Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Who's The Wokest of Them All?
Disney's casting of Rachel Zegler as Snow White in the upcoming live-action remake of the classic animated film betrays another double standard in Hollywood.
"How I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony."
We’ve all been lectured about rampant whitewashing in Hollywood with relatively few examples to show for it -- at least in recent years. While this may be true for films in decades past, lack of representation isn’t an issue one can really speak nowadays without diverging from the truth.
Despite all that is said of whitewashing, there is little to no commentary on the unrestrained blackwashing of every possible character that studios can get away with especially in the age of George Floyd and woke capital. This happens even in cases where there is no justifiable reason to race swap a character, an example being the recent casting of Black actress Jodie Turner-Smith for the role of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, an English royal, who was undoubtedly white.
Enter the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s first fully animated feature film which first screened in 1937 and inspired by Snow White by German authors the brothers Grimm, published in 1812
The premise of the Disney movie and original tale, with some slight variation for the sake of being child-friendly, revolves around a queen who gives birth to a daughter with skin fair as snow, lips red as blood/the rose, and hair black as ebony, but dies in childbirth, leaving the King to marry once more. He marries the Evil Queen, the story’s primary antagonist, who despises the fairest of the land, Snow White.
Unable to accurately represent Snow White and its German origins, Disney has seen fit to cast a Latina actress in the role -- an inflammatory Twitter activist -- to no doubt garner rage-views as well as approval of the loud and very vocal crowd of young racial justice activists.
The fact that Disney would cast a toxic Twitter princess into the starring role of a movie featuring one of the most gentle characters in the company’s 97-year history of children’s fairy tale classics is nothing short of ironic.
It’s also very telling that the actress herself, Rachel Zegler, boasts that she has no intentions of bleaching her skin for the role. She knows full well that she is aesthetically ill-fitting for the role of a character described with “skin as white as snow.”
You’ve seen actors and actresses play roles outside of the orthodox descriptions of their characters, but Disney’s latest effort is a blatant blackwash of a character whose most memorable distinguishing attribute is her appearance. These very elements are core to the story, and central to the character of Snow White, who is hated and pursued by a jealous Evil Queen who wants to be the “fairest of the land.”
Furthermore, even if we were to push aside the aesthetic differences between the actress and the character, Disney’s double standards are exposed in choosing an actress best known for her political outbursts and toxic behavior on social media.
Over the last few years, Rachel Zegler engaged in numerous cancel campaigns against other actors and luminaries in the entertainment industry, namely Gina Carano, who had a starring role in Disney’s The Mandalorian.
Carano became the target of online activists after she refused to partake in wokeness after activists demanded that she show fealty by identifying herself with “she/her” pronouns in her Twitter bio. She refused. Instead, she put “beep/boop/beep” in her bio and told people to stop taking everything so seriously. The resulting explosion of anger prompted cries for Carano’s dismissal from The Mandalorian, and Zegler joined the fray.
“Do not make fun of pronouns,” Zegler wrote. “They are not a joke! Pronouns are validating! Pronouns are cool! Put pronouns in your bio! I wear my pronouns on a button sometimes! It’s a good thing! Bye!” This outburst led activists to harass Carano further, informing her of her sin and demanding that she find absolution in the so-called “movement.”
The irony here lies in Disney’s termination of Gina Carano over political differences, having even subjected the actress to some form of transgender sensitivity training over the pronoun issue -- and later finding cause to fire her for sharing a meme on Instagram that compared the persecution of conservatives in America to Nazi oppression. If being political on social media was all it took to terminate Carano, why then have they actively sought out an actress who is only known for her explosive social justice diatribes on Twitter? Why not hire an actress who is similar to Snow White in both demeanor, as well as personality, to fit the role of a Disney princess?
A Disney princess is more than just the character portrayed on screen -- it is a responsibility for the actress who fills the role to be a role model to young girls. Zegler herself evidently realizes this, where in an old post dating to 2019 she said that girls in movie theaters deserved to see themselves represented on screen.
