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NYCB's Georgina Pazcoguin on Her New Initiative to Eliminate Asian Stereotypes in Ballet

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As conversations in the ballet world about race and representation have opened up in the past few years, its most beloved holiday tradition, The Nutcracker, has come under scrutiny as well. Last year New York City Ballet made changes to its second act Chinese Tea variation, removing elements of racial caricature from both the costume and makeup and the choreography.

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Paramount Studio's 2017 live-action adaptation of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell opens to the soundtrack of a haunting chant in Japanese while surreal images of cybernetic body parts coalesce into a naked female form. As the artificial body emerges from its womb-like incubator, the outer encasement peels away to reveal the face of a black-wigged Scarlett Johansson as the film's protagonist, Major - eventually revealed to be the cyberized reincarnation of a young Japanese girl named Motoko Kusanagi.

For defenders of Ghost in the Shell, deft screenwriting enabled Johansson - who is not Japanese - to play the lead role of a Japanese woman. But, for many Asian-Americans, Johansson's casting was just the latest in a long pattern of Hollywood selecting white actors in Asian roles to make Asian characters more palatable for white audiences. Some Asian-American protesters felt the film was an example of yellowface - a term referencing when a white actor dons "Asian-esque" stage makeup and costuming to play an Asian character. Others lambasted the film for how the script adapted its Japanese source material to allow for a white actor to play the role of Ghost in the Shell's iconic Japanese protagonist - a process termed " whitewashing " by its critics.

Keith Chow - founder of pop culture blog The Nerds of Color, which co-organized protests on social media against Johansson's casting in Ghost in the Shell - believes that both yellowface and whitewashing were evident in that film. He sees whitewashing as a contemporary revival of historic yellowface: a practice related to American traditions of blackface and, like blackface, popularized in early American theater and cinema.

"It's all connected," Chow tells Teen Vogue. "It all results in the dehumanization of people of color; and, in the specific case of yellowface, in the dehumanization of Asian people."

One of the earliest documented examples of yellowface is the mid-18th-century production of The Orphan of China, adapted from the 13th-century Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao. Critics of the production later remarked that the show's popularity was due to the production's "Oriental" setting and its liberal use of Chinoiserie (the imitation of Chinese motifs and techniques in Western art) and white actors in yellowface. This yellowface predates the earliest landing of Chinese immigrants on American soil by nearly a century. The Orphan of China was thus not a realistic portrayal of China; rather, it was an elaborate fiction drawn from the audience's collective imagination of Chinese people. Yellowface would soon become an enduring tradition of American theater that would persist as a popular practice for centuries.

The earliest practitioners of yellowface sought to transform white actors into Asian characters using skin-darkening pigments and makeshift contraptions of tape and rubber bands. The look would be combined with an over-the-top performance that included exaggerated accents and other physical tics. Yellowface was considered a bona fide technique mastered by skilled makeup artists, and instructions were published in technical manuals as recently as 1995's The Complete Make-up Artist by Penny Delamar.

The harm of yellowface was described by Robert G. Lee in his book, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture: "Yellowface marks the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental; it sharply defines the Oriental in a racial opposition to whiteness," he writes. "Yellowface exaggerates 'racial' features that have been designated 'Oriental,' such as 'slanted' eyes, overbite, and mustard-yellow skin color."

For the better part of American history, actors would don yellowface to assume Asian identities in theatrical productions while laws (including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Alien Land Laws) effectively barred Asians from integrating into most aspects of American society. Media industry customs and guidelines (such as the Hays Code) restricted the casting of non-whites in any role where they might be perceived as a love interest of a white actor's character; ultimately, this custom often was cited as justification for casting white actors in yellowface. Rather than allow Asian actors to accurately represent themselves, audiences apparently preferred the fictionalized Asian "other" as it was projected through the caricatured yellowface antics of a white actor.

Yellowface proved a wildly successful career move for many white actors and entertainers. Mid-19th-century magicians invented Chinese personas to imbue their acts with an aura of Far Eastern mysticism. For example, despite his Scottish heritage, New York-born William Ellsworth Robinson wore a long black wig and Chinoiserie costume and spoke in nonsense Chinese to lead a lengthy career as the famed stage mystic, Chung Ling Soo.

