Paramount Studio’s 2017 live-action adaptation of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell opens to the soundtrack of a haunting chant in Japanese while surreal images of cybernetic body parts coalesce into a naked female form. As the artificial body emerges from its womb-like incubator, the outer encasement peels away to reveal the face of a black-wigged Scarlett Johansson as the film’s protagonist, Major — eventually revealed to be the cyberized reincarnation of a young Japanese girl named Motoko Kusanagi.

For defenders of Ghost in the Shell, deft screenwriting enabled Johansson — who is not Japanese — to play the lead role of a Japanese woman. But, for many Asian-Americans, Johansson’s casting was just the latest in a long pattern of Hollywood selecting white actors in Asian roles to make Asian characters more palatable for white audiences. Some Asian-American protesters felt the film was an example of yellowface — a term referencing when a white actor dons “Asian-esque” stage makeup and costuming to play an Asian character. Others lambasted the film for how the script adapted its Japanese source material to allow for a white actor to play the role of Ghost in the Shell’s iconic Japanese protagonist — a process termed “whitewashing” by its critics.

Keith Chow — founder of pop culture blog The Nerds of Color, which co-organized protests on social media against Johansson’s casting in Ghost in the Shell — believes that both yellowface and whitewashing were evident in that film. He sees whitewashing as a contemporary revival of historic yellowface: a practice related to American traditions of blackface and, like blackface, popularized in early American theater and cinema.

“It’s all connected,” Chow tells Teen Vogue. “It all results in the dehumanization of people of color; and, in the specific case of yellowface, in the dehumanization of Asian people.”

GHOST IN THE SHELL, Scarlett Johansson, 2017. ©Paramount Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

One of the earliest documented examples of yellowface is the mid-18th-century production of The Orphan of China, adapted from the 13th-century Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao. Critics of the production later remarked that the show’s popularity was due to the production’s “Oriental” setting and its liberal use of Chinoiserie (the imitation of Chinese motifs and techniques in Western art) and white actors in yellowface. This yellowface predates the earliest landing of Chinese immigrants on American soil by nearly a century. The Orphan of China was thus not a realistic portrayal of China; rather, it was an elaborate fiction drawn from the audience’s collective imagination of Chinese people. Yellowface would soon become an enduring tradition of American theater that would persist as a popular practice for centuries.