12 Ways 2016 Movies Definitely Made You Dumber
6. They Made Us Think Colourism And Whitewashing Is Perfectly Fine
Closet racists no doubt had a romp at the cinema this year with a certain couple of films that thought it was perfectly fine to blackface up actors and whitewash entire casts. Proving Hollywood has yet to learn from ignorant movies of the past, both Cynthia Mort’s Nina Simone biopic and Alex Proyas’ Gods of Egypt look set to join the racist ranks of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Aloha.
Zoe Saldana’s casting as Nina Simone was controversial from the get go and even more so when the first trailers for Nina showed the actress in dark-skinned makeup and a prosthetic nose. Though Simone and Saldana are both black women, the fact that the makers of Nina chose to cast a light-skinned actress in the role of a musical legend whose identity as a dark-skinned black woman was central to her career and life experience is proof that colourism – that is, light-skinned black people being seen as more ‘palatable’ than dark-skinned black people – is unfortunately still alive and well in Hollywood.
Though set in Egypt and taking inspiration from Egyptian mythology, Gods of Egypt surprisingly didn’t feature even one vaguely Egyptian person in its main cast. There’s a Scotsman, a Dane, an Aussie and one black American actor offering a sprinkling of diversity but not one Egyptian in sight.
Both Nina and Gods Of Egypt were rewarded with a critical panning, but the fact Hollywood still gets up to this sort of stuff is galling to say the least and stupid of us to buy into it.