“Actually the main character was Filipino, and then she turned pale,” Mr. Tsang told reporters at a TVB event last week. “That’s the hard part,” he added. “You can’t find a Filipino to paint white, so you can just paint an artist black first, so she can pale. If we’re making an alien movie, and we can’t find aliens in the gameplay, are we discriminating against aliens? This is what the plot calls for. TVB journalists said that Mr. Tsang had no comment.
Critics say the use of brown in this way lends itself to a plot and argues that all Filipinos are a certain person of color.
“This is basically an exercise of privilege,” said Christine Vicera, a Filipino filmmaker and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Framsonca, luc cameraman, has brown skin. Whereas Filipinos or Southeast Asians or South Asians in Hong Kong, we don’t have the privilege of removing our skin color.”
Jan Gube, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Normal University who studies cross-cultural education and diversity, says that many local audiences lack the historical context to understand why brown faces are so offensive. uncomfortable. Professor Gube said that most students in Hong Kong’s public schools grew up not interacting with classmates who looked different from them. Local schools have not taught respect for culture — let alone context for brownface — intensively, he said.
“You will see a lot of comments from social media and local media saying that the actress is being faithful to her role,” he said. “Not many people see it from a cultural point of view, which means they may not necessarily be aware that that kind of makeup means something different to someone else,” he added.
Brown-faced (and yellow-faced – imitation of browns and Asians by light-skinned performers) evolved from the racist variety tradition of blackface, a staple of theatrical shows America in the early 1800s. Most white actors wore heavy makeup to play caricatures mocking Black people. With several other representations of Black people on stage – and then on screen – black performances helped reinforce the antics of humanity.
