a comparison: when no otherization takes place
Colorblind doesn’t mean bleeding-heartedly PC, it just means this. It’s simply that there is no otherization taking place.
When I talk of colorblindness I don’t mean colorblindness as a political message, or colorblindness exaggerated to absurdity to that end. I certainly don’t mean ’90s social propaganda colorblind, like the Disney re-make of Cinderella from 1997 that’s cast like a school play.
Speaking of which, let’s address their bewildering casting decisions point by point. Cinderella is black. Okay, I’ll accept that. Makes a fair amount of sense, doesn’t it? (What? The mistreated housekeeper is black? Preposterous.) Cinderella was always a bit of an underdog, the character unjustly denied credit and thanks. And there’s got to be SOME reason, if she’s really soooOoOo kind-hearted and beautiful, that she’s abused like she is. To make her black adds a lot of coherence and substance to the story, actually, and provides the believability that it’s always sort of cried out for.
Next: her prince is played by a Filipino guy. I see no reason to take issue with this either*. But why (here’s where it gets absurd), when the Prince is apparently a Pacific Islander or of some kind of Asian decent, are his parents black and white? Is he adopted or something? I mean, because otherwise it just makes no sense.
*Not to dismiss how utterly unrealistic it all still is, of course, because honestly, does it not make you wonder how many times in her life Brandy has dated an Asian guy? Or how many times the actor who plays the king has dated a black woman? ’90s pop-culture depictions of racial harmony are and will always be utterly unrealistic — not in the fantastical sense, but literally unrealistic. Unrepresentative of the way things are in the real world. Or, did people really behave like this in the ’90s? I was way too young to know. All I know is that the children raised on such propaganda are now in staunch rebellion against its message. And that it’s one of those unusual cases where there isn’t even backlash-against-the-backlash, so they must’ve done something wrong.
