But if racism is to be less and less of a thing, it's through an ongoing discussion and understanding of its effects, which I feel has improved over time, but still needs some catching up after faltering in the 90s and its move to really ignore specific discrepancies and solutions in the name of a false equality. But talking about race enables perspective and analysis, especially of unintentional racism, including the Key & Peele sketch above (indeed, much of their material to begin with).
Yep. We all have unconscious biases as a result of living in this culture, and the people who can best overcome racism are not the ones who instantly get defensive and go "How dare you accuse me of being racist?", but the ones who actually listen and say "Wow, if my words come off as offensive to others, I should examine my own behavior and attitudes through others' eyes and see if I have a problem that I need to address." After all, it's not about one's own ego, it's about how one treats other people. Getting angry and defensive is just a way to shut down the discussion. The most ethical people are the ones who make sure to question themselves -- just like the best-running computers are the ones subjected to regular error-checking and self-repair. Insisting you're incapable of doing wrong doesn't actually make it so.
Heck, my ancestry is a white supremacist's dream -- my father's family practically came over on the
Mayflower, and my mother's family has lived in Virginia since the 1790s and had members who fought for the Confederacy. I grew up in a white neighborhood and didn't interact much with people of other ethnicities in my childhood. I was never actually taught to hold any racist attitudes -- my family's pretty progressive as a rule, at least since my grandfather's generation -- but as a child I did initially see black or Asian people as unfamiliar and odd, merely from lack of interaction. I had to learn to overcome those prejudices and become more inclusive in my thinking (and the influence of shows like
Star Trek and
Fat Albert was invaluable in that process). Sometimes cultural assumptions about race still crop up in the back of my mind and I have to be alert to them and question them.
Of course, the best cure for such attitudes is to interact more widely with people outside your own ethnic/racial/religious/community group. The more you get to know other people as individuals, the harder it is to hold onto the myth of them as something alien. That's how it was for me, as I made more friends of other ethnicities and belief systems in high school and college. And that's why the changing demographics of the US are working in favor of greater inclusion.
But, like you said, improvement is gradual, and I imagine the next 10 years will show greater improvement, but because race analysis is being discussed more now than before. That we have more minorities in starring roles in TV is a testament to that (though still woefully underrepresented when compared to the population of the audience, so there's still work to do).
Indeed. I still find it ironic that, even though
Big Hero 6 purported to show an alternate-history San Francisco that had a stronger Japanese presence and influence on its culture, the cast of the movie still had somewhat
less Asian representation than the actual population of San Francisco, and none of the Chinese presence that's a major part of San Francisco's demographics and culture in reality. And there are still plenty of movies that are set in nonwhite-majority cities like San Francisco or New York and yet have almost exclusively white casts (e.g.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and
Limitless). TV is better at this, but feature films are still way behind the times in inclusion.
To wit, I'm so sure that in 1993, the producers didn't intend any harm whatsoever in casting an Asian woman as the Yellow Ranger and a Black man as the Black Ranger -- indeed, the original actress was white. I'm positive their intent was to deliver a semi-decent show on the cheap with a diverse cast that could rake in millions.
Honestly, that's giving them too much credit -- both the "semi-decent" part and the "rake in millions" part. At the time, Saban Entertainment was more a distributor and repackager than a production company per se -- mostly they just imported dubbed anime to the US and exported DIC's shows internationally. They didn't handle anything really big -- mostly obscure anime like
Macron 1 and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Samurai Pizza Cats. They weren't exactly known for quality. MMPR was just a cheap, cheesy attempt at repackaging a live-action Japanese show instead of an animated one, and nobody had any clue that it would become as hugely popular as it did. I don't think it was even promoted all that heavily before it came out, since I'm not sure anyone really knew what to make of it.
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