Archived Discussion

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Maso Tey: So, does the Shawshank Redemption example go in category one or category three? I'm inclined to say three.

Trouser Wearing Barbarian: Count me in as another vote for three.

Ross N: Is Red for The Shawshank Redemption really a 'minor character'? He is practically the co-protagonist, and arguably the real hero of the film.

Pete Ross, Nick Fury and Boomer don't really strike me as being that minor either.

Clerval: Okay, I have to ask this somewhere - where and when was Jesus conventionally depicted as having blond hair and blue eyes? That sentence seems to crop up in every discussion of Jesus' appearance I ever see, yet while I have seen such pictures, they have been greatly outnumbered by the depictions of a bearded man with longish dark hair and dark eyes- usually somewhat pale but not impossibly so for a Jewish man from the Eastern Mediterranean (especially not for a half-dead crucified one). Here he is in the sixth Century, apparently◊, Dark and somewhat scary-looking◊ in the twelfth. Somewhat golden-auburn in the fifteenth (though I suspect using actual gold as a tribute was the main motivation there). Dark again◊ by Michaelangelo. Getting pretty Anglo here in the nineteenth◊, but still dark here◊. Not that I am disputing the anti-Semitism that has often warped Christian attitudes to Jesus' Jewish origins, nor the existence of images like this◊, nor that white supremacists have a vested interest in such depictions. But when your instant pop-culture visual shorthand for "Jesus" looks◊ like◊ this◊, this "everyone thinks Jesus was blond but they're wrong!" aspect of it seems to have got Flanderized.

Daibhid C: Does the fact that Steptoe And Son were white, but Sanford And Son were black count? How about Craig Bierko as Lister and Terry Farrell as the Cat, in the failed US Red Dwarf pilot?

Ross N: Ok we are going to have add another type to this trope or broaden out the first one - Angel Coulby's Gwen (Guinivere) in Merlin is not a 'minor character', but the actress is pretty much an unknown.

Looney Toons: Removed pending flamewar over HHGTTG:

Trillian is Indian in the book.
- Where do you get that? I've read the whole series repeatedly, and I don't recall ANY indication of what race/ethnicity she was, although I wouldn't expect someone from India to have the birth name "Tricia McMillan".

Work this out here, guys.

Daibhid C: In her first appearance it says she "looked vaguely Arabic", which might be what the troper who thinks she's Indian is misremembering. It doesn't say she is Arabic, though.

Nobodymuch: While it has become common for a black man to play Othello in order to play up the the nature of the tension between between them, where did _Shakespeare_ ever suggest that Othello had a central African complexion?

Duckay: The only reference to skin tone that I can explicitly recall from Othello is in the opening scene where Iago bawdily informs Brabanzio of Othello and Desdemona having eloped with the line, 'An old black ram is tupping your white ewe'.

Novium: Avatar is a bit ambiguous for this, I think. The characters certainly look fairly Caucasian, so does casting matching them to the animated versions count? Or would the animated depictions count as race lift?

Zeta: Well, you have four cultures that are supposed to be based on the Inuit, Imperial Japan, ancient China, and Tibet(?). There are a few Caucasian-looking background characters, but I would honestly say that aside from Aang, most of the major characters are pretty clearly not white. They're mixed race at most. What was always really weird to me was the Guru, who is from some race or culture of which he is the only example of. He's clearly Hindi-influenced in appearance, culture, and ethnicity - but he's the only one in the world, apparently.

Er, anyways, I would say it definitely counts ad a race-lift, especially if NONE of the main actors are Asian (For Fire, Earth, and Air) or Native American (for Water) at all.

Railstay: I can't even believe this is being debated. Yes, it is a race lift. It is a blatant, blatant race lift. This like how any adaptation of Earthsea invariably white-washes the characters from the book, which Ursula K. Le Guin has stated numerous times to be mostly brown, black and red. Yet the latest Sci-Fi channel adaptation frontlined the series with the lily white Shawn Ashmore. The "it can be any race because it's a fantasy world" argument is an enormous crock. The entire series is very explicitly based not only on Asian cultures, but in the races reflected in the show. It was a completely racist casting. If you read the original casting notices, they even call specifically for Caucasian actors for the lead roles. ONLY Caucasians. So apparently all the people in the Avatar world like the Fire, Earth and Water nations are clearly people who are racially Mongoloids, but for some reason the main characters who hail from these nations are white.

The fact that this is even attempting to be justified disgusts me. Stop holding double standards whenever it comes to the white washing of fictional Asian characters. This is like saying Superman was never intended to be "white" because he lives in a fantasy world, so changing the color of his skin would not count as a race lift.

And Aang is not Caucasian. He's supposed to be Tibetan, therefore making him Asian. I would think that'd be incredibly obvious, not only from seeing him but from seeing flashbacks of other Air Nomads.

KJMackley: I cut this because it went way beyond Thread Mode, and the cast list itself seemed more speculatory then finalized. The example itself is certainly worthy of being mentioned, so I reworded to condense what everyone was talking about, but also reminding people not to over react. If the cast list is final, then maybe there is a reason to be depressed.

