What’s Behind Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost In The Shell Controversy

For as long as Hollywood has churned out movies, directors have cast white actors as minority characters. It's called whitewashing, and sadly it's nothing new. Though, it's for this reason people have gotten increasingly pissed off with every new film featuring a white actor in a non-white character's role. It's 2016, and Hollywood should know better. At this point, it feels like a giant "fuck you" to minorities in and outside the industry when white actors continually snag roles that don't belong to them.

The latest prominent example of whitewashing is the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the main character in Ghost in the Shell, the upcoming sci-fi action film based on the popular Japanese manga of the same name, written by Masamune Shirow. The movie, due out in March 2017, stars Johansson as a human-cyborg hybrid, a special ops commander who fights cyber terrorism in a dystopian Japan of the near future.

This one role is only indicative of a larger industry practice. There are a multitude of legitimate reasons that people are pissed off about Johansson taking the starring role, and the persistence of whitewashing in Hollywood. Click through for a quick explainer.