Flutterby™! : Voice Acting and Race

I'm finding this article fascinating. I grew up in a community that was far removed from the mainstream, and have my own processing and perception issues that impact how I understand and react to other people's emotions. I was long confused that acting didn't seem to be about portraying an emotion, but about performing some cues that we have learned a language to interpret as emotion, but that is really nothing like how people actually experiencing that emotion express it.

This article goes into how that shows up in voice acting. How even in a field where the casting directors deliberately try to not see the people they're casting for a specific role, just to experience how the performer manages to use voice to portray something that they experience as that feeling, end up with an awful lot of white actors pretending to be the other.

The cues and stereotypes that they're looking for are imitations of the thing, rather than the thing, and that gets carried deeper into the culture and builds on itself.

The Atlantic: BoJack Horseman’s Diane Problem Is Now an Industry Problem — High-profile white voice actors are relinquishing their roles as characters of color. But the departures have caused divisions among their peers.