By Jacey Gibb, Opinions Editor
Iād like to start things off with an open question to humanity: despite all the milestones weāve achieved, and the progress society has made as a whole, how does something like racism still exist?
Itās something I often ask myself whenever I read about the latest hate crime or reported incident of discrimination. Racism is one of those things that Iād like to see disappear in my lifetime, but my name isnāt John Lennon, so Iām going to refrain from being a dreamer. Itās a loaded topic, and not one that I could even hope to cover in a 600-word article, but something that I can cover within a moderate word count is the criticism of racial diversity in the television industry.
While I tend to pride myself on being relatively immune to offensively mundane pop culture news, Iām embarrassingly susceptible to articles related to television shows. Like a parasitic entity, articles pertaining to shows that I donāt even watch have a way of worming themselves into my focal point. One of the seasonās new shows, Bunheads, recently had to defend itself against some bigoted television producer who didnāt like the showās entirely white cast. This incident caused me to experience a LostĀ-like flashback to a few months ago when HBOās Girls was receiving similar heat, despite the show taking place in the cultural metropolis of New York.
Seriously?
[quote style=”boxed”]I understand that television is a huge agent of influence and therefore, has the potential to be a vehicle for teaching tolerance and diversity, but does every show have to be a rainbow of ethnicity?[/quote]
I understand that television is a huge agent of influence and therefore, has the potential to be a vehicle for teaching tolerance and diversity, but does every show have to be a rainbow of ethnicity? So a few shows fail to add in a token minority because it makes the network happyāit doesnāt automatically mean the show is trying to make a subtle statement.
Girlsā creator and star, Lena Dunham, has since addressed the negative feedback about the absence of racial diversity and called the negligence āan accident,ā as well as promised to fix the issue in the showās second season. Iāve followed Dunham since her directorial debut back in 2010, and sheās always presented herself in a bright and professional manner, so I believe her when she says the possibility of offending certain groups just never occurred to her. What makes me wonder though is if maybe it wasnāt so much her being ignorant as it was her just being accepting.
Instead of focusing on aspects that donāt even have a direct influence on the quality of the show itself, Dunham put her efforts towards the writing and character development. Should she be publicly penalized for this? I guess some people think so, but itās not like sheās writing dialogue thatās full of racial slandering and oppressionāitās simply absent.
I grew up in a heavily Caucasian town in Alberta, meaning most of my friends were also white. Itās not like I went out of my way to make this happenāitās just who I happened to interact with. I donāt go around constructing my friendships around specific racial requirements, and I donāt feel obligated to make my group of friends into a model UN. Dunham has repeatedly stated that Girls draws heavily from her own experiences and that each of the characters share traits that she finds in herself, so of course racial issues isnāt going to be a go-to topic. Dunham writes about what she knows and it works perfectly.
Iām not sure why television shows should have to conduct their casting in a manner that caters towards every criticās opinion of what diversity is. Just because a show doesnāt boast a spectrum of skin tones doesnāt mean it should be a lightning rod for criticism.
