WHITE characters are routinely scrubbed from historical dramas and replaced with non-whites. European history is misrepresented in a way that Asian and African history never is. Rosa Parks would never be played by a white woman. This miscasting constitutes the malicious erasure of European identity.

“History Debunked” has some interesting commentary on the phenomenon.

“The result of all this foolishness is to show a weird alternative universe which bears absolutely no relation at all to the real past. When David Copperfield  was remade last year the central character was played by a man called Patel who boasted in private he had never read the book. Mister Wickfield was played by a Chinaman and his daughter Agnes by a black woman. The overall effect was inconceivably odd.”

— Comments —

Zeno writes:

One of the most curious aspects of this phenomenon of replacing European traditional characters with African or other non-Europeans, is that it gives two radically opposed messages.

One the one hand, they want to say: “European countries / White people are and always were racist and xenophobic”. On the other hand, they are saying: “European countries were always multicultural”, and therefore, always accepting of others and never “racist”.

As the nice man at ‘History Debunked’ observes, it is odd that no one in Victorian England would find it strange to see an African or Indian man in a position of authority or high status.

I remember seeing a British movie a few years ago, set also in Victorian times (1865), called “Lady Macbeth”. One of the first characters to appear was a black maid assisting the main female character. I thought it odd, but let it pass, perhaps it could be slightly plausible… But then the protagonist takes a dark-skinned man as his lover (odd, where does he come from?). And later on, the film presents us a rich black Baroness or Countess (I forget which), and no one bats an eye!

Ah, the film was based in a Russian novel called “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District”, by Nikolai Leskov, which of course doesn’t feature any African characters.

The Guardian, of course, celebrated: “There are practically more characters of colour in Lady Macbeth than there are in all the Austens, Dickenses and Downtons put together.” To them, this is a good thing. 

Zeno adds:

I forgot to mention that in the original Russian novel the main character ends up being punished for her sins (her lover replaces her for other women, and she ends up dying), but none of this happens in the movie, where in true feminist fashion, the “fierce, independent” woman triumphs against all odds.

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