Wait, Jews aren’t white? Some of them aren’t, some of them are. Most European Jews, as far as I can tell, are pretty white. Sure, some of them might not share the same anscestory, but they are still white. Or does white now refer to something other than skin color? Are we taking this down a dangerous road?
I also would say the consumers are necessarily racist/sexist, just because movies aren’t diverse. I’d say this is a deeper, more structural problem. More a problem of marketing, demographics, and habit, than any individual, or collection of individuals being racist. There also is the issue of tropes, for whatever reasons we expect certain makeups to symbolize certain things, like the “nuclear middle class family” for instance…
The key word there is “apparently,” although more accurately it’s “supposedly.” The reality is that Hollywood assumes such a thing without any evidence (and despite evidence to the contrary). It reinforces the bias by not making such films, or if making them, sending them straight to video or marketing them in a particular way. A film that succeeds anyways is seen as an anomaly whereas a film that fails is seen as proof (even if it actually flopped because it was terrible).
Well we already are removing Hispanic whites from the equation for some reason (over half the people who self-identify as Hispanic also self-identify as white). I figure more arbitrary rules for the quota system can’t hurt.
How about we also enforce quotas on the number of people below the age of 40 too?
This article brought to my mind The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is hilarious and amazing and features no white men in any permanent roles. Or for a different demographic, The Boondocks, with its predominantly black cast, set in a white suburban world.
That is actually complete and total bullshit. You actually don’t need to consider any of that fuckery. And here’s the reason why.
No actual cop lives the life of a gritty cop drama. No actual lawyer or doctor or wacky young urbanite actually lives the life of any of those TV or film characters. These are fantasy make-believe stories about not-real people.
The only thing you need to consider is how un-real to make your unicorn fart fairy tale about gritty drug dealers with a heart of gold or whatever. Because there is no fucking way in hell that you will EVER be representing “reality.”
I mean, The Cosby Show didn’t suck because it was unrealistic that Cliff Huxtable was a doctor. It actually succeeded in part because it showed a character perspective that you don’t usually see - it was not just another thinly veiled clone of All In the Family (I mean, it kind of was, but a little more thickly veiled at least!).
In your world, no one would make shows about cops to begin with because, if we’re shooting for statistical accuracy as a worthy goal, most people are not cops! You’d sooner do a show about the unemployed! And we wouldn’t have ANY superhero shows becaues no one is actually a superhero.
The mandate for film and TV is that it is an interesting and compelling story (that you can sell ad time/merch with). The thing that cripples a more realistic portrayal of diversity is that people imagine that if you have mostly black characters people will think it’s a “black show” and it will target the “wrong demographic” (IE, not rich white kids who spend a lot of money).
The solution to the problem of white dudes in film and TV is advertising demographics, foremost. Those simply reflect the racism that is part of our society already - if white people don’t watch “black shows,” then people will sell media differently to those different demographics.
Well, that’s certainly begging the question - and doubly so! (Also, half of affluent young people are going to be women, and superheroes are, of course, imaginary and even within established narratives have plenty of female and non-white characters.)
They should ignore generations of lesser housing, schools, and job opportunities and just magically create multi-million-dollar shows without any help from funding or producing sources when they turn 30! She’s Gotta Have It can be done thousands of different times by anyone with gumption, yessirree bob!
To add to your point, the Census form now has many more options to answer that question. They’ve finally accepted the fact that mixed-race people shouldn’t have to choose one out of all the others as their sole identity.
This brings to mind Studio 360’s 30-second romantic comedy contest. I’d been intrigued by the 30-second horror film contest and came up with several ideas for that, but when I started thinking about romantic comedies all the ones I could think of featured mostly white casts of financially well-off heterosexuals with the focus more often than not being on the male lead.
As much as I wanted to upend all of that I couldn’t think how to do so in thirty seconds and make it recognizably a romantic comedy.
While I agree with the premise of the article (I’d love to see more diverse stories get made in Hollywood, and I’m a straight middle class white guy), I can’t imagine that Hollywood would ever decide to do that when huge blockbusters featuring mostly white dudes pull in hundreds of millions of dollars. Although, Furious 7 is an interesting one in that it’s aimed primarily at young men, but the cast is fairly diverse.
The point there being that old conservative studio executives should give their target audience a little (a lot?) more credit for how tolerant they are of diversity.
I bet that instead of doing another fucking Peter Parker origin story Spider-Man reboot, they could have gone with Miles Morales and made just as much money.
But it’s the typical “cover your ass” behaviour of most entertainment people, right? “This has worked for us in the past, if we take a risk and it flops, I’ll get fired”. Nobody wants to take a risk because they’re (mostly) all greedy, spineless wasters.
Y’know what would be great? If somebody sincerely proposed such a limit, the right wingers would go ape. In fact, I’m ready to post the idea over on freerepublic.com just for the lulz.
On second thought, it might be more plausible on something like the SAG website, if they have a forum. Then casually point the troglodytes in the right direction.
It’s a fair cop - part of the reason this happens is because it’s white dudes all the way down, so they don’t see anything weird about it. Though rather than “better,” I might say that it’s “prerequisite” - you’re going to need someone other than a fish to make the show including everyone living above water, at least if you want to have any hope of it being a positive representation.
Probably 30% of Jews could really pass in the US, the rest are black, Hispanic appearing, asian, or varying levels of that much hated middle eastern color including by my guess at least 40-50% of European settlers(Ashkenaz) though there are enough who would pass well enough as a pure blonde Nordic Aryan ubermensch.
Interestingly for genetic studies despite the variety of colors nearly every Jew(except obviously the recent conversion trend) shows far more commonality with other Jews worldwide than anyone in the areas they settled in centuries/millennia ago and began to superficially resemble.
Passing, as light skinned minorities sometimes can do, for example Obama would not be considered white by many people in the US despite his skin color and ancestry, even being related to Dick Cheney, because he is not pure blooded and has some African American traits, it just depends how white you can look and act I guess.
I have always though calling at least Jews white in the rise of is a very dangerous trend, we are white when it suits people to lump us in for their protection but we are the other when it is time to assign blame. Calling us white because some are living a fragile ‘model minority’ life of privilege is not unlike saying some minorities are privileged because of their representation in professional sport. It is certainly not white privilege even if some of the privelage can be obtained by passing as white.
