A scene from Peter Pan Live! Photo from NBC
Writer says casting an actress with Native heritage won't erase the racist portrayal of Native people in Peter Pan Live!:
Lumping all American Indians together as one monolithic caricature is grossly offensive, because these are real people, with many, many different cultures. American Indians exist not in the dim past, not in a white fantasy land, but in the real world, on the reservations we herded them onto. Their portrayal is the American Indian equivalent of blackface. Even the most hardened among us (usually) deplore blackface: it reduces blacks to a subservient caricature. Neverland's Indians accomplish the same. We wouldn't let our children to watch blackface. So why do we show them native peoples as feather-clad tomahawk wielders? NBC tried to divert the racial issues by Tiger Lily's casting: she's played by an actress with (some) Cherokee background. Bully for her. It doesn't change that the character's name is Tiger Lily. American Indians don't have tigers. And they don't need a white kid to save them. These issues lie at the heart of American racism. We give them a pass. We build up stereotypes of sub-par people of color early on in life; we resist questioning them. We might cringe a bit. But we don't want to give them up: we love Peter. Calling out the racism in Peter Pan would mean losing him, somehow, and we don't want that. Racism begins here. From the seeds of the caricatures come Billie Holiday's strange fruit. We value a childhood story more than the respect of an entire people -- a people whose subjugation continually benefits us. Live in America? That land once belonged to the caricatures on your TV screen. Our political ancestors raped, killed, pillaged, burned, marched, and stole from them. We built our country on their backs. Even now, we're raping their ancestral lands for profit. These facts matter. And so our portrayal of American Indians matters.Get the Story:
Elizabeth Broadbent: Peter Pan and the Roots of Racism (The Huffington Post 12/11)
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