Memo to Tina Fey: Lou Diamond Phillips, While Excellent, Is Not Latino (an Explainer)
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A couple days ago, Billy Eichner posted an “On the Street” in which he asked “LaTina Fey” to name 20 Latino performers in one minute. Not only did she call queen Gina Rodriguez “the woman from Jane the Virgin,” she named Lou Diamond Phillips who, while great, is not Latino.
Here’s a little explainer for Tina Fey and the world, because people always presume that Lou Diamond Phillips is Latino. The reason they do so is because Lou Diamond Phillips, who is Filipino with Scottish, Cherokee, and Chinese ancestry, has played many Latinos on the silver screen, because of Hollywood’s—como se dice—flexible viewpoint when it comes to hiring actors of one race to play another race. Usually this means that Hollywood will hire a white person to play a person of color, such as Russian actor Yul Brynner’s notorious portrayal of the King of Siam in The King & I or, more recently, Johnny Depp portraying Tonto, an offensive caricature of a Native American of unknown origin, in box-office shitshow The Lone Ranger.