Everyone who had known me since I started out as an actor knows this – I am all about diversity in casting and have been working on improving diversity and representation in the media industry for many years. I champion against stereotypical casting and try to help build a more equitable environment for actors of different background.
As compared to when I first started out as an actor after graduating from the theatre school, I have noticed that things have been changing slowly, amid snail pace. As the new generation of creative professionals who have grown up in a more diverse society starting to take the reins, representation and diversity in productions improved. There is no doubt that there are still works to be done, but the wheel is turning and things are changing.
However, amidst this positive change, something worrisome started to disturb me. I tried not to engage in heated debates of things, unless they warrant a factual debate. However, at times in the last few years, I have noticed a phenomenon that I would personally call it ‘Diversity Supremacy’.
Diversity Supremacy, for me, points to the fact that, in the fight for diversity and representation, it generates a sentiment that anything involving a decision, a statement, or even an existence of a person of Caucasian background, they needed to be put down. This is because they have no place and space in diversity, being themselves as coming from a race that caused the inequality in the first place. While I understand the sentiments of some, putting aside the fact that racism and tokenism do exist in other culture and societies, if we just squarely pin it on what they called the ‘White People’, is a dangerous slope that the diversity movement should not be going down.
You might think that I am making this up. But I personally have been attacked for ‘not being one of them’ when I did not agree with certain things people said against ‘White People’ in the diversity groups. I have been even dealing with statements like ‘People of colour are simply incapable of being racists’ as counter arguments, when we all know, and when we look at the world around us, is simply not true.
Recently, I have even received a direct message from one of the members of my Diversity Casting group, stating, and I quote ‘We don’t need another White person taking up our space in our group’. This message is what ultimately rang the alarm bell for me to write this article.
When diversity is an exclusive exercise, can it still be called diversity?
If diversity is about attacking a particular group of people of a particular background, can it still be called diversity?
Everyone of us has our own social, political and racial baggage. It is not my position to tell everyone how to deal with them. But that baggage does not give us a direct free pass to the attack zone of exclusion. If we want to make the industry or the world better, we should not practice racial divide and conquering when we try to promote diversity. We cannot change our history or what had happened, it is how we turned something that we had bad experience of into something positive for the future generation that matters. I might sound naïve to some, but this is entirely achievable if we have the right mindset. And one of them is using the same measurement for everyone.
If we raised public outcry for a Caucasian actor to portray a fictional character in a piece of fictional work, for example, Scarlett Johansson in ‘Ghost in the Shell’, we should apply the same measure when Avan Tudor Jogia, who is half Indian, being cast as the lead in ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City’, when that character, throughout the video game series history, is a Caucasian American. But we hail the latter and condemned the former. Is that hypocrisy? If straight actors can no longer play gay characters, should we stop gay actors playing straight characters too? If not, are we playing it fair?
Diversity Casting, for me, is always about equal opportunity, when the opportunity arose. Not simply equal opportunity calls when we see fit.
If a character is of a particularly racial background (written or historical) – that authenticity should always be followed. Transgender character is best played by transgender actors because of the physicality and psychological edge they have on other actors, I do not debate that. A generic character of any professional background should always be an equal playground for all. For example, Ming-Na Wen’s character in ‘The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’ was rewritten for her because she did the best audition, despite it was not culturally specific at the beginning. A straight actor playing a gay character should not be hailed as outstanding or ground breaking because they made out with other actors of the same sex on screen, because a lot of gay actors (out or not) needed to make out on screen with the opposite sex too. All accolades should be judged solely on the performance and the embodiment of the role, not what sex they practiced.
The Diversity Casting movement, for me, should be a movement to celebrate and showcase the diversity of our society and industry. It should never be used as an excuse to attack the so-called ‘White People’ by some – for this kind of racism will never take us to the Diversity station.
I hope Diversity could bring us closer to mutual understanding and not mutual attacking. We should still call out inequitable practices and discrimination when they happened, but it should never be used as a ‘get back to the White People’ vehicle, for this completely contradicts what Diversity means.
Only by working collectively as a whole, diversity can be achieved. Any fractioning of this concept will just lead to slower pace and stronger hate.
I hope I don’t need to write about this again.
