A White Bruce Lee?...
(I’m not buying Hollywood’s latest flavor of White Washed Kool-Aid)
By Glenn Peppers
So its come to this! A White Bruce Lee! What next? A struggling black boxer named, Jack Johnson, played by Nicholas Cage?... In my eyes, all this means to me is that Hollywood is White Washing this man's (Bruce Lee’s) Legacy, just like Hollywood has been doing to minorities since the advent of film, and virtually all forms of media! It's insulting, and it's clearly racist!
For Asian culture, this has to be the equivalent to that idiot, Al Jolson and his bended knee, “Mammy” singing Black Face, mocking of blacks, and calling it art! When in fact, its demeaning and has absolutely nothing to do with art so much as it does, Control! This production of a movie with a white man, dressed in Yellow Face is Hollywood pushing people’s buttons again. White Washing another's culture, infusing negative or incorrect idioms and stereotypes that hollywood and others behind the cameras want the world to believe about that certain person or persons, or races and cultures!
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| Steven Mckee as pictured clearly having no resemblance to Bruce Lee |
This kind of portrayal (by actor, Steven Mckee) is the proverbial Foot on ‘whomever's culture, and heritage' Neck! It's the "We want your Art, your culture, your skills, your looks (and in broader terms outside of Hollywood’s shallow scope,) "We want your land, but we don't want you!"
To not respect the boundaries of a person's cultural heritage is just as bad as trampling their homestead; the very land in which they live, and intruding into their everyday lives, portraying minorities in a light that shows us as they want the world to see us. Not how we actually are! White america has always been more comfortable with the whole idea of “Non-Threatening” minorities in the entertainment realm, as well as in real life! Through cinema, they can bend our imagery to their liking! With the Native american, and the African american and the Mexican american, etc. We become reduced down to white actors in grease paint going, “We Smoke’em Peace Pipe!” In film, radio and television and on stage, people of color became these non-threatening, A-Sexual unappealing characters that only showed up for comedy relief, and nothing more because that was all the work that they could find!
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| Steven Mckee |
In telling the story of a complex man like Bruce Lee, I believe that no one outside of Asian culture could truly relate, expound and project the pain and dejection that Bruce Lee felt going through those troubled and downed time he had in Seattle during the early 1960’s; battling back problems, as well as battling his own kind within the Chinese community, in order to gain permission to try and teach westerners the martial arts at his Dojo! Bruce’s fight with Wong Jack Man, and with the leaders involved with the Tong who strongly disapproved of Bruce Lee's sharing of Chinese Martial Arts with outsiders cannot be truthfully, and fairly be portrayed by a white man in Yellow Face!
I repeat! This is Hollywood (Once again) using cinema to alter, water down, and change history to fit their own shallow view of people they believe are beneath them! I assure you, those proclaiming art in Black Face, or Yellow Face wouldn't think it so if a black actor were to grease up in White Face and play George Washington or Ben Franklin in a big budget Hollywood film! There'd be so much heated indignation over that, they’d have to shut the studio as well as the production down! Case in point, white folks in Hollywood and elsewhere couldn't even handle the History Channel portraying the great moorish general, Hannibal as the black man that he actually was! And he was a Moor!
From Andy Rooney’s Chopsocky bucktoothed stereotyped Mr. Yunioshi's character in the early 1960‘s movie, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” To countless white actors portraying native americans, and Mexican bandits, and scores of asian men playing Asian's like "Ming the Merciless," in Buck Rogers films. Or The Mandarin. Or Charlie Chan. Kathrine Hepburn playing Jade in the movie, "Dragon Seed." You name it! These images were insensitively paraded to the world as if this was some kind of art form. When in fact all it showed was a Superior-minded, condescending attitude! In some cases it was as if they were saying, “Let me lower myself to play character." And at the same time, they play someone great in history, and White Wash that person, making them white, instead of a person of color! This in turn would eventually give the world a spin on that character that is unrealistic to culture and possibly region! A negative, or badly cast portrayal of someone of color in history could and quite possibly lessens that person’s achievements, accomplishments, and/or personal life by not telling the whole truth! That first truth being "Who they Really Are!" What some call art is again nothing but the White Washing of someone else’s culture within the media! All around the world, such a thing is looked upon as being highly ingenuous and deprecative!
In the history of Hollywood portrayals of other people's color or race in film, its all fine and dandy when it's white folks mocking Blacks, Mexican americans and native Americans, or Asians in films. But when and if a black “Male” actor were to be cast as any one of the once served Catholic Pope's in history, within a film. The fervor of anger and hate would be out of control, and you know it! Look what happened when they cast a black child, Danyo OKeniyi
in the role of Rue in the movie "The Hunger Games!" White audiences lost their minds and tweeted some of the most awful things in answer to this casting!
There is such a thing as authenticity! Movies like “The God’s of Egypt” showed not one true sense of authenticity! In fact, it was a self admitted intentional White Washing of cast and characters by director, Ridley Scott! There is such a thing as integrity! Couple this with respect for the person the studio wants them to portray. Respecting that person's cultural strain, and their art. Respecting their fans also!
White Washing cultural legacies by using modern media like, film documentary reenactments, and other dramatizations is the new tool used as an excuse, and as a means to change and infuse a created alternative histories for people of color, anywhere in the world! In turn, propagating an image and a history that may not even exist! A history that over time becomes a carefully crafted Lie that is Believed! Just like Voltaire once said about history. “History is the lie commonly agreed upon!” This in fact could end up being true my dear friends, that is, “If we let it!”
Glenn Peppers October 5, 2016