With the proliferation of moving film into popular culture during the early 20th century, yellowface made the transition from stage to silver screen. Swedish-American actor Warner Oland led a storied career that spanned decades as a highly sought-after yellowface actor. He routinely played Asian characters, including the first live-action depiction of the villainous Dr. Fu Manchu, and the bumbling Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan in 16 full-length films. Other famed actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando, Mickey Rooney, and John Wayne all took a turn at yellowface. In a testament to the mainstream acceptance of yellowface performances, German-American actor Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for her depiction of Chinese peasant O-Lan in 1937's The Good Earth - a role in which Rainier wore a black wig and "facial inlays" to camouflage her Caucasian features, and in which she allegedly was originally set to wear a rubber mask to better achieve the "Chinese look."

Producers of The Good Earth allegedly decided to pursue white actors in yellowface for the film's leads because they apparently deemed American audiences to be unprepared for a feature film starring an ensemble cast led by Asian actors. That racial calculus remains popular dogma for major production studios some 80 years after The Good Earth first opened in theaters: in a YouTube video explaining the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Hollywood screenwriter Max Landis responded to critics who were "not understanding [of] how the industry works. "

Although Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing population of Americans, they remain seriously underrepresented in popular American entertainment. In a recent University of Southern California study, researchers found that only 4.4% of speaking characters are Asian in popular American film. Meanwhile, about 1% of Academy Award nominations for acting have gone to Asian or Asian-American actors, HuffPost reports. That same pattern holds true for American television: according to scholar Nancy Wang Yuen, author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, nearly two-thirds of broadcast television shows - including those set in cities with sizable Asian-American populations, like New York City - lack any regular Asian-American characters whatsoever, she tells Teen Vogue.

While the use of yellowface still occurs in contemporary film, use of stage makeup to achieve yellowface is rare and has generally fallen out of favor. Yet, white actors continue to be cast in roles originally conceived to be Asian or Asian-American; now, however, that feat is accomplished through script rewrites and casting choices rather than stage makeup. Recent examples include , , Annihilation, , and live-action adaptations of popular Japanese animated titles including Ghost in the Shell, , and Dragonball: Evolution.

"It's part of the same lineage," Yuen says. "Whitewashing is a descendant of the original yellowface. It's all part of the same story in American media: the underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and usurping of significance of Asians by white actors."

"Why is the erasure of Asians still an acceptable practice in Hollywood?" asks Chow in a 2016 opinion piece for The New York Times. This question captures the central concern expressed by Asian-Americans who have organized numerous protests against whitewashing and yellowface.

One of the earliest such protests was in 1990, when the musical Miss Saigon was set to open on Broadway. Members of its original London cast were slated to reprise their roles for the American production - including white actor Jonathan Pryce, who had worn heavy-lidded eye prosthetics and bronzer to play the biracial French-Vietnamese character, The Engineer, for the show's London performances. Meanwhile, Asian actors were reportedly not "seriously considered" for the part on Broadway.

Outraged Asian-American activists organized a national campaign to criticize yellowface in Miss Saigon, as well as the show's portrayal of villainous Asian men and passive, self-sacrificing Asian women as ancillary to the heroic narrative of white men. That grassroots protest led to the Actors' Equity Association declaring that it could not "appear to condone the casting of a Caucasian actor in the role of a Eurasian" and held a vote to prevent Pryce from taking the role. In response, producers briefly canceled the production until the AEA reversed its decision. Miss Saigon went on to enjoy a 10-year run on Broadway and a brief revival in London in 2014, and Pryce received a Tony Award for his performance. (In a recent interview, Pryce seemingly expressed no regret for taking the role.)

"It is the height of white privilege to think a white person is better equipped to play an Asian character than an Asian person," actor Sun Mee Chomet tells Teen Vogue, who is primarily angered by the stereotypical and misogynistic portrayals of Asian women in Miss Saigon. " Miss Saigon reinforces and reaffirms all of the racial, gendered Orientalist stereotypes that box Asian-Americans in," agrees poet Bao Phi. Chomet and Phi joined several Asian-Americans to campaign against a planned production of Miss Saigon at Minneapolis's Ordway Theater in 2013. Across the country, similar protests have also occurred against productions of The Mikado, which routinely casts white actors in its Japanese roles.

