Tech company Mursion is employing white actors to play people of color in diversity training programs using virtual reality — and the practice is raising some controversy in the acting and media world, BuzzFeed News reported.
Some companies use such training programs to simulate situations about diversity and inclusion at the workplace. The scenarios feature avatars played by human actors and improvise around situations such as people discriminating toward others or characters practicing how to support a traumatized employee in an event of racial injustice, according to simulations reviewed by BuzzFeed.
Mursion’s human actors, or simulation specialists, are playing their roles using a voice modulator and remote to toggle between characters, which means they are often playing people with a different race and gender than themselves.