I think that calling the casting choices of the
Lord of the Rings films 'whitewashing' is maybe going a little too far with that term. Typically, what that term means is that a character who is *clearly* meant to be of a particular race or ethnic background in the source material is cast as a white actor/actress rather than as someone who represents the original character. So, if the story is set in China, or India, or Africa, but oh look, white protagonists...or if it is based on a story in which the characters were not written as white.
Some of the most egregious examples are when studios cast white actors to portray non-white characters - this would be blackface or yellowface, and for the most part, that is not a current practice. 'Whitewashing' typically does not mean that, but rather 'reimagining' the character as a white person. So, to give an example - Tilda Swinton was cast to play 'The Ancient One' in the
Doctor Strange Marvel film. The character she portrays is of Celtic background, so...she thought that was okay. However, in the comics, this character is meant to be Tibetan. So, fans of the comics did see this casting choice as whitewashing from the original, though Tilda Swinton did not see that, because the role was not yellowface; the character was rewritten to fit her, rather than putting makeup on her to fit the character. People were upset over the loss of opportunity for representation there - the adaptation erased or 'whitewashed' the Tibetan character. [Also worth pointing out that this decision - to change the character from a Tibetan man to a Celtic woman - was almost definitely made to preserve access to the Chinese boxoffice.]
Here are two clear cut recent examples of whitewashing in the past decade. "The Ghost in the Shell" is a fairly famous anime about robots and identity - it's set in a futuristic Japan, and the manga was originally written by a Japanese author. The main character in the live action film is played by Scarlet Johansen. There was a lot of anger over that casting; the film did not do well in the US.
Khan Noonian Singh is a character from 'Space Seed', an episode of the original series of Star Trek. He is famous for also appearing in the film
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In both instances, he was played by Ricardo Montalban. The character is clearly meant to be of Indian descent; the actor who played him was Mexican. In the Star Trek reboot based on the Wrath of Khan (
Into Darkness), Khan is played by...Benedict Cumberbatch. I really don't know who thought it would be a good idea to replace an Indian character with a white British actor, but I'm still salty about that choice (and almost every other choice made in
Into Darkness, but I digress). That film did well enough at the box office, and Star Trek fans were grumpy about enough other changes that...the casting choice wasn't top of the list of things to complain about.
And here is a much murkier example. In James Fennimore Cooper's novel
The Last of the Mohicans, Cora and Alice are half-sisters with different mothers. Cora, the older sister, has a mother from the Caribbean who died, and then their father (a British military man named Col. Munro) remarried Alice's mother (who also died). N.C. Wyeth's illustrations suggest that he may have viewed Cora as mulatto; but as far as I know, the book never made that explicit. A lot was made of how fair Alice was, and how she was blond while her older sister was dark-haired, but is there an explicit reference to Cora's darker skin in the novel? Not that I recall. It is a reasonable interpretation of the story as written, though.
Here is one of Wyeth's illustrations of the sisters:
(I know the lighting of this scene is partially responsible for the apparent differences, but Cora is still the darkest-skinned 'white' person in this scene.)
In the 1992 film of
The Last of the Mohicans, Cora is played by Madeleine Stowe. They neglect to mention that Cora and Alice are half-sisters; they are simply sisters in this version. They also add a romance between Cora and Hawkeye that is not present in the book (which has a one-sided Uncas/Cora romance). Now, to be clear, Madeleine Stowe's mother is from Costa Rica - so they *did* choose an actress with some family connection to the Caribbean.
So...is this 'whitewashing'? Did they 'erase' Cora's Caribbean heritage simply so audiences could enjoy a romantic scene between her and Daniel Day-Lewis' Hawkeye without any pesky questions about race being involved? I mean, maybe. One can certainly *suspect* that. But, one could just as easily defend the choices made as being faithful to the content of the book (more or less) when it came to casting Cora (they changed key aspects of how the story played out in this film). She's darkhaired, at least. If Cora's heritage were a key part of the story, then it would matter if she were portrayed differently. But in this case, it's difficult to even be certain what her intended heritage is.
That is why I call this case 'murky' - someone with a better understanding of the source material than my memories of reading the novel when I was 11 would have to weigh in to determine James Fennimore Cooper's intent; perhaps there is a clear description I have forgotten about* (see below). Certainly, a case could be made that Cora's casting is another change from the novel, and people could argue that this is indeed a case of whitewashing. All I know is that 12-year-old me had a very confusing conversation about this story with my father, in which I had read the book, and he had seen the film, and nothing was matching up - who lived, who was in love with who, what was happening. And at some point, in trying to distinguish between the sisters, I think I said, 'you know, the black one,' and then he was very puzzled!
As the Marvel and anime examples should make clear, fantasy stories are not automatically immune from accusations of whitewashing simply because they don't take place in the real world. The liveaction film of
Avatar: The Last Airbender certainly erased the intended culture of its main protagonists - the Water Benders are meant to be based on the Inuit, and in the film, they are...decidedly not. Likewise, almost all portrayals of 'Tiger Lily' in
Peter Pan are considered problematic (to put it mildly).
So, to circle back to
Lord of the Rings. Is it true that Peter Jackson cast white people (and only white people) as 'heroes' in his films? Yes. Hobbits, elves, dwarves, Men of Rohan and Gondor - all 100% white IIRC. Now...is it also true that Tolkien wrote his stories with all of these characters also being white? That...would be more difficult to prove. Sure, Middle-earth is 'fantasy Europe' on some level. But hobbits, elves, and dwarves aren't even meant to look human, let alone specifically European. And Tolkien is notoriously scant on physical descriptions of his characters, giving just the vaguest of impressions about them. So...any reference to someone
not being white-skinned would be fairly significant, right? This is just the prelude to pointing out that hobbits are described as brown-skinned more than once. Sure, maybe that just means 'tanned'. They are curly haired. They typically have dark hair and brown eyes. So, given that description of hobbits, would your mind immediately go to 'white Europeans'? Yes, yes, I know about the Shire being based on the English countryside during the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. And hobbit surnames are all meant to sound very English. There is certainly an argument to be made for portraying hobbits as English people who are just over 3' tall with hairy feet. But...there is also an argument to be made for portraying hobbits with more skin pigmentation...based on descriptions Tolkien wrote.
Failure to do so is not necessarily 'whitewashing'. Whitewashing would have been portraying the Pukel-men as white people. Instead, Peter Jackson's film cuts them entirely. I think it would be more accurate to say that Peter Jackson's interpretation is
a possible, but by no means the only possible, reading of Tolkien's stories when it comes to the portrayal of race. I am not suggesting that Tolkien never told us that his characters were white. Of course there are explicit references to that (such as the description of Isildur in
The Lost Road). But he didn't tell us that
all of his characters are white; that was an adaptation choice made by Peter Jackson.
