Examples Of Whitewashing

There is a consistency we see when flipping through the channels on television: everything feels the same. The same sitcoms with characters getting into situations that they shouldn’t; detectives trying to solve the mysteries of a dead body; dramas where no one is happy at the end, and they all have one thing in common: the majority of the characters are white. We sometimes use television as an escape from the real world: finding a show with a character that faces the issues we go through daily can help reassure us that we’re not alone. As a white person, I can flip through any channel and see dozens of characters that I can relate to in several different ways because of how those characters are being represented. My story has been told several
There are two ways whitewashing can be defined: the first definition is taking a character that is not white and turning them white. Movies have a bad reputation with doing this, for example, casting Scarlet Johansson in an adaptation of a Japanese animation and spending millions of dollars on CGI to make her look Japanese instead of actually casting a Japanese character to play the role. Television, however, likes to erase certain identities and substitute it with whiteface. For instance, CW’s apocalypse show The 100 has a male lead who is half Filipino, but when the show decided to have a flashback episode of the characters early life, the casting directors hired a young white actor to play him– completely erasing the Filipino side of him and only showing the white side of him. Whitewashing is also about how we only focus on white storylines. Famous sitcoms that supposedly star in New York City such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother only have white characters, and little to no recognition of characters of color in the background. “The portrait is one of pervasive underrepresentation, no matter the media platform, from CEOs to minor characters. Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed” (Rhodes n.p). Television shows only want to show the lives of white people, even if they aren’t a regular on the show or in the background. Television is showing us that other racial
Not all characters are stereotyped, however, the majority of shows out there today are being written by white people thus not making ethnic characters realistic. One of Netflix’s most critically acclaimed series, Orange is the New Black, has some of the most diverse characters on television right now: complex storylines of Black, Asian, and Latino characters. Each one of these ethnicities gets their own backstory and representation; however the creator and the writers of this show are white, so the storylines are more stereotypical plotline for these characters. “Women of color are particularly likely to be presented as hyper-sexual and less professional. These representations are consistent with longstanding stereotypes of ethnic minorities, such as the ‘Latin lover’ (Latinos as passionate and seductive), and those associating Blacks and Latinos with lower abilities and work ethic” (Tukachinsky et al. 32). Although Orange is the New Black is based on the main characters experience in prison, and her being white gives the writers a perspective from their point of view of how these characters should act and be perceived as. Not only are shows a huge part of stereotyping characters, but commercials are as well. Canadian writers Shyon Baumann and Loretta Ho conducted a research on Canadian and American stereotypical commercials and noticed the same for both of them: “More