just gave you the two main limiting factors. Both are mainly being controlled by Hollywood itself.
If you want to be a realist, we can take a consequential approach where we decide if the costs outweigh the risks. So far, you haven't actually outlined any real cost for hiring Asian actors. You can claim that hiring Asians carries risk, but exactly how much risk are we talking? Is it something you can quantify?
Look at Moneyball. Team strapped for cash considers baseball players that other teams overlook for superficial reasons. Hires players at a steep discount. Performs incredibly well. Forces other teams to do the same.
And my answer is "yes, I am asking that." I don't think your post about the factors that make a-listers rare addresses that.
You've misread me again, I am a moral realist in in sense that I believe that there are objectively moral or immoral actions, rather than a non-realist or relativist. I'm not saying "I'm a realist, not an idealist", I am saying I don't think morals and by extension social justice are relative or otherwise subjective. It doesn't commit me to any particular consequentialist approach or indeed consequentialism in general (or otherwise, for that matter).
So, the argument for better representation is an economic efficiency/artistic quality one? That's rather without normative force and doesn't really fit with the social justice positioning that has surrounded the argument.
Well, there's a next-level question that extends from this one, which is that if women aren't interested in being, say, politicians, their not wanting to itself may be a problem. If we, for example, filled Congress with misogynist sexual harassers and made woman-bashing a focus of every election, then of course women aren't going to want to be politicians, but I wouldn't then brush off the lack of women in politics as not an equity issue. It would seem to me a far more reasonable approach would be to assume that people should want to be <whatever> just as much regardless of race, gender, etc., unless there's a good reason to think otherwise, rather than the other way around, in which case we can say nothing because we know nothing.*
And frankly, it's not like we're actually considering every career and setting normative standards for each one; prototypically, we do this in reverse - we select careers that we consider important to society in which there isn't equal gender representation where equal gender representation would seem to be substantially important. Nobody's really bemoaning the lack of female bus drivers, for example, because we don't particularly consider unequal gender representation amongst our bus drivers to be problematic.
* Edit to add: this would correspond with John Rawls' theories of distributive (social) justice, which suggest that a just society arises if all policies for that society are established under the veil of ignorance - that is, we should pretend as though we don't know where we will end up in this hypothetical society while we're designing it - and we break ties in favour of the weakest/poorest in that society. I'm skimping on the details here obviously, but, for example, we would expect a priori that men and women would equally want to be in politics. We might also expect that people of all races will want to be actors equally, and if some do or don't, we should look to their relative positioning in the hierarchy of the society as part of whether a just remedy is required.
Because the underlying implication of that decision is, "We like what you did enough to make a movie of it, we just don't like the race you were born with."
Denying someone's identity because they weren't born the race you wanted them to be born with is not okay.
Can you come up with a similar issue where you can present an answer that you would find acceptable?