By Rachel Krueger
A white supremacist group called The Council of Conservative Citizens is outraged that Marvel has cast Idris Elba as Heimdall in Thor, because he is foxy. I mean, black. They probably don’t appreciate that foxy black men exist in the world, but it is definitely the blackness that they are pissed about. “It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves,” they complain. Which, ok. That is a boringly awful thing to say. We are all appalled by this, AND righteously indignant, AND genuinely furious. But surprised? They are white supremacists. Being dirty racists that nobody likes is sort of their job, and it is our job to not like them and to try to make them stop being a thing. Their being dirty racists isn’t exactly Extry! Extry! news.
The TV Guide, on the other hand? Come on, TV Guide. You were my hockey-schedule-checker in the days before the internets, my lazy morning reading once I was done with the cereal box. Why you gotta be such sneaky secret bigots?
Padma Lakshmi, Indian-born and freakishly attractive, appeared on the cover of TV Guide this month looking suspiciously Caucasian. I have no problem with Caucasians. They can be a very pretty people, and to be honest Padma makes a lovely white woman. But Padma: Original Sauce is FAR, FAR LOVELIER, and lacks that distinctive ping of whitewash, with its undertones of colonial imperialism.
Clearly the white supremacists are bad guys, but they’re so overtly jackasserish that all the sane ones shake our heads. Making The Padma into a vampire of her former self, however, is insidious. It simultaneously deprives us of a (rare) Non-White-Person-On-A-Magazine-That-Does-Not-Have-To-Do-With-Sports and reinforces the long-held believe that we only like to look at white people . You need to sit in the corner, TV Guide, and think about what you’ve done.
Frankly, casting a non-white person in the role of a Scandinavian deity, especially one known as the ‘white one’ ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimdall ) is an interesting choice, and one which will predictably meet with resistance by those who regard the pantheon as cultural property (imagine the response to a white actor cast in the role of an African deity). That the white god should be made up white could have to do with going for the traditional appearance of the deity. Though you could argue that if they’re going to cast against type, why not go all the way?