Casting Barack Obama

Since the Writers Guild of America ended its strike, Saturday Night Live has returned to television with its best overnight ratings in two years. Hillary Clinton’s self-satirizing appearance on the show has even been credited with helping her to victories in Ohio and Texas. But what has gotten SNL the most media attention is its decision to cast Fred Armisen, who is of white and Asian descent, as Barack Obama in a skit that satirizes the debates between Obama and Clinton.

The Chicago Tribune argued that SNL’s new character, “Fauxbama,” should be played by an African American, and in Great Britain, the liberal Guardian contended that Armisen’s role as “Fauxbama” brings with it “minstrel” overtones.

The irony is that the protests over Armisen’s playing Obama come at a time when Broadway is using nontraditional casting to open up a series of opportunities for black actors in roles traditionally played by whites. James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad are now starring in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. S. Epatha Merkerson, best known as New York City police lieutenant Anita Van Buren on television’s Law and Order, is drawing raves in William Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and Morgan Freeman will soon be appearing in the Mike Nichols-directed production of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl.

Nontraditional casting is far from new. As far back as the 1950s, director Joe Papp began casting nonwhite actors in his Shakespeare productions, but when nontraditional casting has used white actors to portray nonwhites, it has generated heated protest. In 1990, the casting of English actor Jonathan Pryce in the key role of the Eurasian engineer in the American production of Miss Saigon, drew widespread complaints, and in 1997, a town hall debate between black playwright August Wilson, who opposed nontraditional casting, and New Republic theater critic Robert Brustein, who defended it, became a major news event

Since then, the debate over nontraditional casting has died down. Fearful of being classified as bigots, most liberals in and out of the entertainment industry have never been willing to go on record opposing the casting of nonwhites in roles historically given to whites. In turn, nonwhite actors and directors, seeing the gains that have come their way through nontraditional casting have not wanted to jeopardize their situation by suggesting that nontraditional casting should be a one-way street in which only actors of color benefited.

The protests over choosing an actor of white and Asian heritage to play Barack Obama on SNL thus come at a time when we would expect minimal opposition to such a casting decision. The good news is that Broadway directors and actors, along with SNL’s young audiences, seem determined to ignore this latest outburst of political correctness, as does Obama himself, who continues to campaign as a presidential candidate who is black rather than the black presidential candidate.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. Video courtesy of Hulu.