The grassroots campaign that challenged Last Airbender whitewashing and woke up Hollywood

26.02.2024 - 16:07 / polygon.com

Mike Le was furious. Maybe sad? There was a touch of despair. On the morning of Dec. 9, 2008, news broke that M. Night Shyamalan had cast his upcoming live-action adaptation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. Le, then a grad student at UCLA, was a huge fan of the animated series — but Shyamalan’s take for Paramount Pictures looked like a disaster. In his mind, Avatar was an explicitly Asian-inspired fantasy, an Eastern Lord of the Rings with martial arts. So why were all of Shyamalan’s actors white?

Le had felt the frustration all of his life. The big one from the past was Firefly, a show whose characters he loved but that at its core stole “from Asian culture without doing anything in the service of Asian people.” The Last Airbender pushed him over an edge. He carried the fire to a meeting of the activist group MANNA (Media Action Network for Asian Americans), where he and his girlfriend, Dariane Nabor, met another miffed Avatar fan, Marissa Lee, who didn’t just want to commiserate. By 2009, the three fledgling activists, along with a coalition of internet pals, launched Racebending.com, with the express intent of waging a media war.

“The pie-in-the-sky dream was: Stop the presses, waste hundreds of millions of dollars, and get them to recast and reshoot,” Le says over a video call. They knew the goal was unrealistic. Still, where there’s noise, there’s discussion. “If we got enough attention, that would have an impact on how a lot of people saw not just this particular instance of whitewashing, but how they might think about that in the future.”

Today, you can’t swipe across a feed without bumping into a wound-up fan base — TV show groupies, a stan hive, a political cult — and the 2000s pre-social internet wasn’t too different, while spread across an archipelago of message boards and blogs. So the Last Airbender casting outcry could have been mistaken as everyday fan bickering — and almost was, by fans and media alike. But as time would prove, this was no proto-#ReleasetheSnyderCut.

The clear evidence is Netflix’s new series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The streamer announced the cast of the second live-action reinterpretation in 2021 by specifically citing that the show “would establish a new benchmark in representation” by booking non-white actors for key roles. For fans, it was worth a cheer. But for the folks behind Racebending.com, it was the bookend to an unlikely saga of yelling online, being questioned by the internet, getting waved off by powerful people, and then still doing something about it.

The Last Airbender controversy erupted months before the actual cast was announced. Much like Shyamalan’s discovery of Haley Joel Osment for The Sixth Sense, there was hope that the film