Yes, Race Matters In Voice Acting. Here’s Why.
By Hayley Armstrong
As a Black voice actor, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt the desire to voice characters that aren’t Black or African American.
Friends of mine who are also Black and do voice acting have expressed sentiments like, “Only being able to play Black characters is limiting!”
I’m not a *Black* voice actor, I’m just a voice actor!
Voice acting auditions should be blind!
Anyone should be able to voice a character of any race!
Race shouldn’t matter in voice acting!
For the life of me, I do not understand any of that.
Blackness is too rich, unique, different, fun, and beautiful for it to feel limiting to me. I could only voice characters who were Black or Black-coded for my entire career, and I would die a happy voice actor.
I’ve written at length before about the role that I believe race plays in voice acting, and over time, I have only become more adamant in my stance that characters are much better, and much more authentic when their voices come from voice actors of matching or similar races and ethnicities.
I’ve come across some white voice actors who think it’s silly or trivial to bring race into voice acting, because it’s an audio performance medium, not visual.
To them, I say the voice is an integral part of identity. To sideline the voice (with the excuse that it doesn’t matter because it’s “just” a voice) is to reject a major part of what makes the character who they are.
Can A White Voice Actor Voice A Black Character?
They shouldn’t. It’s in poor taste and there are too few Black characters available for Black voice actors to audition for.
White voice actors shouldn’t be allowed to voice Black characters because it’s culturally tone deaf, inauthentic, and there are about ten white cartoon/game characters for every one Black.
The opportunities for white voice actors are countless, while still pretty rare for Black voice actors and voice actors of color, by comparison.
Most importantly, if you give a character of color a white voice actor, you’ve essentially given the character no voice.
Because even if it’s a good voice acting performance, behind it, is a voice actor delivering lines in a way that they think a person who looks like that character would sound.
And by allowing that, instead of creating a character with depth and honesty, you’ve created a lie. A joke. A caricature. A stereotype.
A white person’s idea of a person of color.
“But, Hayley.. isn’t it actually racist to say only people of one race can voice characters of that race? Aren’t you saying then, that all Black people sound the same?”
I get this question a lot, too, and I have two responses:
No, I don’t think race-accurate casting is racist. Race makes for different experiences in the world, and those experiences often inform an acting performance. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. Race-irrelevant casting, however, pushes the “I don’t see color” narrative, which we’re all clear nowadays is a phrase that actual racism hides behind. Race *shouldn’t* matter, but we live in a world that rewarded some and punished others for their race, so we can’t pretend not to see it now.
While not all people of a certain race sound the same, there are absolutely cultural phrases, vernacular, dialects/inflection, and a general rhythm to language that can only authentically come from people who are a part of a shared culture. But I’d also add that casting a Black role from a pool of Black voice actors would only further allow us to explore the fact that we actually don’t all sound alike. The diversity of Black voices can be focused on even more once the white noise is cut, no pun intended.
Those are my opinions.
I don’t want to listen to a white person try to sound like us. I have Tik Tok. I can listen to that whenever I want. I’ve heard it, it’s not good.
There’s also a more pragmatic reason to make sure voice actors of color are being prioritized.
Payment.
Imagine, if you will, a cartoon that’s fine with making an animated character Black visually, but paying a white person loads of money to provide their voice.
Well, guess what? You don’t have to imagine. That’s the history of voice acting in american cartoons.
Make it make sense.
It happens less lately, because as a culture we’re learning and evolving. (somewhat)
But it’s always confused me how this happens in animation because studios/showrunners go so far as to design a great Black character… (which is no small feat)
….and then decide to NOT give that great character a Black voice actor?
You did all the (more difficult) work of conceiving, designing, and animating a Black character…. just pay/hire a great Black voice actor and round the character out.
Why is it that when it comes to the voice, we start giving checks to white people?
It’s another example of people seeing the value of Blackness, while keeping the actual Black people, from benefiting.
Everybody wanna be Black until it’s time to pay Black people, basically.
A Question For White Voice Actors
White voice actors who feel like they should have a right to audition for Black/POC roles, I would honestly love to know:
why, as a white voice actor, would you want to voice a character of color?
What do you think you could bring to that character more than an actor who has actually lived in that skin?
And, why do you think you deserve to be paid to voice a character whose struggles you’ve never had to identify with?
