@LightningAce:
I prolly wasn't very clear. This isn't about skin colour or her not being brown enough or too white or that she couldn't pass for an Middle Eastern Arab woman.
Disney said they'd be true to the characters and their origins i.e Middle Eastern Arab. They need to be held at their word, but yet again they clearly lied about that.
It's kind of a dumb word though. Or was that actually about casting someone who looked the part, and not the "only exists on internet echo chambers" issue of casting by literal origin.
Take Moana. They only needed voice actors, yet they specifically wanted people of Polynesian descent to VOICE the characters. Anyone could done it, but they wanted to be authentic.
What part exactly is the authentic part? It's a nice gesture, but what is authentic. Did they give cultural script advice?
Indian is not Arab. In appearance there might not be much difference but from all the comments out there, especially from Arabs, they are majorly pissed off.
Are these comments on twitter, or are you actually getting some kind of glimpse in the real world of actual anger.
Most of the articles I saw had tweets, and most of those tweets were from outraged white people.
In either case none of this changes the fact that literal casting by origin is dumb. Especially especially in fantasy settings. Some super realistic slice of regional life thing? There starts being some value in the argument there. But yeah, that sure as crap isn't Aladdin.
And I once again bring up the fact that literal casting only fucks over Arab actors, not helps them.
Brown people are not interchangeable.
This is a very empty meaningless bit of sloganeering people are casting around, and one you're carting out entirely ignoring everything I posted about how yeah sorry the world is more physically similar across large spaces than it is different.
The idea that each little land in the world has hyper specific phenotypes that follow manmade borders and imaginary regional classifications stems from old school racism. Not from anti-racism.
I mean call me nuts but I think its kind of cool and even beautiful how in spite of all the borders people have up, that someone from Karachi could look like the sister of someone from Lisbon. Or even from Havana and Buenos Aires. And to be further frank you'd have to be pretty isolated from diversity to not be aware of that irl.
Casting someone of Arab descent is not asking too much
Calling for a precedent that nationality/ethnicity be literally cast is asking a tremendous amount, and is the sort of thing that will limit the options of minority actors.
From your eyes right now you seem to be thinking that greater care need apply to non-white roles, and thus concern is not needed for white roles.
The actual result though is minority actors being more limited in options, and white actors at worst not being cast in whitewashed roles, while still being cast all over the European spectrum.
After all that is precisely what is going on here. The Indian actress is running up against a wall in her options in your ideal world.
if they claim they're not going to be whitewashing and will do it justice, then cast the right people for it.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with whitewashing.
And as i've said already they may as well have just cast some one that was neither Arab nor Indian but could pass for it for her role if this is what they were going to do.
…how would that change your stance on it? Actually I'm totally confused on this whole sentence. Because thats uh...what they did? They cast someone who could pass for the role? Who wasn't Arab? I'm not sure why Indian is packaged with Arab here.
A part of me wants this casting controversy to carry on, and i want this movie to fail badly. Petty yes, but frankly, I'm tired and angry about this whole situation.
Minority actors getting work outside their own niche?
Christ dude, think about this for two seconds. What if the actress that was chosen was from a small barely talked about ethnic background, like….Tajik or Azerbaijani or something.
Rather than something famous like Arab or Indian. Your whole thing would be basically damning her to pretty much never get speaking roles ever.
I've seen this happen 1 too many times, and its part of a much bigger picture.
That bigger picture isn't "brown people aren't interchangeable", its "brown people aren't a precious resource of carefully preserved diorama figurines that must be carefully placed in the right habitat".
They can look like people from hundreds of miles across the globe, just like white people.
They can do that whole acting thing where they can portray people other than themselves and their own origin, just like white people.
They can in fact be pretty interchangeable physically, just like white people.
They can even plausibly play some white people! Heck some of them if you met them on the street? You'd think they were white people.
Lest we forget these are ethnicities (culturally defined) being spoken of and not races (physically defined).
If you're an Arab you might as well be at the bottom of the casting barrel.
I love that its Arabs your worried about, and not all the little ethnic groups you probably aren't even aware of.
What the heck does a Kurdish actor do? Georgian? Berber? Pashtun?
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
Heck lets even focus in on Naomi Scott.
Frankly while she could pass for straight Indian, overall she doesn't really look it. She is after all half English, and it shows.
So really casting her as an Indian character ironically seems a little off.
Likewise she doesn't work as Northern European. Thus including her own native England.
Where can she get roles that her physical appearance fits? Not England, nor India.
However she can pull off racially ambiguous characters, which means she can pull of random Americans, she can pull off being Latina to varying degrees depending what kind. She can pull off Southern Europeans like Italians, Spaniards, Greeks etc, as well as most Middle Easterners.
She's essentially a mixed race actor, and they're the MOST damned sometimes by your sort of logic. Like I said, generally she looks neither English nor Indian. The two things that she literally is. But there in the great geographic middle between pasty pale Northern Europe, and spicy umber South Asia…boom! The land of her opportunity.