Race Boundaries?

In discussing race in a media class, this photo may be a place to start. I noticed it first in Entertainment Weekly, where the article challenged readers to guess who is playing the character in the center of this photo, a production still from the Ben Stiller's new film Tropic Thunder. The actor is Robert Downey, Jr. and the film is a Hollywood satire.

Students know Ben Stiller and Jack Black and are familiar with their respective comedic approaches. The question to pose: is the fact that Robert Downey, Jr. is a white actor playing a character who has been cast in a role written for a black actor, so he decides to "play it black" worth noting or discussing? Hollywood used to embrace casting white actors in a variety of ethnic roles, but that approach was frowned on for a time, at least in terms of ethnicity. Should there be rules and should the rules apply to just ethnic backgrounds, or also to gender, sexuality, religion?

A quote from Downey in EW: "If it's done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don't do it right, we're going to hell." What is the protocol that youth audiences accept in terms of actors playing beyond their own cultures? Jim Emerson's blog, Scanners, explores the history of this practice in the media:

OK, we've also seen a black actor playing a racist white man who turns black overnight (Godfrey Cambridge in Melvin Van Peebles' 1970 "Watermelon Man"); a white male actor playing a white female actor (Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie"); a white female American actor playing a male Chinese-Australian "dwarf" (Linda Hunt, "The Year of Living Dangerously"); a black male actor playing various white, female, Chinese and other characters (Eddie Murphy, "Coming to America," "Norbit"); a white woman playing a white male pre-op transsexual passing as a white woman (Felicity Huffman, "Transamerica"); a straight white woman playing a gay white female-impersonator (Julie Andrews, "Victor/Victoria"); a German-Japanese-Venezuelan male actor playing a Kenyan-white male American senator and presidential candidate (Fred Armisen on "Saturday Night Live" as Barack Obama)

While watching an episode of Law & Order, I noticed that at one point the character played by Ice-T is classified as a black man by one individual and as a white man by another. The character played by Adam Beach is called a Mexican, which he laughs off. Our race, ethnicity, and culture define us, but should they also limit us? Another posting on the Scanners blog reprints an empassioned letter from Nicholas Rizzo who examines why he responded so powerfully to the film No Country for Old Men. As a part of the letter he suggests that the Mexican drug runners function as "stark stereotypes" whereas the character played by Javier Bardem was complex and compelling. He throws off a parenthetical aside that struck me powerfully as I contemplated these issues:

I sometimes wonder if our society views multi-racial people as the most beautiful because, if we cannot determine which racial group they belong to, no racial stereotypes are attached and then we see their beauty purely and unencumbered.

Do we classify? Should we classify? How should "colorblind casting" look? How true do we need to be? Which boundaries can be crossed as actors?

So, let's look at the photo and see how the students respond. The hope is that they will come up with as powerful and as conflicting of views that I have stumbled on over the past week. It is the complexity of this issue that intrigues me. I just don't hope that they do not expect any easy answers from me.