And just to show that I can use my film geekery on-topic:

What happened with 21 seems more like what filmmakers were doing throughout the 1980s with films about apartheid and South Africa. You had a movie about the murder of Steve Biko whose climactic scene was … a white journalist escaping from South Africa with his family because he investigated Biko’s death. In other words, Biko was a supporting character in a movie about his own murder.

Not to mention all of the movies where white people suddenly discovered that apartheid is bad, apparently never having noticed it before in their previous 40 years or so of living in South Africa.

At least Haing S. Ngor got to win an Oscar for playing a supporting role in a film about Cambodia and how a white man fixed everything by saving his friend.

Nobody is changing Asians to whites in order to honestly translate an experience from one culture to another.

I guess that’s where I’m confused: people brought up the specific example of The Departed and said that it should have featured Asian characters as the leads. I think that re-making a film from one culture to another is completely different than taking a story set in America with American characters and changing their race.

Again, I’m sorry I derailed by trying to say that I don’t think that changing the race of American characters is the same thing as Hollywood re-making a foreign film. Honestly, I don’t think that what the makers of 21 did should be called appropriation at all, because it goes far beyond taking ideas from another culture and claiming them as your own. It’s erasing people from places where they exist and pretending they were never there at all, not appropriating.

The makers of 21 took the story away from the people who actually lived it. As I said above, that makes about as much sense as making a movie about the 1904 San Francisco earthquake and not having a single Asian character in it.

Minorities have been systematically erased from our popular culture for decades to try and prop up white supremacy and make white people feel secure that every good idea that’s ever existed and every interesting story that’s ever been told has centered around white people. It’s so naturalized for us that you barely even notice things like how the population of Colonial America is portrayed as lily-white until someone makes a point of making it conform to reality. Reality means that black people were living and working in Boston and fighting the Revolution right alongside all the white men and women, but we’ve spent decades — probably a century, at least — denying that reality to prop up white supremacy.

Again, I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I thought that erasing people from history and appropriation of culture are the same thing. I do not.

I think the difference between us is something else entirely, but I’ll leave that to the imagination. I mean, have you ever engaged in a conversation with a person of color about race which you did not attempt to defocus and derail by continually re-iterating your educational background and making tangential and irrelevant points?

I’m sorry you took what I was saying that way, because that was not what I meant to say at all. I think we are having a major miscommunication here if you think my purpose was to draw attention away from the whitewashing of this specific film.

I am a huge film history geek and I sometimes get carried away with my enthusiasm. I apologize if it came across as anything else, because I certainly did not intend that at all.

What is being talked about is erasing and replacing non-whites with whites in an american movie. Not for the purpose of translating a story from one culture into another! But for the purpose of giving a shiny mainstream visage to an Otherly type within this culture. Your examples (and you are bringing me back to NYU now with all the fantastic and esoteric references!) are not relevant in this context. Nobody is changing Asians to whites in order to honestly translate an experience from one culture to another. Both book and film versions take place in the same nation, both with MIT students, and both have some amount of Asians. Why keep them at all? Think about it. Then we have to ask, why not keep them as the main characters if we keep two Asians as part of this team?

The difference is that in the film, the Asian characters are relegated to two minor roles, rather than front and center. This is done for no reason but to whitewash the film. It is done because the USA is still not making a habit of placing non-whites in “regular” roles. The film translation is “stealing” the story of the Asians and giving it to white cinematic history.

What bothers me most is that in doing so, we are not only changing important parts of the real story, but the director/writer/producer (?) in doing so is avoiding an important discussion of race in the USA. and that compounds the simple whitewashing into erasure and further oppression.

From the book:

The MIT team thrived by choosing Big Players who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand. Like many on the team, Kevin Lewis was Asian, and could pass as the child of a rich Chinese or Japanese executive. “When you’re recruiting, you don’t recruit white kids. They look conspicuous. Asian kids, Greek kids, dark skin fits in better with lots of money in the casinos. White 20-year-olds with $2 million bankrolls stand out,” explains Andrew Tay, one of Lewis’ teammates. “A geeky Asian kid with $100,000 in his wallet didn’t raise any eyebrows.”

