Due to some alarmingly ignorant events we’ve witnessed the other day, I now feel compelled to make a series of posts discussing non-human characters that are intended to be Black
Assuming a non-human character HAS to be white is due to whiteness being framed as the default. This tends to lead many to believe that they can depict any character as a white person uncritically. The truth of the matter is that even if the character isn’t human, you can still potentially be whitewashing them. Hollywood (storytellers in general) have had a long history of only ever including poc by depicting them as something inhuman, so it’s not like it’s impossible to pick up these intentions
Often when someone is pointed out to have whitewashed these characters, they become extremely defensive and double down into the mindset of how these characters don’t have a canon real race assigned to them, therefore they have the “right” to depict them however they please
Which, sorry, the writers had some faith in y'all to use critical thinking to naturally come to (what should be) obvious conclusions. Seriously, I’ve seen y'all depict Kung Fu Panda characters as white people, despite the fact that the story’s location takes place in Ancient China and is unapologetically Chinese (depicted by white people but nevertheless). And don’t even try to bring up how “they can be white if they traveled from a distant country,” because y'all shut that down immediately when Black people bring up that we also traveled. We are not doing this “rules for thee, not for me" type reasoning
Essentially, who you decide gets to be depicted as Black or not can potentially be rooted in racial or other bigoted biases. Again, rather than confront those biases, many get defensive without examining what has led them to hold onto these beliefs. And as we’ve also seen, those of us who do call out this behavior are framed as the aggressor for the crime of disturbing someone’s fun by making them feel bad. Believe it or not, antiblackness is not fun; at least for normal people.
So yeah, I feel motivated to do this more than ever. It’s 2026, y'all need to get over the fact that white isn’t the default.