"Blackwashing" discourse in the online art world
How "artistic license" in fanmade art pieces became political & a bully stick
EDIT (1 MARCH 2022, 8:54am GMT+8): I’ve updated the piece to correct some misinformation/fix broken links. I previously said that Othello (1995) was an example of Branagh’s “colour-blind casting”, but I’ve been told that Othello was black (or at least not white) in the original play since he was dubbed “The Moor of Venice”, not to mention Othello was released after Much Ado About Nothing (1993). Sorry about that!
If you’ve been in the world of anime/digital art, you might have come across art pieces like these:
You might be looking at these and be thinking to yourself: “What is so significant about these pieces?” Well, here are the actual characters for comparison:
You notice something?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is an example of the strange phenomenon that is known as “blackwashing”, or the practice of drawing (or even just editing) a non-black character as black instead.
If you’re a normie or not plugged into the discourse, you might be wondering: why the hell are people doing this? And why are they drawing these characters in such a specific way and what purpose does it serve?
“Race-bending” has certainly been done in fiction before, especially when it comes to adaptations of certain works from the books/comics to the screen.
A notable example in pop culture is Nick Fury from the MCU. In the mainline Marvel Comics, Nick Fury was historically portrayed as a white man with brown hair and an eyepatch.
The decision to make Nick Fury not just a black man, but specifically Samuel L. Jackson, comes from the Marvel Ultimate series of comics. This series itself is a re-imagining of many of Marvel’s mainline heroes, including Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. The decision to make Nick Fury welll…literally Samuel L. Jackson appears to have done on the whim of the writers, since he apparently was first drawn as being not too dissimilar from the then-mainstream Marvel version, but became Samuel L. Jackson by his next appearance.
As a result, when it came to time to create the MCU, they gravitated towards this idea because Jackson was a bankable actor. Which proved to be a popular decision, since most depictions of Nick Fury now borrow from this look and most people get the shock of their lives when they find out that Nick Fury was actually a white man in the old comics.
Another notable example of a “race-lift” comes from Kenneth Branagh’s adaption of “Much Ado About Nothing” (1993), where he cast Denzel Washington to play Don Pedro, the Prince of Aragon.
Washington’s performance was well-received by audiences and made Branagh committed to the principle of “colour-blind casting” and this was notably done years later in the MCU when Branagh directed the first Thor movie & cast Idris Elba to play Heimdall.
The same happens in the world of fanart. Obviously, we have the phenomenon of “gijinkas”, which is taking a nonhuman/non-humanoid character like a Pokemon or a Transformer, and drawing them as a human. Because these artists are already taking creative license by drawing a non-human character as a human, some of them decided that they would take it a step further and have extremely liberal re-interpretations of these characters.
I came across a series on DeviantArt where the artist had redrawn characters from the 1990s Transformers: Beast Wars as humans, but took a lot of creative license when re-conceptualising them. Notably, this artist changed the genders of many characters, as the cast was majority male in the original show except a token female for each of the two factions. In this new version, some of the male characters became female and…well, looked radically different from what some would imagine the characters to look like.
For example, within the antagonist faction of the Predacons, three of the characters became female upon becoming human: the mad scientist Tarantulas (who sounds like a creepy old man in the original cartoon) somehow turned into a black woman with a buzzcut, the comic relief chew toy Waspinator became a long-haired brunette romantically involved with the Starscream ripoff Terrorsaur and lastly, the crazy loyal minion Inferno (who had a habit of calling head honcho Megatron his “queen”) became a Slavic Amazoness.
I bring this up because this series was dated back to 2004, meaning the practice of taking liberal interpretations of characters in fanart is nothing new. But this seems to have been done in good fun and from the author’s imagination, and not something deliberate (at least from what I could tell).
And of course, there were people who got mad at these changes, that’s not really a question. Comic book fans were notoriously quite purist of on-screen depictions of their beloved characters, as evidenced by Batman fans getting mad when Michael Keaton was cast to play the Dark Knight in Batman (1989). However, most people would learn to move on from their differing opinions; it never really turned into a moral crusade with politically heavy subjects.
