Ready for Your Close-Up? Not If You’re the Wrong Race

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 16, 2025

 

In late 2023, the San Diego County Library’s Rancho Santa Fe branch invited author and actress Annette Hubbell to perform a few selections from her book Women Warriors, which tells the tales of female heroes throughout history. Weeks before the March 2024 performance, however, Hubbell was informed that she needed to remove two black historical figures, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, from the show.

 

The reason? Hubbell is white.

 

“Our administration was uncomfortable with you performing a black character as a white woman,” the branch manager told Hubbell, asking her to replace these women with white historical figures. When Hubbell refused to pay tribute only to white women, the library canceled the performance altogether.

 

Hubbell filed a lawsuit against the library, arguing that its decision to kill the show solely because of her race violated the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

 

Hubbell’s fight illustrates the extreme wrongheadedness of recent attempts to gatekeep racial casting and writing within the arts. It’s not just one library that decides its patrons would be better off if they knew less about Harriet Tubman because the woman telling the story was the wrong color. Such barriers are still erected in movies and plays across America.

 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film One Battle After Another features a full slate of black women in challenging, complicated roles — the types of characters Hollywood has lacked for nearly its entire history. Yet Anderson, who wrote the film, is being criticized for his “hyper-sexualization” of the women and “fetishized depiction of interracial relationships.” (Anderson, who is white, is famously in a long-term relationship with biracial actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children.)

 

In Vineland, the Thomas Pynchon novel on which Anderson based the film, the female characters in question were white; the director thus made a conscious decision to cast black actresses in the roles. But he gets no quarter from writers like The Guardian’s Ellen E. Jones, who claims that Anderson was unaware of the “racist Jezebel trope, which originated during the endemic sexual exploitation of chattel slavery.”

 

So, according to the racial bean-counters, America would be better off had an influential white filmmaker like Paul Thomas Anderson refused to fight for more African-American representation in his films. Got it.

 

The idea that only a person of a particular skin color or physical ability can write or play a role is so ridiculous that it was even lampooned in a 2019 Saturday Night Live sketch starring British actor Idris Elba. When Elba’s character tells the moderator of a game show, “Can I Play That?” that he believes he could play a blind person, the host, played by Kenan Thompson, shakes his head no and says, “God took their sight, and now you want to take their jobs?”

 

Nonetheless, the racial gatekeeping in the arts continues.

 

This year’s Tony Award winner for Best Musical, Maybe Happy Ending, has become the unwitting exemplar of the theater community’s self-defeating barriers. The musical is a love story set in South Korea about two decommissioned robots. When the show announced that Andrew Barth Feldman would take over the lead role when Darren Criss leaves the production, the news did not sit well for many on Broadway, with some saying the casting decision caused “pain” and “profound disappointment” and that it was “a hard slap in the face.”

 

That is because Feldman is white and Criss is half Filipino, and critics are convinced that only Asian actors can play the lead.

 

The show’s creators defended the Feldman choice, clarifying that their intention was for the show to be “comfortably performed by anyone, anywhere.” The robot leads don’t have Korean names, even in the Korean version of the show. They were meant to be ethnically undefined. Don’t even ask how a half-Filipino actor was deemed Korean-adjacent by race-obsessed critics.

 

In an interview earlier this year, Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim explained why he was emphatically opposed to ethnic-specific casting, arguing there has been an “overcorrection” by casting directors.

 

“There are very often times when the role itself has not been thought through,” Kim said. “It doesn’t require any kind of specificity in the story as it’s being told, or in the specifics of the character, because very often, it’s not even being written by an Asian person. So they don’t know the difference in what they’re asking for, and yet casting is being very specific.”

 

The rigid adherence to ethnically accurate casting in fact represents the same small-mindedness that once kept minorities out of roles in the first place. If the race or ethnicity of an actor rigidly determines which roles he or she can play, then it’s just a short step from “only an Asian actor can play this character” back to “only a white actor can play this character.”

 

Further, had the rule against writing characters of other races been in place just decades ago, America would never have been able to bask in the glory of Samuel L. Jackson’s Quentin Tarantino–penned biblical tirade in Pulp Fiction. (That role turned Jackson into a star and guaranteed he would appear in every movie made in Hollywood for the next 30 years.)

 

Artists should be free to make artistic decisions, including the casting of their work. Audiences can decide whether they want to see a show with race-conscious or colorblind casting, and the market can sort out which of those approaches is more successful. But stringently restraining actors of all races from crossing racial lines in the roles they play has real consequences that leave the theater and film communities worse off.

 

Whether presented on a Broadway stage or in a local library performance space, culture suffers when art is limited by race. The controversy over Maybe Happy Ending and the cancellation of Annette Hubbell’s Women Warriors demonstrate that restricting roles by skin color doesn’t protect or benefit anyone — in fact, it can actually diminish opportunities in the arts. Using racial discrimination to prevent racial discrimination leads to no happy endings.