Black Characters Should Never Be Voiced By White Actors
By Hayley Armstrong
As a Black voice actor, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt the desire to voice characters that aren’t Black or African American.
Friends of mine who are also Black and do voice acting have expressed sentiments like, “Only being able to play Black characters is limiting!”
I’m not a *Black* voice actor, I’m just a voice actor!
Voice acting auditions should be blind!
Anyone should be able to voice a character of any race!
Race shouldn’t matter in voice acting!
For the life of me, I do not understand any of that.
Blackness is too rich, unique, different, fun, and beautiful for it to feel limiting to me. I could only voice characters who were Black or Black-coded for my entire career, and I could die happy.
I’ve written at length before about the role that I believe race plays in voice acting, and over time, I have only become more adamant in my stance that characters are much better, and much more authentic when their voices come from voice actors of matching or similar races/ethnicities.
I’ve come across some white voice actors who think it’s silly or trivial to bring race into voice acting, because it’s an audio performance medium, not visual.
To them, I say the voice is an integral part of racial/cultural identity. To sideline the voice is to reject the character’s race entirely.
Can A White Voice Actor Voice A Black Character?
No. It’s in poor taste and there are too few Black characters available for Black voice actors to audition for.
White voice actors shouldn’t be allowed to voice Black characters because it’s culturally tone deaf, inauthentic, and there are about ten white characters for every Black.
The opportunities for white voice actors are countless, while still very limited for Black voice actors.
Most importantly, if you give a Black character a white voice actor, you’ve essentially given the character no voice.
Non-Black and/or white voice actors who feel like they should have a right to audition for Black roles, I would honestly love to know:
why, as a non-Black voice actor, do you want to voice a character of color?
What do you think you could bring to that character more than an actor who has actually lived in that skin?
And, why do you think you deserve to be paid to voice a character whose struggles you’ve never had to identify with?
Shouldn’t someone with a closer relationship to the character’s identity, who has had good and bad experiences as that type of person in real life, be the one to benefit financially from voicing that character?
Do you think you deserve that opportunity more than they do?
But I also see where some people who disagree with me are coming from.
People admire cultures different from their own and I think we all feel that way, to different extents.
However…
when we center our voices in characters and stories that aren’t about us or our cultures, we go from appreciating, to appropriating.
Sometimes white voice actors get a little too excited about their potential involvement in work that features Black characters because they think Black characters are “cool,” and the opportunity to perform their “Black voice” would be fun and show their versatility as a voice actor.
Full stop. You can enjoy the party without hopping into the group photo.
Now don’t get confused, I totally love and have respect for cultures that I’m not personally a part of.
I grew up on a steady diet of 90s cartoons, and in that time, came across white cartoon characters that I loved, who were super cool and awesome.
But in my daily life today, if a voice acting audition popped up looking for a white voice actor to voice a white character, I would in no way, be offended that I couldn’t audition for that role.
A white voice actor would voice that character more authentically than I ever could. And that isn’t something that offends me in the slightest.
The only, and I mean ONLY drawback to strictly voicing Black characters as a Black voice actor is the lack of available roles.
Should White Voice Actors Resign From Voicing Black Characters?
Yes. If a white voice actor has been voicing a Black character, they should step down and make space for Black voice actors to audition for those roles.
That’s not taking a role from someone who rightly earned it. It’s fixing a wrong that never should’ve occurred in the first place. A long delayed fix, but a fix.
The character Cleveland from "Family Guy was long voiced by a white voice actor who had the sense and grace to realize this industry error and step down for a (correctly) Black voice actor to voice him.
Cleveland is one of the very few main Black characters on Family Guy. There are tons of white guy characters. There was no reason a Black voice actor shouldn’t have been voicing him when there was no lack of white male characters for white men to voice.
The beloved character Marshmallow from the hit animated series Bob’s Burgers started out being voiced by a white male voice actor. The show has corrected course and correctly cast a talented transgender, Black voice actor by the name of Jari Jones, to take over that role. That’s how it should’ve been from the start.
People get up in arms when white voice actors who have historically voiced Black animated characters step down for a Black voice actor to take over.
And why does that upset some people? Because they think a role was unjustly stolen from a hardworking voice actor, just because of race, which they think is insignificant.
This misguided idea that white guilt and outside pressures made them “give” the role to a lesser voice actor just because they were Black.
I hate that line of thinking, because the real problem is.. the white voice actor shouldn’t have gotten that role in the first place.
Most of the white voice actors who voluntarily step down, know that they will have a wealth of other characters to voice, so it’s not that big of a loss, for them.
It’s usually just their “fans” who get upset about things like that.
A Black character’s voice being given to a white voice actor was the initial error, the stepping down and re-casting of the deserving voice actor was a correction.
It’s just a correction, a late one, but a correction nonetheless. And the white voice actors who resign, do so, because they now understand that.
(also, the Black voice actors or voice actors of color who then take on the roles, are usually talented and seasoned voice actors. Roles aren’t just being given to Black actors because they’re Black. You realize they have to be good too, right? Ugh.)
Analogy:
You’re a kid on Christmas morning and Santa left you twelve gifts. But, he accidentally gave you 6 of someone else’s gifts (for some reason Santa is inept in this analogy, but stay with me, I’m trying)
You’ve already opened all twelve gifts, and played with them, but soon after realized that you only should’ve gotten half of those presents, while the kid the other presents were supposed to go to, just thinks they didn’t behave well enough this year to receive any gifts.
Sure, you already opened and played with the gifts that weren’t yours, but now that you know they belong to someone else, would it be an unreasonable ask of you to return them to the rightful recipient?
(Probably, if you were a toddler, but that’s kind of how a lot of you sound when you complain about white voice actors choosing to stop voicing characters of color because they’ve realized how many audition opportunities they have, compared to their colleagues.)
Anyway… most, american cartoon characters are white. Therefore, most of their voice actors tend to be.
I think… Cree Summer has voiced some white girl cartoon characters in the past, but she’s biracial, so she’s half entitled to those roles.
Black voice actresses very rarely get the opportunity to voice white characters. It very rarely happens. But for years, white voice actors have been voicing characters of color.
Egregious case in point: one of my FAVORITE animated films, “The Prince of Egypt” had some of the most stunning designs of gorgeous brown skinned people.
but the voice cast? Chile……
Danny Glover voiced Jethro, which, great. Awesome. At least they got one Black voice actor in there.
But everyone else is white, and those characters… are very much not.
…but they had Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey cover a hit song from the soundtrack, said that was enough brown representation and packed it up.
that’s as brown as a story set in EGYPT.. was allowed to be.
White actors voicing Black and Brown characters has been an industry standard.
So, no. You’re telling me the few times the race-switch game has favored Black actors, it’s a whole thing? A crisis?
But it wasn’t a crisis when y’all were doing it?
Miss me with a “double standard.” How is balancing things out, a double standard?
Leveling a tipped scale does not a double standard make.
(this is all excluding anime dubbing, by the way, that is its own issue/arena and since multiple types of american voice actors have been voicing those mostly Japanese characters, if I tried to break that down, this would be a manifesto. I’m also not versed enough in that industry to speak on it. If there are Japanese-American voice actors who have thoughts about that, I’d be interested in hearing them.)
