Star Wars: The Bad Batch? More Like The White Batch
As everyone says, whitewashing has been a problem in film for decades.
Sure, things got better, but there's always room for improvement. Or did they get better? The freshly released trailer for Disney 's Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 2 displays a level of whitewashing unprecedented for Hollywood…
Except, wait, no, it doesn't.
I mean, look at it:
If there is any difference in character skin colors compared to what they had in their first appearances in The Clone Wars series, you won't see it without extremely careful analysis of gradient and lighting.
Things get even more interesting, if we look about what exactly the "whitewashing" complainers complain about. Thankfully, they have explained their reasons in a petition to "Unwhitewash The Bad Batch" on change.org.
If you don't like reading a massive wall of text, then long story short, they are offended by the whole existence of the Bad Batch as a concept. They have been for years before the new trailer, from the very moment of their appearance in story reels.
The Bad Batch, if haven't followed Disney's Star Wars TV series, is a group of clones, who were genetically altered in an attempt to make supersoldiers. They were deemed too defective and difficult to control to replicate the results, but useful enough to form a commando unit out of them.
Naturally, all members of the Bad Batch differ from the standard clone template, and all but one suffer from a sort of nearly-crippling specialization in whatever thing their makers tried to make them better at. That is what the supporters of the petition above call "whitewashing".
An Internet quarrel between supporters of #unwhitewashtbb and their opponents followed, with both sides accusing each other of ableism (either you hate people suffering from disabilities because you want to force the Bad Batch into the same template as all the other clones, or you are supporting stereotyping of people), and so on.
This all, however, seems to be a storm in a teapot. As one of the people trying to stir it admitted: "I'm just gonna keep it real for a second. Dave Filoni does not give two shits about #unwhitewashtbb and that was made obvious by tales of the Jedi. The only thing that will be effective is not watching and cancelling your Disney+ subscription."
And given by the number of likes on that tweet or supporters of the petition above, compared to the number of views of Bad Batch Season 2's trailer, Disney+ subscription numbers are unlikely to suffer.