^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Although New York magazine cites Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan as an example of the "brownface" phenomenon, both Sandler and the title character are ethnically Jewish. Photo: Rob Loud / Getty Images

The other night I caught a few minutes of The Dragon Painter (1919), an American film starring the husband-wife team of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki. One of the remarkable things about Hayakawa and Aoki was that until the past few decades, it was virtually unheard of for an Asian character to actually be played by an actor of Asian ancestry in an American film. More often the character would be played by a caucasian actor wearing crude makeup--as in the case of the Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu in the famous 1920s serials.

Have we come a long way? Not necessarily, as New York magazine reports (see "The Summer of Brownface"). Excerpt:

... [I]n You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, opening tomorrow ... Adam Sandler plays an Israeli and Rob Schneider an Arab; both have seemingly taken a dip in the same substance used to honey up Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart. Mike Myers’s The Love Guru is quite possibly the first Hollywood comedy entirely devoted to tittering over turbans since Peter Sellers played Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, from 1968. Ben Kingsley, naturally, shows up to meta-travesty his own half-Indian heritage, and by extension his Gandhi role, with a cameo as Guru Tugginmypudha. (Should the homophonic hilarity of that name prove too subtle, there’s also Guru Satchabigknoba.)

Kingsley is also onboard for the just-announced Prince of Persia, the cast of which — unveiled in the past week — includes such notable Persians as Jake Gyllenhaal and Alfred Molina. Nor is the trend limited to Hollywood blockbusters. In the indie thriller Stuck, out now, ethnic Estonian Mena Suvari rocks the cornrows to play a character based on a real-life black woman. On the small screen, meanwhile, it’s a fairly safe bet that the two-month overlap between the general-election and the TV-production cycles will bring us a lot more Fred Armisen as Barack Obama come September.

And none of the above, of course, is even close in sheer audacity (and, let’s admit it, comic potential) to Robert Downey Jr.’s full-blown blackface in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.

I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't offensive, but it seems to me that brownface, or blackface, is problematic when it does one of two things:

• When it reduces the already scandalously limited number of roles available to people of color, and/or
• When it reinforces harmful stereotypes.

If we look at each of these examples based on those standards, we find that not all "brownface" is created equal.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

• Not offensive: Adam Sandler as the Zohan. Both he and the Zohan are ethnically Jewish, so I don't know why this is even classified as brownface.
• More troubling: The Jewish-, European-, and Filipino-American Rob Schneider playing a stereotypical Arab villain a year after playing an offensive Asian minister stereotype in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. The Media Action Network for Asian Americans condemned his Chuck and Larry performance as an example of "yellow face," and Wikipedia quotes film critic Richard Roeper as saying that the performance was the most egregiously offensive of its kind since Mickey Rooney's performance as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The Love Guru

Mike Myers has come under fire for lampooning Hinduism as Guru Pitka in the upcoming film The Love Guru, and some commentators have also questioned the decision by a caucasian actor to play a culturally Indian character--but the character (originally named Maurice and hailing from Idaho) is not ethnically Indian, so this is not an example of brownface.

Prince of Persia

This is a classic example of "brownface" cinema--hiring well-known white actors to put on makeup and play people of color, rather than hiring actors with the relevant ancestry--and I would describe it as the most troubling example described in the article. There are not many leading-man opportunities for actors of Middle Eastern ancestry working in the United States, and this one is going to Jake Gyllenhall. That's disappointing.

Stuck

Mina Suvari dons cornrows to play a character based on Chante Jawan Mallard, who struck a homeless man with her car, drove home with him pinned to her winshield, and left him to die in her garage. While Mallard was African-American, this doesn't really qualify as brownface or blackface; the character was not Mallard herself (and therefore could be of any race), and there are so many harmful images of black women in film already that it's hard to complain if a caricature of Mallard doesn't join the ranks.

Saturday Night Live: Armisen as Barack Obama

SNL's Fred Armisen boasts European, Venezuelan, and Japanese ancestry, but no African-American ancestry. That being the case, he makes a controversial choice to play presidential contender Barack Obama. But Armisen does look a little bit like Obama, while Kenan Thompson, the sole black cast member (best known for the title role in the 2004 live-action version of Fat Albert), doesn't.

Tropic Thunder

Robert Downey Jr., a white man, plays a white actor playing a black man. This isn't, technically speaking, blackface or brownface since the character in question is white; it's the character who's in blackface. Confused yet?

Wanted

Not mentioned in the article is the casting of white Angelina Jolie to play African-American comic book character The Fox in Wanted. There are so few examples of black lead characters in comics that this particular example of recasting is particularly troubling.