Racebending was coined as a term of protest in 2009 as a response to the casting decisions for the live-action film adaptation of the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
"[2][3] However, the cast went unaltered and when production began, the leaders of this protest responded by founding the advocacy group and accompanying website Racebending by "playfully borrowing the concept of manipulating elements (bending) from the Avatar universe.
[5] Chong does not consider breakdowns problematic in themselves, but as stated by Russell Robinson in a research article published by the Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, they tend to discriminate against minorities in the entertainment industry.
[7] Robinson claims that these directors and others within the film industry can easily decide to change the race of a breakdown or of a character being adapted from another form of media.
"[6] According to Robinson, there are circles of "the wealthy elite in Hollywood" whose "implicit biases", covered up by breakdowns, lead to a significant amount of racebending and whitewashing within the film industry.
"[citation needed] After the producers of The Last Airbender announced their decision to cast white actors Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone as the lead roles, the artists who had worked on the animated series it was based on created an anonymous LiveJournal website and started a letter-writing campaign.
[8] The film Exodus: Gods and Kings received significant backlash on social media before its release due to white actors Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton and others being cast to play the roles of Egyptians.
"[12] Activists groups, such as the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) accused Johansson of lying that she would never portray or attempt to play someone of a different race.
[12] The Founding President of MANAA, Guy Aoki, stated, "Hollywood continues to make the same excuses, that there aren't big enough Asian/Asian American names to open a blockbuster film.
[18] Netflix has similarly cast black actor Denzel Washington (aged 68) in an upcoming biopic of Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, who was 26 years old at the beginning of the Second Punic War, and likely of Semitic Phoenician descent.
[19] Usage evolved, and by 2015, media studies academic Kristen J. Warner wrote that the term has "many definitions and contexts", from the film industry practice of color-blind casting to fan fiction.
"[22] The University of Southern California report noted that it sampled all "independent speaking character utters one or more discernible and overt words (of any language) on screen.