Pop culture doesn't reflect the diversity of day-to-day life in America, especially in urban centers. Lena Dunham's new series Girls on HBO -- so wonderfully, awkwardly realistic when it comes to depicting bad job interviews, the vagaries of friendship, and bad sex -- flails like a dying fish when dealing with race. Its world is so homogeneous that the show would be more accurately titled White Girls. NBC's The Office, set in Scranton, Pa., is more ethnically-mixed than Dunham's Brooklyn; so is the Seattle of ABC's Grey's Anatomy, which led the charge with color-blind casting in 2005. According to the New York Times:
Grey's Anatomy has differentiated itself by creating a diverse world of doctors -- almost half the cast are men and women of color -- and then never acknowledging it. ...When [Shonda] Rhimes wrote the pilot [of Grey's Anatomy], she didn't specify the characters' ethnicities, so her casting process was wide open: Mr. Washington, who once played a gay Republican in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, was nearly cast in the role played by Patrick Dempsey, who is white; his Dr. Burke was to be played by a white actor who was forced to drop out at the last moment. Ms. Rhimes imagined "The Nazi" as a "tiny, adorable blond person with lots of ringlets," until Chandra Wilson walked through the door ("I thought it was endearing," Ms. Wilson said of her part. "Endearing as the word 'Nazi' can be."). And even though some network executives assumed Ms. Oh's hypercompetitive character would be white, Ms. Rhimes did not -- in the pilot's script she wasn't even given a last name -- so all it took was one "fabulous" audition from the "Sideways" star to christen the character Cristina Yang. ...
Ms. Rhimes has also worked hard to extend diversity to her show's smallest roles. Determined not to have a program in which "all the extras are white, except the lone janitor," she has created one of the most colorful backgrounds in television, a hospital in which punked-out bike messengers and suffering Hasidim roam the corridors. "Shonda's only rule is drug dealers and pimps cannot be black," said Dr. Zoanne Clack, a black writer for the show who also practices medicine. Even the episodic roles -- a gay African-American, a young Hispanic couple -- are multicultural.
Rhimes' choices of seven years ago were bold but incredibly successful. Why haven't they been replicated? After all, following the enormous impact of Twilight, young adult bookshelves exploded with copy-cat novels about vampires and virgins and the occult in general, and one fully expects "Mommy Porn" to become its own genre in the near future now that Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 3 million paperback copies in April alone.
One answer is that Rhimes, as an auteur, breathes rarefied air. Like other writers/directors/producers -- a talented but small and exclusive fraternity that includes Alan Ball, Joss Whedon, Matthew Weiner, David Chase, and David Simon -- she has an unusual amount of creative control over her finished product. If diversity is a priority for her, she can make it happen. Dunham, as this frat's newest pledge, is still trying to figure out what her priorities are, and some of them are stellar, like being funny and worth watching. As Jenna Wortham of the Hairpin writes, part of the reason that Girls has become a lightning rod for the frustration that people of color don't get to see their experiences reflected on screen is because it "is actually good. It gets So. Many. Things. Right. It's on point again and again, hitting at the high and low notes about being in your twenties ...."
Dunham prioritizes reflecting her own life experiences and those of her friends in an authentic, engaging way, and apparently this is her world: part Jewish, part WASP-y, and overall 50 shades of pale. She is hardly unique in having a friend circle that reflects her own heritage, although she may be the first well-known person to be publicly shamed for it. Salamishah Tillet in the Nation points out that this larger issue needs to be addressed, since many of us live segregated social lives, and it affects us whether we realize it or not.
Still, we can sympathize with Dunham's choice to remain true to (her) life and simultaneously be disappointed, because it implies that Dunham, for all her creativity, ambition, wit, and skill, lacks imagination. How hard is it, after all, asks Sarah Seltzer in the New York Times, to at last break free of the traditional paradigm where "characters written as racially neutral (or even as nonwhite) are virtually always cast as white even though movie-watchers and TV-watchers of all backgrounds will search for a mirror, an entrance point, among the faces they see on screen."
