Dulux Hollywood White

You'd think that after Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, the thousands of black Americans who've called America out on it's inherent racism, and the millions who have been victims to racial abuse - the United States might stop being racist assholes for once.

OK, racism exists here too, We're the country who still has yet to pay India back for all the wealth we stole from it, and we're calling people fleeing war, genocide, famine, and dictatorships 'illegal immigrants.' But come ON America! I remember in 2008 when Obama was elected and everyone was in two minds: either he'd cured racism forever...or he was going to get shot.

And that's still how the black community in America works. You're the president, or you're shot by either the police or some other nut with a gun. At least in England, ethnic minorities don't need to fear being shot - they just suffer from every other kind of discrimination imaginable including being unfairly targeted by authorities, being accused of messing up the economy, being accused of being a 'health-tourist,' and having to constantly be wary when walking down the street.

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a tiny bit angry about all this considering it's two thousand and cocking fifteen and we still freak out when a person who's not white and/or cisgender enters the room.What's even worse is that cinema, a medium of escapism and recreation, is still discriminating also.

You could say that the dominance of white faces in this years Oscars may have just been because not that many good films featuring or made by ethnic minorities were released. There was no 12 Years A Slave or anything like that. Perhaps it was all just an unfortunate coincidence. But then you look at the recent Peter Pan remake, simply called; Pan. Hollywood has this recent trend of taking old properties (because they're incapable of original thought) and making them 'edgy' - which translates to 'dull as hell.' The name sums it up. The Adventures of Peter Pan in Neverland becomes just Pan. Zzzzzzzz.

So I was in the middle of falling asleep watching the new trailer when I saw the Native American characters pop up and wow! I mean, wow! Tiger Lilly, a Native American princess, is white. It's like if they remade Pulp Fiction and replaced Samuel L. Jackson with Adam Sandler. In fact, the majority of the Native American characters in the Pan trailer are white - depriving actual Native Americans of a role in a mainstream film and effectively segregating them once again. Marlon Brando is spinning in his grave.

I haven't seen casting like this since Cloud Atlas, where rather than casting Asian actors they forced white actors into disgustingly racist makeup. People defend this decision saying that it's a 'stylistic choice,' but the one Asian character played by an Asian actor was a last minuite casting decision. Originally the role was going to go to Natalie Portman. The Wachowski's wrote an Asian character...and they wanted to cast a white actor. We clearly still haven't moved on from The Jazz Singer.

In fact, I'm still reeling from the As You Like It film adaptation set in Japan but with an all-white cast (though, thanks for putting Brian Blessed in a samurai outfit). When you have an Asian setting that should be populated with Asian characters, and your first instinct is to use white actors - that's hideously racist. There's no excuse for deliberately shunning minorities; not even for artistic reasons. I can never forgive either the Wachowski's or Kenneth Branagh for this. Forget, maybe, but never forgive.

And then, of course, we have the Stonewall trailer. Isn't it just the most beautiful shade of white?

I'm glad someone's finally gotten round to doing a movie about the most influential part of the gay rights movement, and it's extremely gratifying to see the project being given so much attention by the studio, but I remember when the only thing annoying me was that the idiot behind 2012 was directing it. Now that the trailer is out however, the true incompetence of Roland Emmerich is revealed in all it's henious glory.

This is particularly insulting considering that it whitewashes history itself. The first person to throw a brick during the Stonewall riots was a black transgender woman - but in the trailer it's a white cisgender man. The Stonewall Inn was, at the time of the riots, owned by the Mafia. It was a place where the people unable to blend into society went to for salvation: the trangender community, drag queens, effeminate gay men, and masculine gay women. All of this can be learnt by reading a simple Wikipedia article. There are also several documentaries on the subject, and you can still visit the Stonewall Inn today.

Actual people who were there at the riots and were later key figures in the gay rights movement have, in the trailer alone, been replaced by purely made up characters; all of them white, cisgender, and almost all male. Just as Roland Emmerich's Anonymous eschewed facts for made up hodgepodge (THE TUDOR ROSE WASN'T A REAL ROSE, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE WAS MURDERED BEFORE HAMLET WAS WRITTEN, AND SHAKESPEARE WASN'T THE FIRST TO WRITE PLAYS IN VERSE) it seems he's toying with the gay rights movement - turning a community all about multicolour into a whitewash. Replacing real people who are still alive and just a Google search away with fictional loaves of wonderbread. This is not a slippage from the research department or a typical Hollywood screw-up - this is cold, calculated, and deliberate xenophobia. Roland Emmerich looked up all the infomation about the riots and said: "No. We need to take out the black, female, and transgender people from history." Imagine a rainbow flag being painted with Dulux white and you have the perfect visual metaphor.

I'm not sure who this offends more: Black and trans people for being further ignored by the mainstream. Us gay people for only being accepted so long as we're cut down and airbrushed like fashion models to fit a marketable archetype. Or humanity in general for being denied stories about a fascinating and hugely influential group of people. People who, I'll say it again, are still alive.

Roland Emmerich claims that the studio forced him to do this, but I don't buy it. No decent, self-respecting person would attach themselves to this project. If Emmerich was concerned about the erasure of black and transgender characters then he should've left his pet-project rather than let it be fouled.

Because Emmerich doesn't deserve to make another movie in Hollywood again after pulling this. In any other industry, he would be fired for such blatant racism. Everyone I've mentioned deserves to at least have an unshiftable taint on their career. YouTubers and internet stars are called out almost daily on anything the slightest bit sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic - yet one of the largest entertainment industries in the world gets away with these million dollar displays of xenophobia on a regular basis. From Sony stating that Spiderman can never be black to black people being photoshopped out of history itself.

I hate to get on my high horse in such a vocal manner, but boycott this filth. The only way we can get Hollywood to care about what they're doing is by taking away their money...or get North Korea to threaten them with nuclear war again.