When the late Mickey Rooney was asked in 2008 about his objectionable turn as Holly Golightly’s perverted Japanese neighbour IY Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his response was to affect mild embarrassment that a role he had had “fun” doing had become known as an obnoxious symbol of ingrained racism in 1960s Hollywood.



“It breaks my heart. Blake Edwards, who directed the picture, wanted me to do it because he was a comedy director. They hired me to do this overboard,” Rooney told the Sacramento Bee, after protesters forced a Californian free film screenings programme to replace the classic 1961 romcom with the rather-less-offensive Pixar children’s animation Ratatouille.

“Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it, not one complaint,” added the 88-year-old Hollywood star. “Every place I’ve gone in the world people say, ‘… You were so funny.’ Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, ‘Mickey, you were out of this world.’” Had he known the role would go down in history as a shameful example of Hollywood prejudice, said Rooney, he “wouldn’t have done it”.

It remains to be seen whether Scarlett Johansson, star of the forthcoming Ghost in the Shell remake, or the white lead in the new Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon, Billy Magnussen, end up having similar misgivings about their roles in a few decades’ time. At first glance, neither project looks quite so offensive as Rooney’s execrable bucktoothed pantomime turn as Yunioshi: Johansson’s casting as the cyborg cop Major Motoko Kusanagi appears to be straight-up “whitewashing” of an essentially Japanese role, while the decision to shoehorn Magnussen’s entirely fictional Steve McKee into the story of the young Lee’s 1965 fight with kung fu master Wong Jack Man is clearly a new twist on the old Hollywood “white saviour” trope. But at least neither presents their subject as a racist stereotype.

Nevertheless, Asian Americans have quite reasonably reacted to both films with fury. Earlier this year Johansson was heavily criticised by Ming-Na Wen, Melinda May in the superhero TV show Agents of SHIELD and the voice of Disney’s Mulan, for taking on the part. And in June, the blogger Michelle “Mimi” Villemaire made the Avengers actor the centrepiece of her Correcting Yellowface project, in which famous whitewashed characters were restored to more suitable ethnicities via the magic of Photoshop.

Magnussen’s turn as McKee, a young white martial arts student who witnesses the legendary Lee/Wong Jack Man battle in Birth of a Dragon, has drawn gasps of disbelief from those wondering quite how the Hong Kong American martial arts icon ended up being sidelined in his own biopic. “Asian males can never take the lead role,” complained Bawlife, an IMDB user. “Only the sidekick even in their own movie … White people, would it kill you to stop inserting yourselves into everything?” Added a fellow user, neonfusion: “Is this a joke? I am here to see Bruce Lee but they put the focus on some white guy … Bruce Lee is a beast and the film should be celebrating this, but instead they make him out to be some insecure and jealous loser who is [angry at] Steve’s success.”

There are huge differences between whitewashing and the “white saviour” trope, but both exist due to a sense in Hollywood that audiences won’t turn out to see a movie unless there are Caucasian faces involved somewhere. This is especially strange given research shows that people of colour, Hispanics in particular, make up a sizable portion of the US cinemagoing public.

Whitewashing, which usually involves casting a white person to play a role that has traditionally been considered to be, or simply ought to be, the exclusive preserve of ethnic minority actors, is the more obviously offensive concept. The Cameron Crowe romcom Aloha became a critical and commercial car crash when the Almost Famous film-maker inexplicably cast the white actor Emma Stone as the part-Hawaiian woman Allison Ng. Likewise Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings fought to overcome the British veteran director’s strange decision to cast Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, and Aaron Paul as biblical figures of Middle Eastern descent.

The “white saviour” trope, as seen over the past decade in movies such as The Help, The Blind Side and even 12 Years a Slave, is a rather more insidious side project of institutional Hollywood prejudice. These films do not always invent white characters for insertion into stories about people of colour, as the makers of Birth of a Dragon appear to have done. The Blind Side, which won Sandra Bullock the best actress Oscar in 2010, is based on the real-life story of a white family that took in a homeless black teenager, Michael Oher, and helped give him the stability to achieve his dream as an NFL footballer.

Likewise, a white man really did help rescue Solomon Northup, the subject of the other Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. McQueen, a black British director, was simply portraying history. And yet these films received more attention than they otherwise might have because they placed famous white faces at the centre of black stories (in the case of 12 Years a Slave, one of the most famous white faces in the world, in the form of Brad Pitt). The largely white Academy sat up and paid attention, despite being rather less interested in Ava DuVernay’s Selma, another movie about the struggles of people of colour that did not feature white people in conveniently prominent roles.

There are signs that Hollywood is changing, with the existence of social media and its ability to instantly highlight unhealthy industry behaviour surely a major influence. This week it was revealed that Disney is searching for a Chinese actor to play Mulan in its forthcoming live action remake, following an online campaign calling for the studio to avoid whitewashing the role. And the studio’s forthcoming animation Moana will feature a largely Polynesian voice cast (though it has still upset people of Polynesian heritage over a portly depiction of the god Maui).

And yet the very existence of movies such as Birth of the Dragon, Aloha and Ghost in the Shell suggests some film-makers still don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. Deeply offensive stereotypes such as IY Yunioshi may be off limits in 2016, but we still have a long way to go before more subtle examples of prejudice have also been consigned to Hollywood history.