The internet has been up in arms since the release this week of the trailer for “Nina,” the upcoming movie about Nina Simone. Star Zoe Saldana, while clearly acting her heart out, looks like she’s wearing blackface to play the much darker-skinned jazz musician, who became an outspoken civil rights activist and eventually an expat recluse before making a comeback of sorts — which looks to be the central subject of the film.

Simone’s estate weighed in earlier this week, responding to a tweet by Saldana referencing one of Simone’s famous quotes: “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me — No Fear . . . I mean really, no fear.”

“Cool story but please take Nina’s name out your mouth,” @NinaSimoneMusic responded. “For the rest of your life.”

The real question is: Why did anyone greenlight this impending disaster in the first place? Did any of the (nearly all-white) people working on the movie actually know anything about Simone going into it? She was a prominent and controversy-courting pro-black voice, a supporter of Malcolm X and a friend of Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, and a composer and performer of angry, despairing songs about racism like “Mississippi Goddam,” which she wrote in response to 1963’s Birmingham church bombing and murder of Medgar Evers.

Is there anyone less well-suited to be played by an actress in skin-darkening makeup? This is a woman who said: “To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the world — black people. So, my job is to make them more curious about where they came from and their own identity and pride in that identity.” And “this is what compels me to push black people. To identify with black culture: giving out to them that Black-Ness; that Black-Power.”

To make matters exponentially worse, the film’s creators apparently never consulted Simone’s family on anything. In an interview with Ebony magazine, Simone’s daughter weighed in on the uproar about Saldana’s casting: “As an actress I respect her process, but I also know that there are many actresses out there, known or not, who would be great as my mother. The one actress that I’ve had in my heart for a very long time, whose work I’m familiar with already, is Kimberly Elise. Many people have spoken to me about Viola. I love her look. I love her energy. Both of the actresses that I’ve mentioned are women of color, are women with beautiful, luscious lips and wide noses, and who know their craft.”

She also spoke about her surprise that nobody asked for her help with the biopic: “We offered to get involved with all the stuff that we have, from the music, to the pictures, to her writings, to connecting them with the stories of many people who were close to my mother, and we were ignored.”

So to recap: in an era when white supremacists are popping up in the news on a regular basis, and the Oscars just enraged pretty much everyone by being lily-white — Hollywood still thinks it’s a great idea to put out a movie in which a black woman is played by a much, much less black woman wearing skin-darkening makeup (unevenly applied, from the looks of it) and nose-widening prosthetics. And in case you’re wondering — no, the casting is not because all the other black actresses were busy.

Congratulations, film industry: You have learned exactly nothing from your mistakes. You have also given even more relevance to the title of the recent Netflix documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?” — a film which deserves to eclipse “Nina” as testament to the singer’s cultural importance.