Shouldn’t someone with a closer relationship to the character’s identity, who has had good and bad experiences as that type of person in real life, be the one to benefit financially from voicing that character?
Do you think you deserve that opportunity more than they do?
But I also see where some people who disagree are coming from.
People admire cultures different from their own and I think we all feel that way, to different extents.
However…
when we center our voices in characters and stories that aren’t about us or our cultures, we go from appreciating, to appropriating.
Sometimes white voice actors get a little too excited about their potential involvement in work that features Black characters because they think Black characters are “cool,” and the opportunity to perform their “Black voice” would be fun and show their versatility as a voice actor.
Full stop. You can enjoy the party without hopping into the group photo.
Now don’t get confused, I totally love and have respect for cultures that I’m not personally a part of.
I grew up on a steady diet of 90s cartoons, and in that time, came across white cartoon characters that I loved, who were super cool and awesome.
But in my daily life today, if a voice acting audition popped up looking for a white voice actor to voice a white character, I would in no way, be offended that I couldn’t audition for that role.
A white voice actor would voice that character more authentically than I ever could. And that isn’t something that offends me in the slightest.
The only, and I mean ONLY drawback to strictly voicing Black characters as a Black voice actor is the lack of available roles.
Should White Voice Actors Resign From Voicing Black Characters?
Yes. If a white voice actor has been voicing a Black character, they should step down and make space for a Black voice actor to take over that role.
That’s not taking a role from someone who rightly earned it. It’s fixing a wrong that never should’ve occurred in the first place. A long delayed fix, but a fix.
The character Cleveland from "Family Guy” was long voiced by a white voice actor who had the sense and grace to realize this industry error and step down for a (correctly) Black voice actor to voice him.
Cleveland is the lone Black main character on Family Guy. There are tons of white male characters.
There was no reason for a white voice actor to voice him when there was no lack of white male characters for white men to voice.
The beloved character Marshmallow from the hit animated series Bob’s Burgers started out being voiced by a white male voice actor. The show has corrected course and correctly cast a talented transgender, Black voice actor by the name of Jari Jones, to take over that role. That’s how it should’ve been from the start.
People get up in arms when white voice actors who have historically voiced Black animated characters step down for a Black voice actor to take over.
And why does that upset some people? Because they think a role was unjustly stolen from a hardworking voice actor, just because of race, which they think is insignificant.
This misguided idea that white guilt and outside pressures made them “give” the role to a “lesser” voice actor just because they were Black.
I hate that line of thinking, because the real problem is.. the white voice actor shouldn’t have gotten that role in the first place.
Most of the white voice actors who voluntarily step down, know that they will have a wealth of other characters to voice, so it’s not that big of a loss, for them.
It’s usually just their “fans” who get upset about things like that.
A Black character’s voice being given to a white voice actor was the initial error, the stepping down and re-casting of the deserving voice actor was a correction.
It’s just a correction, a late one, but a correction nonetheless. And the white voice actors who resign, do so, because they now understand that.
(also, the Black voice actors or voice actors of color who then take on the roles, are usually talented and seasoned voice actors. Roles aren’t being given to some random voice actor of color just because of their race. You realize they have to be good too, right? Ugh.)
I’ll explain it like this, you determine if it makes sense:
You’re a kid on Christmas morning and Santa left you twelve gifts. But, among those 12 gifts, 5 were someone else’s gifts that Santa left you by accident. (for some reason Santa is extremely incompetent in this story, but stay with me, I’m trying)
You’ve already opened all twelve gifts, assuming they were all yours. You’ve played with them, grown attached, but soon after were told that you only should’ve gotten 7 of those presents. The other 5 were given to you by mistake.
The kid the other presents were supposed to go to, woke up that same morning, thinking they just didn’t behave well enough this year to receive any gifts.
So sure, you already opened and played with the gifts that weren’t yours, but now that you know some of them belonged to someone else, would it be an unreasonable ask of you to return them to the rightful recipient? You’d still have 7 gifts. That’s still more than the other kid would get.
(If you were a toddler, that might seem like a big ask, but that’s kind of how a lot of you sound when you complain about white voice actors choosing to stop voicing characters of color because they’ve realized how many audition opportunities they have, compared to their Black colleagues.)
