The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/whitewashing/)
Phrases like “you’re not Latino” and “you look so white” have plagued my form of self, stemming back to my youth. I never truly understood the gravity of these misconceptions, so I tended to shrug them off without much thought. As the years went on, it became increasingly transparent that my white-passing token wasn’t as effective as it was made out to be.
By KATIE O’BRIEN
It’s no secret that the movie industry has a diversity problem. In 2014, only 17 percent of the top 100 films featured non-white leads, and only 12 percent featured female protagonists. In the same group of films, there were just 19 queer characters with speaking roles out of 4,610 total characters, and zero of them were trans. The lack of diverse casts isn’t that surprising when you consider that there is even less diversity among filmmakers. So this notorious lack of representation in film makes it all the worse when films depicting actual, historical events fail to give credit to the people of color who participated.