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Racebending


Racebending is a term used to describe a process where a character's perceived race or ethnicity is changed in a narrative by an adapter as it is created in a new media form. The term was coined by one of the founders of the website Racebending.com, which was created to protest the casting of white actors in the 2010 film The Last Airbender, where the originating TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender featured characters of East Asian appearance. The term "racebending" was derived from Avatar characters' ability to manipulate or "bend" the classical elements of water, earth, fire, and air. Assistant Professor Kristen J. Warner wrote that the term has "many definitions and contexts", such as being the industrial practice of color-blind casting or writing fan fiction, the latter being "when writers change the race and cultural specificity of central characters or pull a secondary character of color from the margins, transforming her into the central protagonist."

In 2010, Racebending.com and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) urged boycotts of The Last Airbender as well as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time due to their practices of racebending. Prince of Persia was criticized for casting white actors for the principal cast instead of actors of Iranian or Middle Eastern descent.

Fan activism over The Last Airbender led to the term becoming prevalent and becoming the name of the activist movement. Activists used the term interchangeably with "whitewashing" to describe white actors being cast as non-white characters in adaptations of media.Paste's Abbey White said in 2016 that the term was subsequently adopted to apply to actors of color being cast in traditionally white roles. White said, "In the last several years, racebending has become a practice used more and more to help networks diversify their ensembles and capture a bigger audience. Not only has it resulted in more racial visibility on the small screen, but in a far more unexpected way, racebending can generate deeper and more significant depictions of characters."


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