Now, I haven’t seen the movie to see exactly how much of this thread remains, but can you see how much depth is potentially sacrificed in the decision to turn these characters into white people? Can you see how much the truth of the story is being perverted by such a decision? Can you see how it is being jukeboxed into a tasty hit rather than being brave enough to tackle these discussions head on? And can you think of any reason to do that aside from the typical american hollywood habit of keeping the Brown™ as thieves, crooks, lowlives of some sort, or second-rate characters in order to appease the dollar-wielding masses who go to the theater wearing the White Lens?

If film truly speaks to the universalization of experience, then why is it assumed using a POC cast for Westernizing a film originating from a place not dominated by Western thought and experience would detract from the film’s impact? Because I think that’s the underlying assumption here. To adapt a film with predominantly Asian casting and symbolism using White characters, the racism that permeates the Western landscape often goes with it. As progressive as Hollywood purports itself to be in influencing the social and cultural fabric of America and beyond, I don’t know why it would take the risk of recreating one of America’s ongoing ills in its works for the sake of showing more white faces in film.

I think that part of the difference between us is that I’m looking at 100 years of film history, which includes a lot of stuff that’s been unearthed fairly recently.

Hehe, that’s a really funny argument to make: the difference between us is that I know what I’m talking about and I somehow pyschically know that you don’t. Oh well. I think the difference between us is something else entirely, but I’ll leave that to the imagination. I mean, have you ever engaged in a conversation with a person of color about race which you did not attempt to defocus and derail by continually re-iterating your educational background and making tangential and irrelevant points? It is quite strange to me, seeing this behavior time and time again. Thanks for your lesson on Asian culture, but um, no thanks. Don’t you feel even slightly embarrassed to be lecturing an Asian person on Asian culture? And then going on to flaunt your ignorance on the matter by claiming that Hong Kong is homogenous? Wow. Clearly, film school is not the place to learn about such subjects.

NY, LA, SF, or Miami would have been better substitutes for HK than Boston.

I know this is my ignorance talking but … is Hong Kong as diverse as New York or Los Angeles? In Los Angeles, they’ve identified 224 different languages that are spoken by the people who live here, though the LA Unified School District only recognizes 92 of them.

I was under the impression that Hong Kong was a little more homogeneous, like Boston, but I could well be wrong. Even Boston is by no means all-Irish though the criminal syndicates often are, as they’re often Italian (and formerly Jewish) in New York, Italian and Polish in Chicago, and Mexican and Russian out here in Los Angeles.

Mnemosyne, I agree with the specific examples you’ve offered; but I’ll admit that I’m uncomfortable with the notion that cross-cultural adaptations occur on unstructured racial and/or ethnic terrain.

I think that part of the difference between us is that I’m looking at 100 years of film history, which includes a lot of stuff that’s been unearthed fairly recently. D.W. Griffith was talked about as the inventor of the closeup until film historians in the US got a good look at Italy’s Cabiria and other silent Italian films of the era and realized that Griffith was basically ripping off the Italians with his “innovations.”

I’m not saying that the trading of ideas between cultures is always problem-free, because it has often happened because of conquest and adaptation by the conquered culture. That’s why there is no such thing as “pure” culture. In Southeast Asia alone, the art and style of India was adopted by/imposed on the surrounding peoples who are in what is now Thailand and Vietnam. Japan spent years under the thumb of China, and their written language still reflects that. And that’s just one tiny area of the globe.

I think it’s important to trace the roots of American culture, because they often come from places that people don’t expect. Surf music, that epitome of Southern California beach culture? Dick Dale, born Richard Monsour, adapted it from the Lebanese music that his family played as a child. I think (I hope) we’re getting past a time when influences from around the globe simply get assimilated into “white” culture with no acknowledgment and a pretense that they’ve been there all along.