A big part of the false equivalence problem people keep raising wrt voice actors matching the ethnicity of their character is a that lot of PoC actors lose out on positions as recurring cast members because directors still treat white actors like they’re more “versatile”
It’s not uncommon for a show to have a limit on the number of actors they’re allowed to cast in an episode, so that means actors are chosen both for their ability to do the role and their ability to fill in multiple characters to keep the actor count down
(The limits are something like, if a voice actor does 3 characters in one episode you have to pay them a little more, and if they do 4 characters you have to pay them double, so it counts as “another actor”, I’m not sure if that’s union standard or just my experience)
Quite a few animated shows have majority white casts, and an unfortunate number of directors treat white actors like they can voice anyone, but only give PoC actors the opportunity to voice characters who match their ethnicity
So it’s entirely too common for a director to be like “it’s not worth it for us to hire a black actor if we only have one black character in the cast” because they’re stuck on the idea a black actor can only play black characters but a white actor can play anyone
So by a) supporting the idea that PoC roles should go to PoC actors and b) not falling for the false equivalence arguments about who should be “allowed” to playe white characters, that’s how you build up more diversity in regularly occurring series casts
(I mean, obviously “only one black character in the cast” is a whole other issue, but if we’re just talking about “the way tv shows are currently made and who gets to act in them” that’s the problem we’re up against right at this moment.
Also worth putting out there it’s a similar reason you get so many cartoons with male actors voicing female characters, directors will be like “well we have so many male characters, we can double them up more efficiently if we just cast men to play them.”
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