Dunham is far from the only auteur, though, with this failing; as Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic points out, why should a 24-year-old just starting out be blamed for not diversifying media when the problem is a systematic one? Judd Apatow is one of Hollywood's most successful producer-writer-directors. He's prolific, too: a typical year finds him involved in two to four high-profile projects in one capacity or another. And he's not afraid to take risks, including, most recently, working with newbie Dunham to bring Girls to the screen. Yet no film of his has had a single leading character that Joey Drayton would have to think twice about bringing home to her parents. (Unless Tracy and Hepburn have a problem with emotionally-stunted man-children.) The few nonwhite characters in Superbad, Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, and the others in his stable, even 40-Year-Old Virgin -- featuring Apatow's most diverse cast and his smartest script -- exist on the fringes of the story and are there mainly for comic effect.
His most recent foray into relationship comedy, The Five-Year Engagement, which I recently reviewed with writer Adam Freelander for the Billfold, wastes the talents its few nonwhite actors by rendering them as depressing stereotypes: the bespectacled, socially-awkward Asian guy, the dick-obsessed black man, and Mindy Kaling, who, as Adam puts it, plays "Mindy Kaling, which is technically not an ethnic stereotype, though I'm concerned it soon will be." The movie's inability to deal with race in any kind of sophisticated way distracts from its otherwise poignant, interesting exploration of real-life problems.
Is it better, ultimately, to write minority characters, even when you end up making an ass of yourself, or should you stick to what you know at the expense of relegating minorities to the margins, if you remember to include them at all? Put simply: Try and maybe fail, or don't try?
Unfortunately, as long as "don't try" is an option, too many filmmakers and showrunners will quail at the prospect of doing it wrong and getting criticized and will revert to what feels easier. We need a sustained outcry against having movie after movie and TV show after show that is as white as a New Yorker cartoon. This is not about Lena Dunham; this is about our culture, and how much more we will all benefit from color-blind casting in our media and, hopefully, in our lives. Studios needs to stop considering it an option to have a totally vanilla cast, or one that pretends to be a sundae just because it has a couple of sprinkles here and there. Producers need to insist on better minority characters, and to recruit minority writers, directors, and producers to help them and their staffs see around their blind spots. Everyone will be better for it.
And writers, have a little courage! Expand your boundaries. Good faith efforts are often rewarded, especially as long as the quality is there. Just ask Shonda Rhimes, whose show was just renewed for a ninth season. Channel the advice of one memorable minority character from a 1977 classic: "Do or do not. There is no 'try.'"
Follow Ester Bloom on Twitter: www.twitter.com/shorterstory
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I suppose they should have cast David Allen Greer as George Castanza, huh? Would have been more "diverse".
Groups of whites don't generally have a single black, Chinese or Hispanic person hanging out with them, like on some shows, and some black shows and commercials are all black, where we constantly see people of color shoe-horned into situations where they simply would not be, generally speaking. What the author and the proponents of "diversity" are striving for in mainstream entertainment (and life) just does not exist. Generally speaking. And is it wrong not to be interested in another's culture or lifestyle, as long as that culture or lifestyle is not being denigrated?
We have a fantastic time picking places to eat - and the nationality/restaurant match gets to pick the food. The other day we went to a restaurant in SF Chinatown and I'm still not sure what I ate (I've eaten chinese food lots of times but my friend ordered in Mandarin stuff I'd never even seen before). Since we're friends he knows what we each like. It was great.
I learn every day from my buddies, and they from me.
To me, being exclusionary in your relationships while you have neighbors that can teach you so much is not "wrong", just nonsensical.
the truth is that liberal arts college hipster brooklyn is overwhelmingly white. if you asked any of the characters on the show, they would say that they support diversity. they would probably even complain about "girls" being too white.
this is the point. lena dunham is holding up a mirror to the blogging set, and they don't like what they see; it's one thing to talk about diversity in college and another to live it in real life.
You left out Dick Wolf. That guy has had some of the most diverse cast on his TV productions over the decades. Moreso than a Joss Whedon I dare say.
Which is why I have no interest in anything these people have to say. Why would I be?
These are the same id.10ts who state that bIack people shouldn't complain about lack of diversity or representation on TV because BET exists.
Or the same ones who claim that BIack people shouldn't be complaining about racism or lack of opportunities any more because the country has now elected a bIack president.
Because, as we all know so well, Barack Obama being president means that ALL bIack people are president.
Also, because as we all know so well, they didn't then go and embarrass that first bIack president by making him the first president in US history (and probably anywhere in the world) stand up on a podium and have to show his "papers" (his birth certificate) and prove he is who he actually claims he is.
"That's not r.acism, black people
That's love, .....
Stop complaining."
(shakes head)