Racebending
Term coined in 2009 to protest race-based casting.
Racebending is the practice of casting actors in live-action films to play a character of a different race. The term was coined in 2009 as a protest against the casting decisions for the live-action film adaptation of the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, where characters coded as East Asian and Inuit were played by actors of European descent. The protest began on a LiveJournal forum with a letter-writing campaign called 'Saving the World with Postage,' and later evolved into the advocacy group and website Racebending, borrowing the concept of manipulating elements from the Avatar universe.
Quick Facts
- Origin
- 2009, in response to The Last Airbender casting
- Associated organization
- Racebending.com
- Related concepts
- Whitewashing
- implicit bias
- breakdowns
Facts from the source article.
Background
The term racebending emerged from a LiveJournal-based protest against the 2010 film The Last Airbender, where white actors were cast as Aang, Katara, and Sokka, characters originally coded as East Asian and Inuit. The protest initially involved inundating Paramount with mail, but the cast went unaltered. The protest leaders then founded the advocacy group Racebending, playfully borrowing the concept of bending elements from the Avatar universe. The term has since been used to describe similar casting controversies.
More in Lore & History
Elsewhere in Avatar The Last Airbender
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