Marissa Lee, who co-founded the group Racebending and led a national campaign against whitewashing in the 2010 film The Last Airbender, cites the 1990 Miss Saigon protests as her inspiration. "We built off of the Miss Saigon campaign and looked at how they did it," Lee recalls. Lee wanted to use the controversy around The Last Airbender to revive the conversation around the racial implications of Hollywood casting decisions. "It's impossible to look at whitewashing without considering it in the context of employment discrimination," Lee says. She notes that there has been an exodus of Asian actors going to Asia because they cannot find work in Hollywood, which only compounds the invisibility of Asians in American media.

Racebending was one of the earliest campaigns to bring the conversation around racial diversity in Hollywood to the digital sphere. Since then, Asian-Americans have continued to use social media to target whitewashing and Asian underrepresentation in Hollywood - including through trending hashtags such as #StarringJohnCho and #SeeAsAmStar (both created by Twitter user William Yu), #WhiteWashedOut (co-created by Chow), and in viral parody videos, such as those created by Tow-Arboleda Films. Thanks to efforts like these, "it's looking more like a bad career move for white actors to participate in whitewashing," says Lee, citing actor Ed Skrein's recent decision to back out of playing a Japanese-American character in the Hellboy reboot.

"So long as whitewashing continues to occur, we need to be conscious of whose stories are being marginalized and whose stories are not being told in mainstream media," cautions Yuen. Indeed, campaigns against Hollywood whitewashing and yellowface have brought fresh awareness to issues of diversity in American media; more tangibly, they have also inspired a proliferation of self-published Asian-American media.

"We're in the middle of a renaissance in Asian-American film and theater," Chomet says. She argues that Asian-American actors need not settle for taking background roles in whitewashed productions that perpetuate stereotypes about Asians. "We need to consider the impact of when media uses damaging stereotypes and centers the white gaze, and we have a responsibility to not participate in them.

"Asian-Americans are creating so many of our own opportunities by writing our own stories right now. Our energy is best used in the creation of our own stories and demanding a permanent seat at the creative table," she says. "We have the power to render racist representations of ourselves as obsolete."

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Yellowface, Whitewashing, and the History of White People Playing Asian Characters

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Paramount Studio's 2017 live-action adaptation of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell opens to the soundtrack of a haunting chant in Japanese while surreal images of cybernetic body parts coalesce into a naked female form.

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Yellowface: What it is, why it's bad...

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Yellowface? We're not talking about the David Henry Hwang play, of course. Despite its roots in racist practices of the 19th Century, Yellowface still pops up regularly on North American and British theater stages, often wallowing in stereotypes and caricature.

Yellowface is more prevalent than many think, and even honored, in a way; there are more white actresses who have won Oscars playing Asian characters (Best Actress Awards for Luise Raines, The Good Earth and Linda Hunt, The Year of Living Dangerously) than there are Asian actresses who've won playing Asian characters (Best Supporting Actress for Miyoshi Umeki, Sayonara).

Some examples of Yellowface on film:

And plenty of examples of Yellowface on stage:

Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon (London premiere) 1989, Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society's (2014), Sarah Bowden, Jerome Robbins' Broadway (2018)

CAATA wants modern theater to progress from this practice, moving into the 21st Century where Asian artists can stand on an equal footing, whether it's on a stage for a historically white institution or a stage run by and for Asian American Artists. We've assembled information to attack the issue of Yelloface from an array of angles: what it is, why it's bad, and case studies and examples of (very!) recent occurrences of Yellowface on stage. We've also developed a checklist of action steps to take when you spot an instance of Yellowface.

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Yellowface: What it is, why it's bad, and action steps to fight it

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Yellowface? We're not talking about the David Henry Hwang play, of course. Despite its roots in racist practices of the 19th Century, Yellowface still pops up regularly on North American and British theater stages, often wallowing in stereotypes and caricature.

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Casting White People in Asian Roles

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On an unusually empty street in New York City, a single cab drops off a woman clad in diamonds and a Givenchy dress in front of Tiffany's & Co. As she casually gazes up, the iconic opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's is underway. But it's not long before many viewers are jolted out of the film's transporting charm with the introduction of Mr. Yunioshi, a bucktoothed man with a loud, thick Asian accent played by Mickey Rooney.

