Two white actresses who voiced black characters on popular animated television shows announced they would resign on Wednesday, extending a season of soul searching for systemic racism that has plagued multiple industries in the wake of the recent police killings of African-Americans.
In a couple of statements shared on social media a few hours apart, the actresses – Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell, from the shows “Big Mouth” (Netflix) and “Central Park” (Apple TV Plus) – said that their casting he had contributed to the “elimination” of his black colleagues. The creators of “Big Mouth”, including Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett, apologized in their own statement.
“Black characters in an animated show should be played by black people,” Slate wrote.
Bell and the creators of “Central Park” came to a similar conclusion in their own statement: “We deeply regret that we could have contributed to anyone’s feeling of exclusion or erasure.”
In both series, the characters in question were biracial, with a black and a white father. In “Big Mouth”, Slate played Missy Foreman-Greenwald, an intelligent and sensitive teenager who fights against puberty. In “Central Park,” Bell played Molly Tillerman, an awkward teenager who creates her own superhero comics.
In each case, the casting of a white actress generated immediate online criticism even before the shows premiered. In their statements, both Slate and Bell said that they had been beneficiaries of the white privilege.
“Launching a mixed-race character with a white actress undermines the specificity of the mixed race and the African American experience,” Bell wrote on Instagram.
The world of animated film and television has historically been dominated by white men. In 2019, only 13 percent of directors of animated television shows were women, and only 12 percent of roles represented women of color, according to research from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Public pressure and the recent success of animated films with largely non-white cast members, such as “Coco” (2017) and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), have fueled calls for a greater diversity across the industry.
But viral footage of George Floyd’s police murder last month, and a subsequent national conversation about the legacy of racism in all aspects of American life, have lent new urgency to those calls.
In a measure of how quickly the industry is adapting, one of “Central Park” creators Loren Bouchard had defended the decision to cast Bell in the role of Molly earlier this year.
Kristen needed to be Molly; we couldn’t not turn her into Molly, ”he said, speaking to an audience on a press tour for the Television Critics Association in January.
Bouchard, who also created the animated series “Bob’s Burgers,” apologized for those comments on Wednesday. “I really appreciate everyone who contacted me here to express concern, anger, frustration, everything,” he wrote in a post shared on Twitter. “I’m listening.”
