No term is without it's flaws tho, I think... Or is there one that you think is a bit better?
yeah all flawed = because racism is bullshit/there being no such thing as race, it becomes impossible not to talk about it without adding to the bullshit.
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Since Athos has been talking about challenging moral absolutism Ive been trying to think about this all from a more philosophical/psychological angle.... a lot of it has already been covered, partly im thinking out loud, but still, hope this is of interest:
*if an actor limits themselves to roles that are essentially the ethnicity and accent they are born with there is no taboo-breaking about it - as an example thinking of someone like Ray Winstone playing eastenders - we go along with the characters he plays, theres little sense of offense (apart from maybe any inherent stereotyping written in to the role/s), and at worst you could say it shows he's a limited actor for not being able to take on more stretching roles
*if an actor plays a character of different ethnicity that may require different accents, but the character is still of a similiar enough skin colour then on the whole this is also completely acceptable by the vast majority of viewers, so long as the actor does a good job of it - a bad accent like Don Cheadle in Oceans 11 or a stereotypical performance may create offense, or make a joke of the performance, but its not a taboo-breaking thing to do in and of itself, particularly so if acted well - and if anything we respect the actor for taking on a stretching role.
*playing a character with a different skin colour to that of the actor does move into a taboo breaking area, even though on the face of it we respect actors for stretching themselves as much as possible, particularly so if they can pull it off - in fact an actor might be judged as limited for not taking on such roles. So why is it a taboo to do so? I've got these reasons
-historical: the bad politics associated with such acting in the past, and the racist ideas that feed in to the act - discussed already here so wont add to that.
-boundary transcending: this is an interesting bit of it I think. Part of the ways taboo comes around is having socially-agreed, clear boundaries and taboo-breaking is all about breaking those boundaries. The dressing up and acting out in carnival is often talked about as serving a taboo-breaking function, as is dressing up in drag, and i expect cinema/acting plays a big taboo-breaking function in our society. My point here is that I think there is a taboo at work here, socially constructed, which Athos was making the point that it isnt amoral in and of itself to break - I agree with that.
-I think on a visual level the playing of characters of other skin colours 'looks wrong' (unauthentic), even with the best make-up. I think theres a parallel with drag here - it is only on the rarest occasions that people beleive the costume, and if they don't then that discordance is something that many people, for deep psychological and socially constructed reasons, tend to find unnerving to different degrees.
- leading on from that, a last thought is I think in acting most people value a performance that captures the character authentically - the more authentic the better the performance. The visual part of that is probably the first layer that we respond to, and the more we know about and are sensitive to what we think the character should be like, the more we might hold the actor to account. For example a Swedish person might hold an Italian-American actor playing someone from Sweden to account more closely than a French-Canadian viewer would, picking up as they would on more subtle differences, and that may include the way the actor physically looks too. Playing a character of a different skin-colour is something everyone picks up on, and so makes it that much more problematic.
