I read an article in Newsweek yesterday about the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film which pointed out that all of the golden-ticket-winning kids were white. I noticed that myself when I saw the film last week. Part of me felt that it did seem kind of odd that all five winners would come from Europe and the United States (and that all of the winners would be children around ten years old), given that people were shown buying Wonka bars all over the world. Another part of me wondered how much it really mattered. How much did it affect the story?

I suppose it did help that all of the kids spoke English (even the German kid), but would anything have changed if one of the kids had been Pakistani or Vietnamese? How would the viewing public have reacted if the five kids been an equal representation of all the races? I guess the question here is, at what point does diversity for diversity’s sake stop being empowering and become insulting tokenism?

Consider the original story. Look at the characters’ names: Bucket, Gloop, Salt, Beauregard and Teavee. I don’t hear anything in there that would have come from Peru or sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe that’s the problem right there. It’s been over a decade since I read the book, but I seem to remember all of the kids having originally been English. Maybe the film should have kept them that way. There are people of African descent living in England, but I don’t know what the ratio is; they probably could have afforded to have had at least one black kid in the cast. But unless that’s Charlie himself, the kid would inevitably turn out to be a brat. So either we enforce negative racial stereotypes by making the black kid one of the bottom four, or we make Charlie the black kid–and show black people living in poverty at the beginning of the film. I could see people being annoyed either way.

Even if they had managed to put a diverse batch of kids in that factory, it would have been difficult to accurately portray any culture that the kids might have represented. (Yes, represented, whether intentionally or not.) Where’s the line between put-upon homogeneity and stereotyping, and how thin is it? How alike or different will the general public let Hollywood make its diverse characters before they file defamation lawsuits?

They probably could have made Violet Beauregard Haitian and Mike Teavee Fijian without raising any hackles. Maybe they should have. Or maybe they were following the illustrations from the original books when they made the cast lilywhite. Whatever the case, I honestly don’t think that anyone acted maliciously when they did the casting. And I really think there are better things to write about in Newsweek.