White Stories are Easier To Write
The Mysteries of TV and Film “Diversity”, and How a Terrible Show Is Helping
by Lena Potts
According to the internet, we’re in a Golden Age of Television. The internet is right- TV is great right now, and I’m into it. This season, TV tried to mix it up- they tried to, shockingly, put people of color on TV. So far, it’s been just ok- while there are definitely a bunch of non-White people on network TV right now, not all of it is good TV, and that’s especially painful in this gilded era, when the standard is so high. Surprisingly, though, one pretty bad show has handled TV diversity with innovation, and in finding a creative solution it has highlighted one of the real problems- it’s hard to write television or film stories about people of color.
Let’s pump the brakes before I’m attacked for my obvious ignorance and racism. People of color, as with the people of non-color we normally watch, are rich and diverse characters with interesting lives (I’m not a great example, but like, they exist). But, unless your interests lie explicitly in telling the stories of hardship, often hardships tied to race, which are valid, important, and fascinating stories, it’s not going to be easy.
I don’t know what you’ve heard, but equality is struggling. Race/ethnicity and socio-economic status have bred and created a monster that supports the death of the middle class, the school-to-prison pipeline, Black and Latino kids getting shot all the damn time, the Redskins still being a mascot (and that being probably the least of Native American concerns, but the one we pay attention to), etc.
The New York Film Academy made this great infographic; while it is focuses on Black representation in film, it gives a lot of stats on other racial and/or ethnic groups as well. Basically, everyone is underrepresented. Hollywood, sometimes, tackles stories about people of color (really just Black people- when was the last time you watched a movie about Asians or Asian-Americans). Many of these movies are fantastic; the Oscars, my snooty obsession, even chooses to recognize them when they have space. In recent years quite a few racial movies have reached both critical acclaim and commercial awareness: The Help was both good and the worst; 12 Years a Slave took over the world, and even prompted People Magazine to name Lupita Nyong’o their Most Beautiful Woman in a way that felt only a little like exoticism; Fruitvale Station, which is horrifying perfection, was snubbed more than I expected.
Everything I just mentioned was about Black people, and nothing I just mentioned avoided being about their Blackness. In Fruitvale Station, Michael B. Jordan portrays Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by a BART Police Officer on January 1, 2009. Jordan, who is 1) Flawless and 2) on the come-up, is good at being shot to death on film. As David Simon, God-like creator of The Wire (Jordan’s starting-point), puts it:
Perversely, we are at the edge of creating a hard-and-fast rule of film narrative in which the one assured means by which we can get America to care about young men of color is to shoot Michael B. Jordan.
The article is amazing, and I really couldn’t suggest reading it enough (probably about as much as I’d implore you to watch The Wire). Simon offers impassioned criticisms of how we deal with Black men and their stories- but he misses something. The variety of stories is, for people of color, smaller, because most stories, at some point, have to become a race story.
My previous statements suppose a story set in this world, wherein race is still relevant, and, ahem, colors nearly everything. Take, for example, a show set within our universe, with all its rules and context, about a Latina President, wherein no one ever mentions her race- it’s preposterous. Of course, in this universe, where we live, it is important that she is Latina, and a woman, and someone should at least acknowledge it at some point if I’m going to continue believe the show. Otherwise the realism is broken and I’m annoyed and wow, that was lame.
I intended to not be obnoxiously uppity in writing this, and go through the list of top grossing films of 2013 and discuss whether they feasibly could have starred people of color. Then I looked at the list, and most of them were animated, superheroes, about animals, remakes, or adaptations. Not really great for this discussion, as they generally rely on source material. So instead, let’s look at the Academy Award Best Picture Nominees for last year and talk about those casts. The winner, 12 Years a Slave, was, spoiler alert, about slavery. American Hustle is great, and literally had to be White. Captain Phillips is about race and Tom Hanks, and does a fine job making Somali pirates people, but still pirates. Dallas Buyers Club is about a real White person. Gravity did not have to be White, but there are not a lot of astronauts of color (check out NASA Facts), nor Biomedical Engineers. Her could have had people of color. Nebraska’s setting requires Whiteness for it to make sense. Philomena could also have been about people of color, but takes place in the UK, so there’s some small difference in conversation there. Wolf of Wall Street was the most necessarily White thing.
Biopics are inherently racial because of the history; the same goes for true stories. Anything that takes place in a historical context has to take that into account, often forcing people of color from powerful or focused positions. Current day stories, too, have to account for reality, and while we have many more people of color living in a raceless, movie-adaptable life, it’s nowhere close to the wealth of opportunity to write about being a politician, or banker, or other non-racial thing in White stories. There is a similar issue with Television, despite the format change.
That’s what privilege is- it’s that we get to tell “normal” stories about White people. Television and movies that center on White people are, by and large, not about their Whiteness, nor is it a device, or feature, or plot point in the story. This is far less possible with people of color, because in these stories, race is almost always, to some extent, relevant.
