Re: Have We Overcome? Not if TV Casting is an Indicator
The point isn't that only black artists can create representations of black people. My point was that if there were more behind the scenes creative personnel who were black, we would probably see more black representations on the screen. People tend to write what they know, especially TV writers who have to write a script a week.
You don't have to be black to make an effort to include black characters, or characters of other ethnicities. You just have to want to be inclusive. There are quite a few white producers who've committed to casting their shows multiethnically, including the creators of
Deep Space Nine, Lost, and
Heroes (the latter shows have lost diversity, but both started out admirably diverse).
Avatar: The Last Airbender, an animated show set in an Asian-based fantasy world where every ethnicity except Caucasian is represented, was created by a couple of guys named Konietzko and DiMartino.
One place where you do find prominent black faces behind the scenes is in animation. Dwayne McDuffie and James Tucker have become major names behind Warner Bros.' animated output, and John Semper has been a story editor or producer on shows such as the '90s
Spider-Man and
Static Shock. And they aren't just doing "black" shows. McDuffie is currently story editor on
Ben 10: Alien Force and Tucker is producing
Batman: The Brave and the Bold; before then, they were both on
Justice League and Tucker did
Legion of Super Heroes.
I don't know beyond a shadow of a doubt, no. I'm surmising. Television producers go where the money is, that's it. They cater to the major demographics that make them the most money. For whatever reason, that seems to be 18-35 white folk.
Where's the evidence that "white folk" as a whole are unwilling to watch shows about nonwhite people? Maybe a few are, but nobody should be catering to the likes of them.
Consider another side. Why is it all these years that Latinos have been fairly underrepresented in Hollywood? As late as TNG (a show specifically structured to show racial and cultural diversity) I recall reading about one 'Latina' actress was turned down because, to paraphrase what she was told, the Enterprise would not need a maid. Maybe because the people who cast and direct are used to dealing with Latinos as their yard workers and house maids? Course these were the same people who defined that the Dr. Crusher character would have a walk 'like a whore', so these are not really enlightened or fair minded. The people in Hollywood are not these paragons of perfect liberal views.
Latinos are fairly well-represented in the TV shows I watch.
The West Wing had two consecutive presidents played by Latino actors (well, half-Latino in Martin Sheen's case), though only one was playing a Latino character.
Galactica has Edward James Olmos.
Fringe has Kirk Acevedo (who's Puerto Rican/Chinese).
Knight Rider had Yancey Arias, though he's been dropped.
Heroes has had cast members including Santiago Cabrera and Dania Ramirez, though I don't think there are any Latinos in the current cast mix. And of course there are plenty of Latinos/as on non-genre shows -- Roselyn Sanchez and Enrique Murciano on
Without a Trace, Alana de la Garza on
Law & Order, Eva Longoria on
Desperate Housewives, etc.
Not to mention plenty of nonwhite actors on non-genre shows -- Omar Epps and Kal Penn on
House, Anthony Edwards and S. Epatha Merkerson on L&O, Marianne Jean-Baptiste on
Without a Trace, Laurence Fishburne as the current lead on
CSI, etc.
Oh, and I forgot to mention one African-American lead character from a recently cancelled SF/fantasy show: Chi McBride from
Pushing Daisies.
I'm white, overweight, have a congenital heart condition and a geek, I don't see too many people who fit that description and still act like a "normal" person on TV either, but you don't see me complaining that you don't see any "normal" geeks or disabled people on TV. I can relate to gay people though I'm not gay, I can relate to women though I'm not a woman, I can even relate the ethic minorities and understand where they are coming from. They don't have to be like me for me to understand them.
Hear, hear. We have got to get over this narrow-minded assumption that people can't care about anyone who doesn't resemble themselves. All it takes is imagination, respect, empathy, and an open mind.
Diversity should strive to fit the show, not shows strive to meet diversity, because if you have a show that is set in a community that has 95% white people are you going to force the cast to be 20% black just to fit more black people on screen?
Now, that's a fair point as far as it goes; sometimes inclusion can be taken to an illogical degree, like insisting on having a black character in every Robin Hood adaptation, or casting black actresses to play Cleopatra even though she was the last of a pure-bred imperial line of Macedonian Greeks.
But it is true that TV and movies often fail to represent the true diversity of present-day America. Look at the sitcom
Friends, which was allegedly set in New York City but in which nonwhite faces were almost never glimpsed, in total defiance of reality.
And it's compounded when a show is supposed to be global in its storytelling, like
Heroes or
Lost, or set in the future, like
Star Trek or
Babylon 5. A particuarly egregious example was
Firefly -- set in a future that's supposedly dominated by a mix of Western and Chinese culture, but almost totally devoid of Asian faces. And Trek's not much better; it's supposedly a unified Earth of the future, which one would expect to be about half-Asian, but the majority of the characters are of European ancestry and fully
60% of the character names are of British or Irish derivation.
Why do we whites have to feel guilty of everything our forefathers did? And for that matter, why do we always have to hand you non-whites everything? Can't you create anything of your own?
