I think I'm gonna have to walk back how hard I scoffed at white creators insisting POC animated characters correspond with POC actors in the wake of protests last year.

To be clear, I only scoffed a little, but hey. Upon further reflection, their aim was admirable if still off.

It's easy to put it into an "Oh, here come some more Hollywood do-gooders" narrative, so to be fair, it is true that there's more going on under the surface than that.

I have complex thoughts about whether or not POC characters only being played by POC is better as a guideline or a rule, if it helps or hurts, if it's welcomed or not by POC actors, and the contradictions necessary to ignore to pull it off as politically pure as possible.

That said, there *is* something fundamentally weird about (usually) white actors voicing black & brown characters, but for me, it's not the inherent fact of the activity. I don't *always* find blackface offensive, for instance (gasp, POC aren't drones who just chant "racism!").

A good example would be 30 Rock, whose use of blackface I thought was very funny. Like, yes, it *is* always offensive, but that's the joke and if you wanna make that joke, you can ... sometimes ... & very carefully.

That's a use I found to be walking the line & rocking the line.

So the recap so far:

— People are correct that even offensive things do belong in humor & they're still a vital part of comedy.

— This all comes with the caveat "and be popular" bc inevitably someone will say, "I can say what I want whenever I want," a point I'll concede NOW.

— Racism really is a complex topic. So don't expect that every POC has the same reaction to ... anything. Not even blackface. Not even jokes about lynchings. Not even Trump. Well ...

We're all caught up? Good. So here's the real issue with non-POC people voicing POC characters:

I could conceivably assume, if one understood the ways in which being a person of color impacts one's life, & were to make a specific choice to color an animated character's skin in homo-centric stories that the attendant characteristics would also ... change.

This often doesn't happen. Either it's not a story they wanna tell, or they feel like including it is getting too "political"/off-track, or they simply don't have & aren't willing to work for the information they would need, defaulting instead to stereotypes positive & negative.

What makes many black people, for instance, scoff at the very idea that white audiences find it "difficult to relate" to black protagonists is that we've done the reverse our entire lives — because that's the media available to us.

So what we realize through this process of white producers and white writers and white actors and POC characters is that often the meager representation we are accorded is further marred by a complete and utter lack of anything that *makes* a POC character a person of color.

Am I saying that just bc you have a character of color, that their race needs to be front & center of the narrative? God no. We are quite enjoying a new era of literature *by* those ppl who can best represent themselves wholly separate from the pain inflicted on them by others.

But it is weird that the vision of the world that comes out of the minds of many white writers is not that these differences exist, but that people of color are in fact, only darker versions of the same people.

You're gonna lose a lot of complexity there.

We can see this in the medical assumptions doctors make based on studying male forms, because everything else is an extension of a male, the same but different.

And the issue at hand is that some things are different than other things.

I cannot and will not speak to authorial intent, but hey, Alison Brie is a white woman without a drop of Vietnamese blood in her who played Diane Nguyen on Bojack Horseman, but on that show, being Vietnamese-American means things for Diane's character. It changes who she is.

This is the same constellation of racial experiences white people have too, it's just that often the constellation remains the same while the character's color doesn't.

I'm not just a white person with black skin. I'm a black person. It means something, nothing, and a lot.

Being Viet-Am affects how she relates to the world and her place in it. It colors her perception of heritage, class, patriotism, & family. It simultaneously is and isn't an incidental fact about her, because it's obviously important but there's a lot more to her than *just* that.

What they think is the problem, what these white creators were responding to, was white people playing POC characters.

What I'm posing as a bigger problem is a fundamental lack of altered storytelling that erases minorities altogether — behind colored faces.

It seeks the aesthetic of diversity with the deftness of a college brochure featuring an interracial group of students grinning from ear to ear, devoid of the generational trauma, daily annoyances, physical dangers, or any of the messy complications that govern most of our lives.

It sounds hip and liberal to teach your kids nobody's different, but "everyone's equal" doesn't mean that.

This is the blackface I DO find offensive — the denial that what makes us different actually makes us different, a negation that sounds like charity but feels like erasure.

It denies that being POC would meaningfully change anything at all.

This blackface that occurs when a white writer places a white experience inside of a black body because that's all they see it as.

So if the creators wanted to sharpen their aim, from a huge fan of EVERYTHING, that'd be my advice.

Because while the tide may be turning on white people no longer playing POC characters, it's not moving that quick for the practice of stripping or avoiding anything that would dare give a character a unique experience of the world because of that ...

... and pretending that's what you presented just because you changed the color of their skin.