There are many things wrong with whitewashing — a term for Hollywood’s tendency to massively underrepresent people of color in its movies. Asians receive only 1% of lead roles in Hollywood, making them the most invisible among the large minority groups in the U.S. 2.7% of lead roles go to Latino actors and 14.3% go to black actors. Yet what particularly hurts about the way Asians are kept off-screen is that it reveals how people treat Asians as weak and easy to ignore.

Rather than roles that see Asians as human, Asians are often cast as stereotypes: the emasculated Asian man or the submissive, sexually objectified Asian woman. Both these tropes have one attribute in common: weakness. Ken Jeong as Mr Chow in The Hangover is emasculated — an extensive bit is done on how small his genitals are; he is absurd, barely intelligible and uses an exaggerated Chinese accent when he does speak. When I heard that Olivia Munn, a half-Chinese actor, was playing Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse, I was excited for a year in anticipation. Finally, I thought, an Asian woman gets a major superhero role. Finally, someone to show Asian-American girls that they can be heroes too, rather than just sidekicks.

But Olivia Munn’s Psylocke was a disappointment. She had about three lines and stood around as a prop for most of the movie. Another silent and hypersexualized Asian character. All the media had to say about her role was how she used lubricant to squeeze into her skintight costume.

Forms of discrimination against Asians in the U.S. are sometimes accepted even when they would be seen as outrageous against other minorities. For example, as the criticism of whitewashing reached a high with the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite controversy — leading to protests and celebrities like Will Smith boycotting the ceremony — Chris Rock still made use of racist Asian stereotypes while hosting the ceremony. He herded three small Asian children onstage and introduced them as accountants, playing on the stereotype that Asians are nerdy, silent and good at math. While Rock was scathing about racism against African-Americans, Asians, as usual, didn’t seem to matter. This double standard operates on the same, tired belief that Asians are easy to bully.

Jokes based on racial stereotypes can be funny, but it wasn’t so funny during the Oscars because Asians were not represented as human — or equals — anywhere else in the ceremony. Rock’s bit might not have been as offensive if Asians were not treated like passive objects all the time on the public stage. Flatly representing Asians as docile, silent and ultimately inferior in their need for representation is further damaging to the cause of racial equality.

Far too many times to count, white actors have been cast as Asian characters. But criticisms leveled against directors and producers who cast white actors for Asian roles are often waved away as annoying and ultimately unimportant. Take the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the Japanese character Major Kusanagi in the anime Ghost in the Shell. Leaked emails from Paramount showed that producers had brainstormed ways to digitally edit Asian features onto Johansson — a digital yellowface that would be unimaginable today, for example, in the case of black features edited onto a white actor.

A common excuse for castings such as Johansson's is that no Asian actress has enough star power to play these roles and movies need star power to make money — that’s just how the industry works. Producer Steven Paul also insists that he sees Ghost in the Shell as international and not Japanese. The same kinds of responses were seen when Emma Stone played a half-Chinese woman in Aloha, when white actors played lead Egyptian characters in Exodus: Gods and Kings and when Tilda Swinton was chosen last month to play an originally Tibetan monk in Doctor Strange. In Swinton’s case, the producers wrote out the monk’s Asian heritage in the script and made the character white, while still placing him in Buddhist temples in Asia — whitewashing if I ever saw it. The director’s defence is really bizarre: he suggests that by being liberal in terms of gender, he could get away with the race problem.

Saying that this is just how the industry works is the laziest excuse for directors and producers who want to dodge the blame. It is pathetic to dismiss whitewashing as something happening outside of your control, leaving you helpless against it. Producers and directors of major Hollywood movies: you are powerful agents of the industry. You are making the decisions on whether to cast Asian actors or not. You are the industry. There are so few Asian stars in Hollywood because you never give them a chance in the first place. And the worst irony of all is that, if only you cast aside your prejudice, diverse casting could actually help you make more money, as this recent study suggests.

And unfortunately, when you fail us, it matters. It matters because this casting aside of Asian actors in movies mirrors and perpetuates the way that Asian-Americans are kept invisible and unheard in the U.S. It matters because for Asian children, dressing up for Halloween so often means dressing up as white characters. It matters because Asian children grow up surrounded by popular images that tell them they never get to be the main character, never the hero, never very important — sometimes not even fully human. It matters beyond the U.S. because people all over the world watch Hollywood movies and the way they see — no, don’t see — Asians, can affect how they view Asians in reality. It matters because we fight the silencing and the undermining of Asians everyday.

Asians are speaking up. The fanmade #StarringJohnCho campaign photoshopped Asian American actor John Cho onto movie posters such as those of James Bond and Iron Man to show that it is not unimaginable or ridiculous to see Asians as leads. Cho has supported the campaign, saying, “Movies may be as close to a document of our national culture as there is; they’re supposed to represent what we believe ourselves to be. So when you don’t see yourself at all — or see yourself erased — that hurts.” Aziz Ansari’s show Master of None shows how producers can want one Indian actor as a token minority — but add one more Indian actor and it’s not OK because it becomes a so-called Indian show. The TV show Fresh off the Boat features Asians as a real family — a rare find — and its lead actress Constance Wu has become increasingly fierce about the underrepresentation of Asians in Hollywood. Mindy Kaling is an all around boss — producer, director, creator and main star of her show — and in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Ming-Na Wen kicks ass, literally.

Asians are not easy to bully. Perhaps a reason we haven’t always been too vocal is because we know that the U.S. has problems with race more serious than ours — African Americans face much more damaging discrimination. But silence is no longer an option because it encourages others to treat Asians as jokes, as irrelevant.