In essence, people back then took creative license with works, both in official and unofficial capacities, and generally did it because it was a fun idea. And while people did get upset about it sometimes, people kinda knew that this was just a personal opinion and often moved on. Nobody took it seriously as a political statement, or at least, interpreted it as part of the larger “colour blind” ideal that was the norm for liberal politics for decades.
Nowadays, the climate of changing a character is different. It’s practically endemic at this point to the point it’s a culture in and of itself, especially within the context of fanworks. No longer is it rooted in a sense of “having fun” or “taking creative liberties” or even some sense of “colour-blind casting.” Instead, these changes seem to be very deliberate and rooted in the principal belief that because certain minorities are “underrepresented” in various media works, people are morally obligated to change the traits of certain characters in order to make groups “feel represented”. Or, in the case of fanart, artists of certain minorities should be allowed to redraw certain characters as having their own “representation”, like re-drawing a Japanese or white character as black because they’re “not enough black people represented in media.”
Other variations of the phenomenon exist as well, albeit not being officially named. A common variant of blackwashing is what I can only describe as “vitiligo-washing”, where they redraw a character as not just a racial minority, but also having vitiligo, a skin condition where blotches of skin to gradually lose their pigment. It’s actually very rare and affects only 1% of the global population, but became fetish material for a lot of Tumblr artists.
One of the other common variants is “queerwashing”, where a character who is either canonically heterosexual and “cis” or simply not explicitly stated to be LGBT is redrawn to be that way. Usually, this is simply expressed through slapping one of the numerous microsexuality flags onto a character or the artist just stating that the character is insert sexual minority here.
However, other artists choose a more…explicit approach to showing that the character is LGBT.
This talk of blackwashing in art is also deeply tied to the discourse of its “forbidden” opposite: whitewashing.
In theory, whitewashing refers to the practice of changing a black character to be white instead. This doesn’t actually happen a lot online, save a few obvious troll attempts by 4Chan to rile up Tumblr.
However, as what happens on the Internet, this definition has undergone a game of telephone and has now been redefined to “drawing a character with dark skin a few shades too light.”
Supposedly, drawing a black character outside the accepted range of skin tones “erases” black people, particularly those with very dark skin. “Erasure” here does not mean literal Thanos-snapping out of existence, but rather, not elevating them & giving priority instead to those who are lighter-skinned (and therefore, more “acceptable” to white people, or at least that’s why I think is their internal logic). As a result, many guides have appeared online teaching artists how to draw black people the “correct” way.
Naturally, variants of “whitewashing” also exist: straight-washing, skinny-washing etc. They follow the same basic internal logic in the sense that drawing a character who is of the “sacred minority class” in a way that skews from the party line is seen as “erasure” and therefore a grave moral crime. For some of these people, it prompts them to “punish” these individuals who have been perceived to cross the line.
Perhaps one of the most infamous examples of this moral policing comes from the story of Zammii, a Tumblr artist who was piled-on for drawing a chubby character, Rose Quartz, as slim in her art piece. The pile-ons apparently got so bad that Zammii was not only forced to delete the offending post, but attempted to commit suicide due to the constant pile-ons. Luckily, she was saved in the nick of time and recovered in the hospital, but the fact that she was almost bullied into ending her life is frankly horrifying.
Zammii is unfortunately not the first artist who has been subject to such horrible treatment. If you are subscribed to fandom news channel Hero Hei, these stories are practically a dime a dozen and happen every few months. They generally follow the same pattern: a non-English speaking digital artist (usually Japanese) posts fanart, the social justice people in English fandoms get mad, harass the artists and then drive them off the platform. Rinse, wash, repeat.
The “blackwashing” discourse in fanart circles is…a terrible microcosm to say the least and there are many things to parse through within them.
Let’s start with the cringe art. Yes, I am turned off by most of them (which was probably the hardest part of writing this piece), but I think that was the intent. These art pieces are deliberate countercultural statements and a way for artists to signal their moral politics. By re-drawing a non-black, slim character as black and fat, they show that they are committed to the progressive orthodoxy because they are willing to draw a character who is like that. The “shock value” of the art piece has the added benefit of validating the artist’s positions, because they would either be praised for being “inclusive” or feed into their victim complex when their critics are angered by these pieces (which they can twist into being bullied by a bigot). I also wouldn’t be shocked if this is also fetish fuel for some artists as well, especially when it comes to drawing characters as either visibly trans or morbidly obese.
