A white actor, Joseph Fiennes, has been cast to play Michael Jackson in a British TV production about a fabled road trip made by Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando took while trying to get home to Los Angeles from New York after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, commented: “Are you for real?” “All the drama going on over black actors being ignored, and you’re getting a white actor to play the greatest black pop star of all time.” “And the worst thing is it’s not even like the best white actor,”
Just days ago, we published a post about the Oscars. Maybe white actors playing black characters is one of the reasons blacks are having difficulty being nominated for an Oscar. The Washington Post recently published an article, “100 times a white actor played someone who wasn’t white: Hollywood has moved on from blackface, but it remains terrible at casting people of color.”
On our page about racial bias in mass media, we talked about how actual black heroes have been portrayed as white, including the black marine at ground zero in the movie “World Trade Center.”
During an interview with Oprah, below, Michael Jackson stated, “Why would I want a white child to play me? I’m a black American. I’m proud to be a black American. I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am.” Jackson makes the comments at around the 23:46 mark in the video. Maybe Jennifer Beals or Halle Berry should have been cast as Elizabeth Taylor, who makes an appearance during the interview; especially since Taylor portrayed Cleopatra, who is speculated to have been of black African ancestry.
