Colorblind

Well the creator of BoJack Horseman finally gave an interview about casting Diane Nguyen. Part of what turned me off the show and made me not watch after season 1 was Alison Brie playing Vietnamese, and the stupid fucking jokes about mispronouncing her last name (from the very first episode!). It has annoyed me ever since that fan reviews of the show keep talking up how 3-dimensional and great Diane is, how this is a fabulous female character, while ignoring the fucking elephant in the room. How great and valuable would that role have been if cast with an Asian actress much less a Vietnamese one?

The guy talks about how he cluelessly went into the Netflix pitch meeting with a white actress, felt bad about it afterward and cast an Asian actress who recorded four episodes, but became unavailable, so he recast with a white actress in order to meet some deadline of Netflix's. He knew what he was doing was wrong, but he fell back on "colorblind" casting and "the best person for the job" arguments which of course means white people as the default. Why is that "colorblind" casting in animation results so often in white only casts, but "colorblind" casting in theatre roles led to the incredible diversity I saw on display in the Tony Awards? He said there was a lack of Asian actors with experience. How the fuck do they get experience when you cast white actors all the time? They talk about other shows with this whitewashing problem, historical examples like Apu in The Simpsons. Those were insensitive choices in the past, but to have this problem still going on in recent shows is fucking frustrating. Supposedly they are hiring a "consultant" and going to explore Diane's Asian identity in new episodes. I don't know if they ever revisited her family after season 1, but what I saw was so clearly not written by anybody with any experience of Asian families. I guess they were arguing that they were trying to write her family not as Asian stereotypes, but they removed anything recognizable from them as well. Colorblind "I don't see race" attitudes mean you make race invisible; it's forcing everyone to act white to be seen as normal.

He says to fight the system, "If you want to go against that, you have to be active about it. You have to actively hire people of color. You have to actively think for every role: Can this be not a white person? If I’m not thinking about, it’s not going to happen." No fucking shit. So actively do better now; think about it every time this comes up in the future. Think about it behind the scenes by hiring diverse writers as well. It's the only way things will change.

I don't think I'll return to the show anyway, because it's so fricking dark and depressing. That's another reason I gave it up.