White-washing is the process of casting white actors and actresses to play non-white roles. It is a tradition in Hollywood as old as the business itself. In the most nefarious of examples, white actors donned blackface make-up to play or mock African-American characters-a performative “tool” that lasted into the 1990s. At other times, actors adopted stereo-typed mannerisms and speech to play Asian characters-most famously perhaps when Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Such blatant racism on-screen is rare today (unless it’s played for parody, and even in such instances still creates controversy). But the problem of white-washing has not disappeared. It’s just evolved. Modern white-washing may look less offensive, but the effect is the same: it removes people of color from characters of color, and thus from our stories.

Last year white-washing controversy spiked with Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. Scott cast English actor Christian Bale in the part of Moses, and surrounded him with a cast that included Aaron Paul, Ewen Bremner and Sigourney Weaver. All fine actors, none of Middle-East or North-African heritage. As a result, Exodus: Gods and Kings became one more film about white actors saving African slaves from bondage.

When questions about Scott’s casting choices finally reached the director, he pushed back, saying that his film simply would be financed without white, famous actors.

The issue again arose this year when Scarlett Johansson was cast to play the lead in the American remake of Japanese anime classic The Ghost in the Shell. Presumably Johansson’s character will get a name change. It’s hard to see her playing Major Motoko Kusanagi. But judging from the casting in Aloha, you never know.

Aloha, the latest romantic-comedy from writer/director Cameron Crowe, is in the midst of a casting controversy. Crowe selected Emma Stone to play Allison Ng. Stone’s character is the daughter of a half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese father and a Swedish mother.

Chris Lee, writing for EW, sums up Aloha‘s white-wash incongruity nicely:

In order to process this idea of Stone as a bi-racial character, as someone whose genetic lineage can be traced back to the Middle Kingdom by way of Polynesia, you must first get past the obvious stumbling blocks: her alabaster skin and strawberry blond hair, her emerald eyes and freckles—past the star’s outwardly unassailable #Caucasity—if only because the movie hammers home her cultural other-ness in just about every other scene.

Thanks to the character’s half-Hawaiian-half-Chinese father, Ng (“Rhymes with ‘ing’!”) is a Hula dancing expert with a functional knowledge of Hawaiian folk guitar who rhapsodizes about the islander spiritual energy mana when she isn’t attempting to save the archipelago from a creeping military-industrial complex.

Crowe wrote Aloha with a bi-racial Hawaiian-Asian-American woman character at its core. Which is laudable given the fact that Asian-American women are woefully underrepresented in American film and television. To see such a rare part, an Asian-American protagonist, go to Emma Stone really is troubling.

Just how rare are stories that feature Asian-American women in the US? In the study It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-screen Representation of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2013, Martha M. Lauzen found the percentage of female protagonists in those stories to be 15%. Of those 15% of female protagonists, only 3% were Asian characters.

Three percent of fifteen percent. The Asian population is the fastest growing demographic in America, yet Asian women comprise a sliver of our stories on-screen (a fact that Johansson and The Ghost in the Shell team might keep in mind).

There are, right now, Asian-American actresses who could, and should, have played the part of Allison Ng in Aloha. If it’s a financing issue as Ridley Scott claims, surely Maggie Q or Olivia Munn could have made the business-case for a $40-million rom-com role opposite Bradley Cooper.

It is not necessary to cast a white actor in a non-white part.

Fortunately, there is reason to believe Cameron Crowe is listening. This week Crowe took to his personal website, where he wrote a letter apologizing for white-washing Allison Ng’s character, and declaring that he alone deserves the blame.

Here’s Crowe:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice.

…

We were extremely proud to present the island, the locals and the film community with many jobs for over four months. Emma Stone was chief among those who did tireless research, and if any part of her fine characterization has caused consternation and controversy, I am the one to blame.

I am grateful for the dialogue. And from the many voices, loud and small, I have learned something very inspiring. So many of us are hungry for stories with more racial diversity, more truth in representation, and I am anxious to help tell those stories in the future.

This is not the solution. After-the-fact apologies are important, but they are not change. Still, there is a way forward to be found in Crowe’s letter, in a business that desperately needs change. A year after Ridley Scott blamed financiers for white-washing Moses in Exodus, Cameron Crowe is taking responsibility for Aloha. Crowe could have gone a step further, ensuring readers that will not make the same mistake again, but his words indicate he has learned the importance of racial representation.

Emma Stone is a Hollywood A-lister. As an Oscar-nominee, a comedy-star, and a lip-synch icon, she has critical accolade and popular success on a level few women in Hollywood achieve. By publicly apologizing for casting an actress of such repute, Crowe is making a strong statement against one of Hollywood’s longest standing traditions: favoring white performers at almost any cost.

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