Rooney's portrayal of Yunioshi has come to epitomize ethnic stereotypes and often prompts protests whenever the film is screened. But, at the time of the classic film's release in 1961, Hollywood already had a long history of casting white actors in Asian roles-a tradition known as "yellowface."

Yellowface dates to early forms of minstrelsy when ethnic white actors would darken their faces and use prosthetics and costumes to appear Asian. The term itself came from similar acts of blackface that were popular, when white actors colored their skin to caricature black people and culture.

"In minstrelsy, that was part of the performance. Putting on a costume, and everyone knew you were in a costume, and then using that yellowface performance to ridicule or villainize Asians in a way that was entertaining for its audience," says Nancy Wang Yuen, Associate Professor at Biola University and author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.

One of the earliest known performances of American yellowface comes from the theatrical show, An Orphan of China, performed in 1767 and based on a play by Voltaire. This early exposure of dramatized Asian culture would persist for centuries, particularly in film.

Among the first appearances of yellowface in film was in a work by D.W. Griffith, best known for The Birth of a Nation, a racially-charged epic featuring characters in blackface that became so popular it reignited the Klan. Before that film, Griffith targeted Asians through yellowface in his 1910 short, The Chink at Golden Gulch.

"Like a lot of Griffith's films at that period it was about a white woman in jeopardy and peril, and a white man coming to save them," says Dr. Daniel Bernardi, author of Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness.

Yellowface characters would persist through the 1930s, as contrarian and villainous characters in The Mask of Fu Manchu, or in meek and withdrawn roles as in Madam Butterfly. Even as Asian characters became more complex in the 1940s and 50s, the roles were still played by white actors, like Katherine Hepburn in the 1944 drama, Dragon Seed.

Why not cast ethnically Asian people in Asian roles? One reason was the Hays Code, an internal set of guidelines that major studios enforced before films could be distributed from 1930 to 1968. The code included an array of requirements that were indicative of society in America, including the prohibition of any sexual encounter between actors of different races. With that restriction, hiring an Asian person as a lead actor in a film would rule out that character having any sexual relations with another unless they were Asian as well.

This code could help explain why the 1937 film The Good Earth featured two white actors in the lead roles as Chinese farmers - Luise Rainer would become the first actor to win an Academy Award for a role in yellowface for her performance in the film.

Casting white actors was also part of a crude box office calculation. Jenn Fang, founder of the Asian-American blog Reappropriate, explains that since white actors were better-known and seen as more relatable to audiences, producers figured featuring them would generate more ticket sales. When white actor Warner Oland replaced Asian lead actors in the Charlie Chan films of the 1930s, the films skyrocketed to success, making it hard to argue with the results.

Until the mid to late-2000s, there was also no public outcry over yellowface roles, according to Fang. Actors saw chances to play different ethnicities as a challenge to be taken on and show their versatility, offensive or not. That creative liberty is something that Bernardi explains should be examined thoroughly.

"You cannot deny the history of yellowface being patently and overtly racist and painful to a host of people," says Bernardi. "And actors need to act. And that if we start drawing strict racial lines when it comes to casting, we only redefine the problem that exists now."

Instances of blatant yellowface have become scarcer in recent years, although it has been replaced with another strategy-altering lead characters to allow for white leads without the use of prosthetics and makeup. Whitewashing continues to be common, as in the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the 2017 film, Ghost in a Shell, which was based on a series made up entirely of Japanese characters.

(Credit: Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros Pictures/Everett)

The long history of erasing Asian actors in films makes the release of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, which features an all-Asian cast, that much more significant. The film marks the first time that Hollywood has produced a movie with an all-Asian cast since the critically-acclaimed film, The Joy Luck Club, was released 25 years earlier. And with growing appetite for diverse representation in media, Crazy Rich Asians could represent just the beginning.

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Casting White People in Asian Roles Goes Back Centuries

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On an unusually empty street in New York City, a single cab drops off a woman clad in diamonds and a Givenchy dress in front of Tiffany's & Co. As she casually gazes up, the iconic opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's is underway.

