Disney tried to cast a white guy as the hero of live-action Mulan movie

um, no. you're falsely conflating "chinese" (the nationality) with "chinese" (the race). hermione was english in the harry potter books, so her race would naturally be anglo-saxon/caucasian. but if you're saying that a white person can't play a nationality-wise chinese character, then by that same reasoning, hermione can't be played by a black person if race and nationality MUST be equivalent

1. No. There's a substantial amount of academic literature on this, if you took your head out of your own arse long enough to educate yourself. Head on Google Scholar, who knows you might learn something new, I know it mustn't happen very often for you, but worth a shot.

2. If you bothered to read the OP or article properly, you would have saved yourself some embarrassment by understanding that it's not a case of finding the perfect white guy for the role which they just couldn't refuse. They are only in the story writing stages, and set the entire plot based on a white European soldier. If you're going to get anywhere on this damn site, learn to ****ing read the opening posts.

You did the exact same thing in the thread regarding 'accidental penetration' and rape. Why are you so idiotic as to not bother reading a post and then subsequently waste time making completely invalid points?

3. You lack the basic reasoning ability that presumably someone your age should have developed a long time ago. If you are nearing the age where you are thinking about higher education, I'd be very worried if I were you.

right, so there "aren't enough" of them, so you're going to feed more minorities into cinema for...what goal exactly? a cosmetic, superficial, tokenistic justification? like that's going to change anything or fool anybody? again, you're treating these people as props, not individuals. it also doesn't actually refelct whether the actors have skill or not, it literally just suggests that they were picked due to their race, which is regressive and if anything is just going to damn these different groups with a reputation of "you only got here because of special treatment" - what a perfect ingredient to a society of racial tolerance

So being English, naturally means you are anglo-saxon or caucasian... ok then

oh my god - you went there. your argument now is "english people aren't, by a *vast* majority, ethnically white" - because if they *were*, you wouldn't have said this for a story based in ENGLAND. if hermione wasn't white, surely the author would have *implied* this when she implied it for literally every other BME character?

Why argue about this? Because all you need to do is look into popular culture to see that minorities are generally cast into roles that fit their stereotypes. If all the people who are represented in entertainment white, is that liberal equality? All I ask is that minorities get an equal consideration for acting roles other than as token minorities or the sidekick that dies first in action movies especially when the roles are pertaining to them.

Yes each person is different and they aren't symbols. Yes they are more than just their race. But does Hollywood see it that way? Generally, I don't think so. Why does racism still exist? Because race is still an issue here in 2016..... This is why this is an argument and why the whitewashing of a traditional Chinese story is such an issue.

As a white man you don't understand.

People are very influenced by the fact that there are just a multitude of white heroes in the media being white saviours. It brainwashes them and it devalues minority men. Same case with the women.

um, no. you're falsely conflating "chinese" (the nationality) with "chinese" (the race). hermione was english in the harry potter books, so her race would naturally be anglo-saxon/caucasian. but if you're saying that a white person can't play a nationality-wise chinese character, then by that same reasoning, hermione can't be played by a black person if race and nationality MUST be equivalent

um, no. You can be English and any colour. And as I said, simply changing her colour wouldn't affect the story. Even the books author has said she really doesn't care. None of the characters colours have any importance to the story. It's only the fact that they're england raised.

Mulan is specifically meant to be Chinese. Both race and nationality.

Both are important to the story. You're not going to have a chinese parent drafted into the chinese military if you're white. Especially in the time that mulan was set. Once again, it genuinely isn't hard to grasp at all.

If you're still not getting it after this many people trying to break it down for you then maybe just give up.

oh here we go. full SJW-mode and white privilege all around. racism against whites isn't racism and so on! go ahead: tell me that I'm racist and that I don't understand. tell me how my race makes me inferior in this context. even with all the information out there at my disposal, tell me just how I will never understand these things because of the tone of my skin. I mean, with this logic, I could tell a black person "you will never understand white society and all its ways, because you're not white", in the same way you're saying "you'll never understand racism", because you're narrowing this down to skin colours.



but we live in a predominantly white society - the target audience will always be "white people" here - in india, there are indian actors predominantly represented. in central america and south america, it's latinas/latinos. in the west, it's generally white people. if you're saying that "white countries" are racist for this, you will literally be accusing all these other places as racist as well. the only difference is that "white society" has a larger global influence because we happen to be better at making successful movies. it's not racism. it's a coincidence that you're conflating as deliberate racism.

You don't see anything wrong with casting a white man as a Chinese character? Really?

Do you see anything wrong with casting a Chinese, black or Asian actor as a white character? It happens, and it's regarded as social progress.

I don't particularly care. I certainly don't see anything wrong with it. Sure, it'd be cool to have a Chinese Mulan actor. But if the best person for the job is the white actor (or the cheapest, or the most local...), then I don't care. I've watched plays where a black person has a white child and you barely notice if the acting is good enough...

If you're casting a historical documentary then it's probably better to have it as life-like as possible - but for a Disney film it's barely relevant...

It's a deliberate attempt to export white supremacist views worldwide. The places you mention have execs that don't care as they just want to make a quick buck.

you cannot tell me with a straight face that hermione in harry potter was meant to be non-white when J.K. Rowling never even slightly suggested that she might have been as such...she was pretty discriptive of these characters as well - you'd have thought that *at some stage* hermione would have been described as having at the very least darker skin than harry and ron?!



"not necessarily", as you say. you could be ethnically european but nationally chinese. or: they could have been mixed.



maybe the military made an exception. can you prove that they didn't? see, I'm being just as petty as you were - how fun.



nah? I'll keep giving you offerings of logic and reason with some faith that maybe you'll see the sense in what I say

I like to keep things authentic, if the original plot was a Asian character keep them Asian, that being said I think people are over sensitive these days about ethnicity.

People didn't care much when Scarlett Johansson was cast in Ghost In The Shell saying it wasn't implied she was Asian and the people saying its disrepectful were basically told they were over sensitive.

So seems a double standard there.

I find it worse when they cast say a Asian American for a role because I see them as purely American with Asian features pretty much every time.

The fine line is even if it was intended as in this to be a Asian character, if a white person was far better for the role then don't choose the inferior actor just because they are ethnic.

"not necessarily", as you say. you could be ethnically european but nationally chinese. or: they could have been mixed.
maybe the military made an exception. can you prove that they didn't? see, I'm being just as petty as you were - how fun.
nah? I'll keep giving you offerings of logic and reason with some faith that maybe you'll see the sense in what I say

Feel like I need to elaborate on how incredibly silly this is. First of all you're genuinely wrong. We already know what their races are supposed to be. Not sure why you've gone off about theoretical exceptions and being european.

But even if we didn't already know Mulan and her Dad are supposed to be Chinese in race and nationality, put 2 and 2 together.

This isn't a character taken from an authors imagination like with the harry potter universe. The movie is directly based on the Chinese legend Hua Mulan. Who is Chinese in race. It's not for you to decide what colour they are. As viewers, we're told what race they need to be for the story to make sense.

No ethnically european women with chinese nationality were there in 420AD to be drafted into chinese military.

It's bad enough that you didn't know what you were talking about prior to replying to people. But you've been acting cocky too. White Mulan is the equivalent of an Indian woman playing the Queen victoria I in a mainstream movie. Victoria needs to be a certain colour for things to make sense.