By Julia Conforti, staff writer
Ever since the beginning of history class and the media, whitewashing has been a prominent issue. Chapters in history textbooks are rewritten, or flat out excluded, to gloss over the events of our history to paint white people as victims or saints. TV shows cast solely white personas or write people of color as their stereotypes or sometimes demonize them.
The reason that whitewashing is such a toxic practice is because it promotes the ideas that white is the ‘default’ race. Additionally, it does not have any proper representation of people of color in the media. The censorship that comes along with whitewashing is the most toxic part of the practice.
There are the obvious events that have been falsified and covered up from American students, such as the true nature of what was done to Native Americans. A topic that is still scarcely spoken of in history classrooms is the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II at the hand of white Americans. Japanese-Americans were still suspected of being loyal to Japan during World War II, so these innocent American citizens were snatched from their homes, placed in internment camps which were up and running for four years. Additionally, racial propaganda against Japanese-Americans was circulating wildly at the time.
We still celebrate Christopher Columbus to this day, even if he murdered many Native Americans who were in no way a threat to him, and others followed suit. This censorship in our history books paints Columbus as a saint, even if he took people’s land and then their lives as well. This is also whitewashing our history.
However, whitewashing is most dominant in the entertainment industry. Books, movies, T.V. shows, and video games are taking over the lives of old and young people all around the world, but a large percentage is not being depicted in this phenomena. The people of color.
Some casts are entirely white, or people who were a specific race are cast as white people in the live action adaptation, or stereotypes of races are displayed in ways that are intended to be harmful.
A fine example is the movie Exodus, which was released in 2014. Though the book from The Bible was set in Egypt and depicted Hebrews, people of color, most of the cast was caucasian. In The Hunger Games, Katniss is never specifically categorized as any race, although many of the readers interpreted her as a person of color, though she was played by the white Jennifer Lawrence.
Neverland has a whole region of Native American people whom reside in the plot of the classic Disney film, Peter Pan. Though the recent live action origin story, Pan, casted a white girl as the tribe’s princess, Tiger Lily. Stonewall depicted the black transgender woman who threw the brick as a white male. The list is truly never ending.
What the true problem is that people perceive white as the default race. Once that premonition is erased from our minds, then the true problems and the lack of representation in media will become more and more apparent to those who do not currently see it as an issue worthy of our attention.
All of this must be stopped. Our true history needs to be fairly taught to us without protecting the white people’s wrongdoings, programs and films need to properly represent people of color so the problem of whitewashing can finally be scrubbed from our culture.