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Silk Road Rising Theater Arts Programming in Schools 

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Silk Road Rising Theater Arts Programming in Schools 

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EPIC (Empathic Playwriting Intensive Course) is Silk Road Rising's arts-learning program. Through dramatic writing, students explore their world and themselves. Student plays are then read aloud by professional actors!

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Circa Pintig: Filipino American Theater Company in Chicago

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Our Perspective: Asian American Play Readings The Asian Pacific American (APA) population is seriously under represented on stage. "Our Perspective: Asian American Play Readings" is a staged play...

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Stir Friday Night: Asian American Comedy Troupe

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Stir Friday Night: Asian American Comedy Troupe

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Stir-Friday Night! is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit theater company that was founded in 1995. Based in Chicago, Illinois, we are one of the nation's premier Asian-American comedy troupes. Having worked with such renowned companies such as The Second City and iO (formerly known as Improv Olympic), Stir-Friday Night! has become a fixture in Chicago's comedy scene.

As an ensemble of Asian-American actors/writers, we travel the nation performing improv and sketch shows that educate all audiences, from an Asian- American perspective. Our diverse cast keeps audiences laughing while delivering messages with which they can identify.

Our alumni include Danny Pudi from Community, and Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead. We are Asian. We do comedy.

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Stir-Friday Night! is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit theater company that was founded in 1995. Based in Chicago, Illinois, we are one of the nation's premier Asian-American comedy troupes. Having worked with such renowned companies such as The Second City and iO (formerly known as Improv Olympic), Stir-Friday Night!

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Dwight Okita: Local writer/playwright whose work has focused on Japanese American incarceration and identity

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Dwight Okita: Local writer/playwright whose work has focused on Japanese American incarceration and identity

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"In Response to Executive Order 9066" by Dwight Okita - Manzanar National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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I am a fourteen-year-old girl with bad spelling and a messy room. If it helps any, I will tell you I have always felt funny using chopsticks and my favorite food is hot dogs. My best friend is a white girl named Denise- we look at boys together.

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Asian American International Film Festival

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Asian American International Film Festival

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2018 Asian American International Film Festival

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home the first and longest running film festival for asian americans!

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2018 Asian American International Film Festival

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The first and longest running film festival for Asian Americans!

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The Orange Story: film and digital history project focused on Japanese American incarceration

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The Orange Story: film and digital history project focused on Japanese American incarceration

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In the first chapter of the movie, In the first chapter of the movie, Koji faces the reality that he will have to leave the life he has worked hard to build. What led up to this moment? Explore the climate of fear and racism through the archival images, documents, oral histories, and videos below.

"The wartime abuse of Japanese Americans . . . was merely a link in a chain of racism that stretched back to the earliest contacts between Asians and whites on American soil." Roger Daniels, historian

Witness how discrimination - before and after Pearl Harbor - contributed to the forced removal of Japanese Americans. (Note: Some primary sources contain offensive racial epithets, and are included here solely for historical accuracy and context.)

"I no longer felt that I'm an equal American." Akiko Kurose, a Japanese American born in Seattle

Listen to Japanese Americans explain how wartime hysteria and prejudice impacted their lives.

Or read along as Akiko Kurose, Roy Ebihara, and Shigeko Sese Uno share their memories.

Or read along as Akiko Kurose, Roy Ebihara, and Shigeko Sese Uno share their memories of how prejudice affected their lives.

"I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast . . . . Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it . . . . Let us have no patience with anyone whose veins carry his blood . . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them." Henry McLemore, a Hearst syndicated columnist, January, 1942

Watch the U.S. government defend Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans, violating their citizenship rights.

Excerpt from "Japanese Relocation," a newsreel produced by the U.S. Office of War Information and narrated by Milton S. Eisenhower, Director of the War Relocation Authority.

Excerpt from "Japanese Relocation," a newsreel produced by the U.S. Office of War Information, and narrated by Milton S. Eisenhower, Director of the War Relocation Authority.

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In the first chapter of the movie, In the first chapter of the movie, Koji faces the reality that he will have to leave the life he has worked hard to build. What led up to this moment? Explore the climate of fear and racism through the archival images, documents, oral histories, and videos below.