"How I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony."
We’ve all been lectured about rampant whitewashing in Hollywood with relatively few examples to show for it -- at least in recent years. While this may be true for film in the 1950s, lack of representation isn’t an issue one can really speak nowadays without diverging from the truth.
Despite all that is said of whitewashing, there is little to no commentary on the unrestrained blackwashing of every possible character that studios can get away with especially in the age of George Floyd and woke capital. This happens even in cases where there is no justifiable reason to race swap a character, an example being the recent casting of Black actress Jodie Turner-Smith for the role of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, an English royal, who was undoubtedly white.
Enter the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s first fully animated feature film which first screened in 1937 and inspired by Snow White by German authors the brothers Grimm, published in 1812
The premise of the Disney movie and original tale, with some slight variation for the sake of being child-friendly, revolves around a queen who gives birth to a daughter with skin fair as snow, lips red as blood/the rose, and hair black as ebony, but dies in childbirth, leaving the King to marry once more. He marries the Evil Queen, the story’s primary antagonist, who despises the fairest of the land, Snow White.
Unable to accurately represent Snow White and its German origins, Disney has seen fit to cast a Latina actress in the role -- an inflammatory Twitter activist -- to no doubt garner rage-views as well as approval of the loud and very vocal crowd of young racial justice activists.
The fact that Disney would cast a toxic Twitter princess into the starring role of a movie featuring one of the most gentle characters in the company’s 97-year history of children’s fairy tale classics is nothing short of ironic.
It’s also very telling that the actress herself, Rachel Zegler, boasts that she has no intentions of bleaching her skin for the role. She knows full well that she is aesthetically ill-fitting for the role of a character described with “skin as white as snow.”
You’ve seen actors and actresses play roles outside of the orthodox descriptions of their characters, but Disney’s latest effort is a blatant blackwash of a character whose most memorable distinguishing attribute is her appearance. These very elements are core to the story, and central to the character of Snow White, who is hated and pursued by a jealous Evil Queen who wants to be the “fairest of the land.”
Furthermore, even if we were to push aside the aesthetic differences between the actress and the character, Disney’s double standards are exposed in choosing an actress best known for her political outbursts and toxic behavior on social media.
Over the last few years, Rachel Zegler engaged in numerous cancel campaigns against other actors and luminaries in the entertainment industry, namely Gina Carano, who had a starring role in Disney’s The Mandalorian.
Carano became the target of online activists after she refused to partake in wokeness after activists demanded that she show fealty by identifying herself with “she/her” pronouns in her Twitter bio. She refused. Instead, she put “beep/boop/beep” in her bio and told people to stop taking everything so seriously. The resulting explosion of anger prompted cries for Carano’s dismissal from The Mandalorian, and Zegler joined the fray.
“Do not make fun of pronouns,” Zegler wrote. “They are not a joke! Pronouns are validating! Pronouns are cool! Put pronouns in your bio! I wear my pronouns on a button sometimes! It’s a good thing! Bye!” This outburst led activists to harass Carano further, informing her of her sin and demanding that she find absolution in the so-called “movement.”
The irony here lies in Disney’s termination of Gina Carano over political differences, having even subjected the actress to some form of transgender sensitivity training over the pronoun issue -- and later finding cause to fire her for sharing a meme on Instagram that compared the persecution of conservatives in America to Nazi oppression. If being political on social media was all it took to terminate Carano, why then have they actively sought out an actress who is only known for her explosive social justice diatribes on Twitter? Why not hire an actress who is similar to Snow White in both demeanor, as well as personality, to fit the role of a Disney princess?
A Disney princess is more than just the character portrayed on screen -- it is a responsibility for the actress who fills the role to be a role model to young girls. Zegler herself evidently realizes this, where in an old post dating to 2019 she said that girls in movie theaters deserved to see themselves represented on screen.