Why is Hollywood still using“yellow face” in 2016?

Why is Hollywood still using“yellow face” in 2016?

From：The Guardian 2016/10/05

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/05/yellowface-hollywoodasian-stereotypes-birth-of-a-dragon

Studios no longer give us squinting, stereotyped‘Asians’, but they’re still finding new ways to shoehorn white faces into stories where they don’t belong.

When the late Mickey Rooney was asked in 2008 about his objectionable turn as Holly Golightly’s perverted Japanese neighbour IY Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his response was to affect mild embarrassment that a role he had had “fun”doing had become known as an obnoxious symbol of ingrained racism in 1960s Hollywood.

“It breaks my heart. Blake Edwards, who directed the picture, wanted me to do it because he was a comedy director. They hired me to do this overboard,” Rooney told the Sacramento Bee, after protesters forced a Californian free film screenings programme to replace the classic 1961 romcom with the rather-less-offensive Pixar children’s animation Ratatouille.

“Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it, not one complaint,” added the 88-yearold Hollywood star. “Every place I’ve gone in the world people say, ‘… You were so funny.’ Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, ‘Mickey, you were out of this world.’” Had he known the role would go down in history as a shameful example of Hollywood prejudice, said Rooney, he “wouldn’t have done it”.

Nevertheless, Asian Americans have quite reasonably reacted to this film with fury.

Because after that, hollywood movies keep going to use whitewashing and the “white saviour”methods.

There are huge differences between whitewashing and the “white saviour” trope, but both exist due to a sense in Hollywood that audiences won’t turn out to see a movie unless there are Caucasian faces involved somewhere. This is especially strange given research shows that people of colour, Hispanics in particular, make up a sizable portion of the US cinemagoing public.

With help of social media which give a harsh beat on the phenomenan,there are signs that Hollywood is changing because of the existence of social media and its ability to instantly highlight unhealthy industry behaviour surely a major influence.

This week it was revealed that Disney is searching for a Chinese actor to play Mulan in its forthcoming live action remake, following an online campaign calling for the studio to avoid whitewashing the role. And the studio’s forthcoming animation Moana will feature a largely Polynesian voice cast.

Deeply offensive stereotypes such as IY Yunioshi may be off limits in 2016, but we still have a long way to go before more subtle examples of prejudice have also been consigned to Hollywood history.