A NUMBER of high-profile Asian-American stars — including Constance Wu from “Fresh Off the Boat,” Aziz Ansari from “Master of None,” Trekkie George Takei, and Daniel Dae Kim from “Lost” — have called out Hollywood’s “whitewashing” tendencies and spoken out about the difficulties they’ve faced scoring roles in the notoriously “diversity-shy” industry.

    “An Asian person who is competing against white people, for an audience of white people, has to train for that opportunity like it’s the Olympics,” Wu told writer Amanda Hess in the New York Times piece, titled “Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored.” “An incredibly talented Asian actor might be considered for a leading role maybe once or twice in a lifetime. That’s a highly pressured situation.”

    The article points to the current fight for Asian representation on screen, a protest made louder in recent months given the industry’s ongoing and increasingly brazen whitewashing of Asian roles, such as Emma Stone’s “part-Chinese Allison Ng” in the widely ridiculed “Aloha” and the upcoming films “Ghost in the Shell,” “Dr Strange,” and “Death Note,” where Asian characters from the source materials have been conveniently rewritten as white to gift roles to Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Nat Wolff, respectively.

    “It’s all so plainly outlandish,” Takei, a vocal protester of Marvel’s “Dr Strange” casting, told Hess. “It’s getting to the point where it’s almost laughable.”

    “The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and stories about straight white people are universal, and that anyone else is more niche,” Aziz Ansari added. “It’s just not true. I’ve been watching characters with middle-age white-guy problems since I was a small Indian boy.”

    While TV shows such as Aziz’s “Master of None,” “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and Mindy Kaling’s now groundbreaking “The Mindy Project” have been leading the push for more Asian faces on TV, Hess quotes some sobering recent stats: “Though they make up 5.4 percent of the United States population, more than half of film, television and streaming properties feature zero named or speaking Asian characters,” she writes, citing a February report from the University of Southern California.

    On a more uplifting note, the piece champions the social media campaigning from stars and fans — like 25-year-old William Yu, who created the viral hashtag #StarringJohnCho — for bringing the issue to the forefront of the media’s diversity debate.

    “As I was Photoshopping John Cho’s face on top of Tom Cruise’s in the ‘Mission Impossible’ poster, my friends and I started chuckling a little bit, like, ‘How crazy would that be?’” Yu told the Times. “Then I caught myself. Why should it be crazy?”

    (SD-Agencies)