The second is the moral arbitrariness of these “rules” dictating how you should draw or re-interpret characters. There seems to be some level of hypocrisy on who can and cannot re-interpret characters in fanart, as well what is considered “appropriate”. It’s fine if a “black, fat and trans” artist redraws Sailor Moon (a Japanese character, but admittedly looks white with her blonde hair and blue eyes) as black, fat and visibly trans, but it’s not okay when a Japanese artist (who doesn’t speak English) draws the Hispanic characters from the movie Encanto a shade too light, even if the artist is using a pastel palette.
And of course, there’s the elephant in the room that is the fact that many “diversity-washing” artists have frankly borderline offensive depictions of minorities in their art pieces. Look at the picture I put at the start of the post. They look like blackface with their duck lips (which were cleverly not shaded pink) & lack of a nose! This is more offensive than characters people take issue with nowadays as being “whitewashed”. The fact that some art pieces with the style seen in the first two pictures are acceptable sometimes but not with others really highlights how morally arbitrary most of these “guidelines” really are as well.
Speaking of style, the other issue that crops up is the seeming lack of creativity as a result of these rules. You might have heard artists complain about “a Tumblr art style” or “CalArts style” that has become the common style for many of these artists, which is often panned for being uncreative, bland and even downright offensive.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the fact that a lot of the artists have the same art style because they would rather stick to something that was “safe” and follow the same template as everyone else, then do their own style and potentially get cancelled for being offensive.
I also noticed that some of these “diversity-washing” artists don’t even draw their own artwork to begin with and just edit pre-existing screenshots from the show that they’re drawing from, or (even worse) other fan-artists’ work to make their own work! Leaving aside that is potentially a form of plagirism, it is just uncreative. If these people are so concerned about the lack of representation in media, why don’t they just create their own work, with their own set of diverse characters? Yes, I would probably find it cringey as hell, but I admit that I must give credit to a show for being an original concept (High Guardian Spice), rather than a fanmade ripoff of something else (I’m lookin at you, She-Ra reboot).
The most devastating effect of the discourse, however, is on artists themselves. With these kind of people colonising platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and DeviantArt, digital artists have to constantly watch their backs while also attempting to engage with other artists in order to grow their platforms. Not even the language barrier would protect them, since people are willing to harass foreign artists over alleged “whitewashing”, even if these people do not speak much English and come from completely different cultural standards/backgrounds.
Delving into my personal life for a bit, I myself am a digital artist. I’ve been doing digital art since 2017, but I’ve been drawing since I was at least 4 years old. I don’t intend to pursue this as my career for practical reasons, but I am happy that I have the Internet and drawing programmes as an outlet for my creative pursuits. However, I am very unwilling to share my art, save individuals who know me IRL (my friends and family) or select individuals I’ve learnt to trust online. The reasons are very simple: (a) I do this for fun and my art definitely doesn’t look professional by any means (in fact it looks quite amateur) and (b) I rather not risk being dogpiled for an art piece that someone somehow thought was offensive in some way.
I should end this by clarifying something that might not be obvious, but I am not against artistic re-interpretations. Yes, I think diversity-washing is cringe, but I don’t want these artists to be run off their platforms.
My bigger point is that the online art community has become poisoned by social justice ideology. In theory, the Internet could be a potential equaliser for many artists who might not be able to break into the business through traditional methods and allow them to gain a niche audience who will support their work. However, because current Internet fandom culture is basically run by cyberbullies disguised as moral crusaders, a lot of artists are either too afraid to start a platform online or have been completely run off from these platforms by the mob of bullies. And while there are certainly platforms for people to post their art without the need to be political (like Pixiv and ArtStation), they have their own barriers to entry and it takes a lot longer to grow there.
Ultimately, I can only hope that this culture dies down with the rest of the culture war, because this is not how we encourage creativity.