My chosen topic for this class is minority representation in Hollywood. I decided to pursue this topic because of the proliferation of films, especially in the past couple of years, that have mainly cast cis, heterosexual white actors in roles meant for minorities, especially people of color. I find this particularly disturbing considering the emergence of shows that primarily feature people of color as the main characters.

I have been following several online websites’ twitters such as @Buzzfeed and @HuffPost since I have found that these websites usually tweet a lot about entertainment news and call out media that whitewashes minority roles. Moreover, I also follow @OscarsSoWhite which has been a continuing hashtag which turned into a twitter account to call out the lack of people of color nominated and awarded Oscars for their performances and behind-the-scenes work in Hollywood films. Moreover, I also follow media outlets that primarily report on all things Hollywood such as @VanityFair and @THR (The Hollywood Reporter).

From my searches on twitter, I see that people have mainly been talking about the recent Death Note trailer that released this week. Death Note was an anime series that was recently picked up by Netflix to produce as a film. However, the trailer that was shown featured Nat Wolff, a white American actor, in the lead role. When I searched #whitewashing and #HollywoodSoWhite, most of the users called out Netflix for its blatant whitewashing of a beloved anime series. Many people also compared the Death Note film to Ghost in the Shell, another anime series that was turned into a film with Scarlett Johansson as the lead.

From my time online this week, I have seen the impact of what Manovich described as “web 2.0” in this week’s reading. In the 60’s and 50’s there was definitely blatant whitewashing (films such as Breakfast At Tiffany’s, etc.) and disregard for providing people of color with roles in the film (along with the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) but I feel that with the emergence of social media, our ability as consumers to communicate our disgust has been able to shape the films that are being created. Yes, there are still films that are whitewashing the roles of minorities, but those films have recently been tanking at the box office and I believe that through twitter and the ability to directly call out these companies, we have been able to really use the internet for social communication and change, as described in the readings.