Anyway… most american cartoon characters are white. Therefore, most of their voice actors tend to be.
I think… Cree Summer has voiced some white girl cartoon characters in the past, but she’s biracial, so she’s half entitled to those roles.
Black female voice actors very rarely get the opportunity to voice white characters. It very rarely happens. But for years, white voice actors have been voicing characters of color.
Egregious case in point: one of my FAVORITE animated films, “The Prince of Egypt” had some of the most stunning designs of gorgeous brown skinned people.
but the voice cast? Chile……
Danny Glover voiced Jethro, which, great. Awesome. At least they got one Black person in there.
But everyone else is white, and those characters… are very much not.
…but they had Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey cover a hit song from the soundtrack, said that was enough brown representation and packed it up.
that’s as brown as a story set in EGYPT.. was allowed to be.
White actors voicing Black and Brown characters was allowed to become an industry standard, and that wasn’t right.
In light of that, I’d like to edit an earlier point I made: If, in the process of helping voice actors of color build experience, some of them end up voicing white characters, I’m good with that.
Why?
Because there are MORE white characters, overall. And the only way to make up for decades of white people being allowed to voice any and all characters, (white, Black, Brown, Asian, etc) is to allow the inverse for the same amount of time it was allowed for white voice actors.
Looking at you, Aparna Nancherla, voicing Moon Tobin from The Great North. You go, girl. You voice that white boy.
But there is never any nuance around discussion of why one version is okay and the other isn’t.
It’s always white people going, “well if Ariel can be Black now, why can’t Princess Tiana be white?!”
BECAUSE TIANA IS THE ONLY BLACK DISNEY PRINCESS WE’VE GOT, AND THERE ARE ABOUT SEVEN DIFFERENT WHITE DISNEY PRINCESSES. THAT’S NOT RIGHT.
YOU GOTTA PULL FROM THE GROUP WHO HAS MORE, TO HELP UPLIFT AND REPRESENT THE GROUP WHO HAS LESS. HOW DOES THIS NOT MAKE SENSE TO Y’ALL?
ALSO WHITE ARIEL STILL EXISTS, WE JUST HAVE A BLACK VERSION TOO, NOW. Sharing is taking nothing away from you. (unless you consider welcoming underrepresented girls personally offensive.)
But back to voice acting…
The race-switch game has historically favored white voice actors but the second it favors voice actors of color, it’s a whole thing? A crisis?
But it wasn’t a crisis when y’all were doing it?
Miss me with a “double standard.” How is attempting to balance things out, a double standard?
Leveling a tipped scale does not a double standard make.
(this is all excluding anime dubbing, by the way, that is its own issue/arena and since multiple types of american voice actors have been voicing those mostly Japanese characters, if I tried to break that down, this would be longer than a CVS receipt. I’m also not versed enough in that industry to speak on it. If there are Japanese/Chinese-American voice actors who have thoughts about that, I’d be interested in hearing them.)
I feel like Black animated characters and anything involving African American voiceover should be gatekept. The door should be shut. Slammed. Locked.
We have so few Black characters, even today!
There just aren’t enough Black characters for even Black voice actors to audition for, and you think white people should get a shot at those roles, too?!
Black characters should be reserved for Black voice actors, in my honest opinion.
It’s hard enough for Black voice actors to get the Black roles. You all have so many white characters to play, why wade through our kiddie pool when you have oceans?
I know that there are non-Black voice actors who want to flex their acting range, but the Black characters we seldom get are not your opportunities to do that.
There are other ways to demonstrate range. Voice an alien, a robot, an anthropomorphic puppy, it’s animation/fantasy/games. The options are endless.
But when it comes to fictional HUMAN characters? Every voice actor needs to stay in their racial lane when audition time comes around.
And if you’re so bored of your own culture that you want to explore everyone else’s, I think that’s saying more about how you feel about your race than anything.
There is no shame in finding beauty in your own people, and wanting to hear those characters’ voices represented authentically.
I don’t want to hear non-Black people vocally cosplay Blackness anymore.
And to be fair, I have no interest in going for their roles either.
Deal? We cool?
Leave the Black characters to the Black voice actors. We got this, I promise you.
- BLACK Voice Actor Hayley Armstrong
If you need Black voice actors for hire, check out Hayley Armstrong on her website: hayleyarmstrongvoiceover.com.