With the failure of Marvel's Iron Fist, and the garbage fire that was "Ghost in the Shell" at the box office, more and more folks are beginning to question why there are so many white actors in roles clearly designed for actors that aren't, well, white. But there is a problematic way in which some are talking about whitewashing, in that some people are answering a bad critique with an equally bad argument. For years, the Hollywood consensus resisted the depiction of non-white stories with non-white casts on the premise that such diversity represented a threat, rather than a boon, to their bottom line. Even if this argument from Hollywood producers were true (which it demonstrably isn't), we shouldn't cater to corporate logic when it comes to art and storytelling. There's more to representation and de-centering Whiteness than making what is not white profitable for white investors.

Why do we see so many articles in which the focus on whitewashing controversies is on how much money they lose or the pitfalls of budgeting? We must know, in an America lead by the most obvious of racists, that representation in media does not guarantee a future of racial reconciliation. Hollywood is not out to decolonize the collective imagination of its customers; there is nothing beyond a motive for profit in their decisions to make the new Star Wars less white, or to make LeFou gay in the live action adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast." We must rethink why we are outraged at whitewashing. When we make folks who are not white a monolith, as we do when we lump Chinese, Japanese and Korean cinema together when it comes to our discussions on "Ghost in the Shell" and "Iron Fist," we are not merely misnaming or speaking over those people. Whitewashing is itself a kind of violence borne from colonialism, a caricature of the "Other" created by the white gaze in order to establish dominance and supremacy over colonized peoples. Therefore, when artists tell stories about white folks in stories that do not feature any sort of whiteness, their art serves the goals and interests of empire: to relegate formerly and presently colonized people into the margins. What of the new Yasuke film in the works -- the tale of the African samurai who served under Oda Nobunaga in Japan? Say the casting is entirely correct, any white directorial pitfalls are avoided and market trends are in favor of the film's diversity. What if it bombs the same as "Iron Fist" or "Ghost in the Shell?" There would be myriad reasons to answer trolls, of course, but the premise of profit remains intact. We must interrogate how whiteness informs the motive for profit and vice versa.

There is simply more to whitewashing than whether it makes Hollywood money or not and if we are to build a world where children of all nations, tribes and peoples have stories that they can recognize themselves in, then we must demand art independent of Hollywood profit. We must support filmmaking, novels and stories of all media based on the efforts of folks of color.