The main characters of Avatar The Last Airbender come from cultures based on China, Japan, the Inuit, and other non-European cultures. So of course, for the live-action movie, they cast a bunch of white kids.
- Possibly justified as the series is set in a fictional universe where the racial makeup of our world doesn't apply (though Sokka and Katara do have darker skin than everyone else).
  - Not justified. The point of the show was that it was based on non-European sources.
- But still, the characters as drawn look like Caucasian/Asian "mixed race" people.
  - That's the anime-inspired art style. The big eyes and neutral features are to help make them more expressive. You want to know what ethnicities the kids are? Look at how they're dressed.
  - Unfortunately, attempting to extrapolate ethnicity from cultural context (including clothes) in a fantasy setting is a somewhat flawed idea, since regardless of which real-world culture directly inspired the thinly-veiled fantasy version, they are categorically NOT the same. There's nothing that says the nomadic noble savage warrior race CAN'T be black, or white, or even green, regardless of the fact that every facet of their culture was based on historical and stereotypical Native American elements. Wise primal shaman characters talking about the Dreamtime could just as easily be Swedish as aboriginal Australian. And in the case of Avatar, there's absolutely no reason why characters living in what is clearly an Asian-inspired world have to be Asian themselves. In fact, a number of authors do this deliberately, with the synthesis of different real-world cultural groups meant to create a new, somewhat alien culture (albeit one that still bears a lot of resonance for the reader).
  - Plus, in this case, the anime-style itself may be more to blame than the filmmakers for deliberately "casting white". Especially when you consider that many, many people in the potential audience would be more annoyed that the live-action characters don't LOOK like their original versions than they would about the implied accuracy of representing anime characters as Asian instead of Caucasian. Let's be honest - if a live-action Sailor Moon movie was ever made with Western audiences in mind, Usagi/Serena is going to look a hell of a lot more like Blake Lively than she is Miyu Sawai. Like it or not, regardless of whether or not the JAPANESE implicitly understand that the Caucasian designs of anime characters is meant to represent Asian appearance, the vast majority of people outside of Japan who aren't otaku don't make that distinction. Which almost certainly includes most of Avatar's actual audience, let alone mainstream fantasy audiences in general.

Didn't Michael Jackson suffer from a major case of a skin pigment altering disease? Note: This Troper suffers the same disease only that it is restricted to the patches around the joints and has by now has recovered much pigmentation.

That's debatable: Jackson claimed to have Vitiligo. It explains his gradual, um... "slide" down the color scale. At first, it was only in small patches, and light brown make-up was applied to the affected areas. As it progressed to cover most of his body, it became easier to just use white make-up on the parts that weren't affected. -Mac Phisto

Trouser Wearing Barbarian: Would Sport (Iris's pimp) from Taxi Driver be considered an example of this? He was black in the Paul Schrader's original script, but Scorsese made him white for the movie because he thought the character would come off as racist.

No mention of the movie Twenty One? They took all the Asians from MIT and white washed them.

Even worse, the only Asian in the film was reduced to a bumbling sidekick.

Mac Phisto: Just to clear up any confusion — any anthropologist will tell you that Semitic men from two-thousand years ago were on average 5'1" tall, weighed 110 lbs, had brown skin, and had short, dark, and curly hair. A six foot white man with long, flowing, brown hair is highly improbable, to say the least.

Jack-of-Some-Trades - Changed the following:

Not sure if this counts, but Jessica Alba is Hispanic meaning that movie Sue is technically Hispanic, too.
- Hispanic is not a race, so it does not count.
- In any case, Alba has a darker complexion than the main character. The strange thing is, they try to in turn make her look as blond-haired/blue eyed as possible, which ends up looking unsettling and pleasing nobody.

To:

Not sure if this counts, but Jessica Alba is very clearly Latina, meaning that movie-Sue is presumably Latina as well.
- In any case, Alba has a darker complexion than the main character. The strange thing is, they try to in turn make her look as blond-haired/blue eyed as possible, which ends up looking unsettling and pleasing nobody.

A more accurate name for this trope would have been "Ethnicity Lift," but since that doesn't rhyme with "Face Lift," we must toil in the realm of semantic ambiguity. But deciding what is a race and what isn't seems like something that's likely to inspire a flame war, so let's just keep the argument over here for now.

ralphmerridew1: How about adding category 4: Characters whose race is not changed, but are played by an actor / actress of a different race. (Charlie Chan remains Chinese, but the actors were not.)

Loser Takes All: It seems like a lot of the examples are actually Fake Nationality. Like ralphmerridew1 said, the characters' races aren't changed, they're just played by an actor/actress who isn't of the same race as the character they're portraying. Should some attempt be made to weed those out, or should Fake Nationality be folded into this trope?

Daibhid C: The following comment appears after the D'rizzt entry:

Since Forgotten Realms steals freely from Tolkien (much as he had intended) but is not actually an attempt to remake Middle-Earth, it's just a name drop rather than a racelift. FR drow are not Tolkienian dark elves

I'm not sure I understand this (since it's the first and only mention of Tolkien); is it suggesting that the covers showing a light-skinned D'rizzt aren't necessarily wrong, because the drow may not be dark skinned? Because that's exactly wrong: D&D drow◊ have definitely got bluish-black skin. Tolkien's Dark Elves, on the other hand, are simply those who didn't make the Great Journey to Valinor, and there's nothing in his writing to suggest they have different skintones from any other elves.

Archived Discussion Main / RaceLift