"The Last Airbender": A Sad Example of Racist Casting

 
To kick off the new year I am going to write out a rant that's been in my head for a few years. Taking a brief break from discussing sexism, I'm going to talk about racism; specifically, the racist casting decisions of the live action adaptation of my favorite TV Show, Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's been two years since the film was released (and, unfortunately, there are more recent examples of racist casting) but I still hold a lot of anger that a show that was such a wonderful source of diversity became such a blatant example of Hollywood Whitewashing. 

It is no secret that the majority of the faces in Hollywood are white. Sure, there are a couple faces of color that have made it to the top, but they are few and far between. Some act as though this is coincidence, that everyone is given their fair chance but all the best actors just happen to be white. It disturbs me that so many believe this lie when, not only are the majority of films being produced the stories of white people, but the roles that are intended for people of color are going to white actors. Sadly, M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender proved a disgusting example of the latter. The show takes place in a fantasy world that is modeled after various parts of Asia and Inuit tribes in the Artic, animated in a style that was created in Japan and, I'm just going to say it, all the characters in the show are clearly not white; yet when the film was cast the three main characters ended up being white. Shortly after this information came to light controversy began brewing, Shyamalan defended the choices in an interview that only increased my anger. Since I will probably never get a chance to sit down with him and argue about his casting choices I'm going to do the next best thing... pick his statements apart on my blog. 

The story of The Last Airbender involves a war started by the Fire Nation against the three other nations in this world. Particularly in the first season of the show (which is the only season the film covers) the people of the Fire Nation are painted as the bad guys, which became a problem when M. Night Shyamalan decided to cast actors with darker skin as characters from the Fire Nation. Now, to be fair, the "good guys vs. bad guys" dynamic does get muddied throughout the series, some characters from the Fire Nation develop and join the heroes, specifically the characters Iroh and Prince Zuko. That was the first point that Shyamalan brought up in his defense: "The whole point of the movie is that there isn't any bad or good. The irony is that I'm playing on the exact prejudices that the people who are claiming I'm racist are doing. They immediately assume that everyone with dark skin is a villain. That was an incredibly racist assumption which as it turns out is completely incorrect." However, even if I pretended not to know that the original casting of Prince Zuko was the blond haired/pale skinned Jesse McCartney, who stepped down to be replaced by the Indian Dev Patel, the casting still played into the expectations of a racist society by casting people of color as the villains. Having a couple characters of color that eventually turn against their people and join the "right" side is just a slightly sneakier way of reinforcing our societies prejudices.

After claiming that he intentionally cast non-white actors as the Fire Nation to undermine our racist assumptions, he says that he cast the primary actors in a "color-blind" way. (Note: the casting call was released and it asked for Caucasian actors to fill the roles of the main characters.) He made each nation have a different ethnic background and he justified casting white actors as the originally Inuit Sokka and Katara by saying, "If you don't have an edict of 'don't put white people in the movie' then the Water tribe can be European/Caucasian. So that's how it ended up." It is true that over the course of the film you do see several faces that are not white, however every heroic character that is given more than two seconds of screen time is white. He's claiming that it is merely coincidence that all three of our leads ended up being Caucasian?! I call bullshit. Don't believe me? Watch the first few minutes of the film, every person in the Southern Water Tribe is Inuit except the three characters that speak. I also question the decision of dyeing  the hair and tanning the skin of Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone to make them look more Inuit, if they were intended to appear European/Caucasian. Putting people of color in the background and putting white people in the leads is a failed attempt to placate the people like me, while keeping the unbalanced and unfair status quo.

Finally, he claims that the animation style is at fault because,"The Anime artists intentionally put ambiguous features on the characters so that you see who you want to see in it." So, despite the fact that the animation style was created in Japan and the entire world created in Avatar was based on Asian or Inuit cultures, Shyamalan still says that the characters are not necessarily non-white?! This is the statement that makes me the most angry. He is right that there is ambiguity in the Anime style that allows for universal relate-ability; I feel that this was all the more reason for him to cast people of color in the lead roles. That ambiguity is something that racists cling to while watching animated television shows or reading books; it is an attempt at keeping white the norm. Casting Asian and Inuit actors would have been a way to get rid of that ambiguity and definitively show people of color as heroic lead characters. When 82% of leading roles go to white actors, this was a missed opportunity to give young children of color some characters to look up to and to counter racist assumptions. 

Stars aren't born, they are created by film makers who continue to choose white faces and steal opportunities that belong to actors of color. There are countless epic fantasy series out there for Caucasian actors and I have no doubt that there will be plenty more in the future. When a franchise that is designed for Asian actors, like Avatar: The Last Airbender, comes along it's time we demand that those roles be filled by Asian people, rather than continue to makeup white actors who have significantly more opportunities. (Seriously, it's the least we can do.) I don't know if M. Night Shyamalan was lying to us or to himself in this interview, but at the very least he's displaying horrible ignorance to the racism in the film industry and society at large.

For more information on The Last Airbender casting and racism in other Hollywood films please visit and show your support for Racebending.com.