So you want to make a show with people of color. There are a few options:
- Make a show about a character who happens to be of color and allow that to touch, but not drive the plot. I asked someone once if Scandal, which I, criminally, don’t watch, ever addresses that Olivia Pope is a Black woman having an affair with the White President, prepared to be annoyed that they took the easy way out. Turns out, Shonda Rhimes and her team of television wizards do know it matters. My friend told me, “it’s a thing that she’s Black- they bring it up. It’s not like what the show is about, but they don’t ignore it either.” And I was impressed. I don’t know if Olivia Pope’s Blackness, and how it relates to her business and presidential affair, has become more or less of a “thing” in the past season and a half since I had that conversation. But I do know that Shonda knows how make shows last forever (wow Grey’s Anatomy wow), and that audiences and critics have embraced Kerry Washington’s character as complex, well-dressed, and worth watching.
- Make a show explicit about its racial elements. Everyone should watch The Wire. The show is a novelistic portrait of Baltimore, and, in the demographics of the city, is a Black show, although there are also many White characters. I’ve had a handful of people tell me they watched it subtitled, as the characters, many portrayed by native Baltimoreans, use natural and consistent African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). I could write pages on the wonder of The Wire, but relevant here is that it is non-exclusive. Despite the AAVE, and what might be a challenging first couple of episodes for people culturally and linguistically unfamiliar with the setting, The Wire ends up feeling like any other crime-laced, broadly-set epic. The Departed, too, was difficult for people to understand, with its intense Boston accents, loud Irish music, and 1.56 “fucks” per minute. But it is tremendous in the same way that The Wire is tremendous- it is sprawling, complex, deeply connected, well-written, and, most importantly, it transports you to its world. By the end of the show, everyone can pick apart the intensely complicated moral, political, and economic structures at play. Everyone has their favorite drug dealer, crooked politician, misguided school kid, or screwed-up cop- some White and some Black- not because they’re “the good guys”, but because you understand them and you respect them, or at the very least you respect their game. There’s also a subcategory here, which I might title the Race Show or Race Movie. Included in this are works that know that their audience will be mostly of the race of the main characters/cast, and center their content in that idea, with no intention of branching out. Examples are most Tyler Perry or Kevin Hart things.
- Or, you can fly in the face of convention without committing to race-politics. In Selfie, the critically panned Pygmalion adaptation of the iPhone age, we see a red-headed White woman and an Asian-American man as the two main characters. We’ve all seen My Fair Lady, and also television generally, so we know they’re love interests. This is revolutionary. Almost more than anyone, Asians and Asian-Americans are intensely underrepresented on American television, especially in large, non-nerd roles, with the notable exceptions of Ming-Na Wen killing it on Agents of Shield, Lucy Liu on Elementary, and Mindy Kaling taking over the world. I wanted this to be good, for John Cho and for all of us. So far, one friend has told me she “isn’t as mad at it as I thought I would be, but it’s still really bad”, and another friend is watching it in spite of himself.
This year, we got Black-ish, which is opened to reviews that were both strong and vague. There’s a sense of waiting and hoping- maybe this will break some barriers, look how it’s tackling things head on! Jane the Virgin, centering on a Latino-American family and drawing on some issues of religion and cultural expectation to consider its central issue, is commercially sluggish. Brooklyn Nine-Nine and its diverse cast/characters continue to be successful. Shonda Rhimes forges on with her media takeover with the Viola Davis-led How to Get Away with Murder. Fresh Off the Boat, with an Asian/Asian-American main cast, and either great or horrible premise, will jump onto ABC midseason, so we’ll see. Orange is the New Black is still the standard by which we judge television diversity (unsure whether we should, but we do).
And then there’s Gotham. I don’t know why I’m still watching Gotham- while it’s recovered from its stressfully bad pilot, it still fails to be what it seems like it wanted to be. Through every one of the episodes I have the same question- where the hell are we in time? The showrunners have commented on their deliberate lack of era, calling it “timeless”. While I find this maddening, I’m also interested in the surprising effect is has on its cast and characters. By giving us a jumble of time-markers, like old cars and 90s desktops and Ben Mackenzie’s modern suits, Gotham is able to play with diversity as well. The first episode left me saying aloud “this show looks like 1965 but has racially ambiguous women of color in power and I’m confused”. In reality, so many of the (mostly female) characters possess ambiguous identity qualities in a way that is entirely current. Fish Mooney, played with Madonna-esque affected speech by Jada Pinkett-Smith, leverages her sexuality against women and men in what will probably be a seasons-long power struggle. The police captain is actress Zabryna Guevara, whose past characters have had the last names Ramirez and Perez, but also Berkman, and now Essen. Victoria Cartagena is a non-heterosexual police officer whom my roommate described as “TV Zoe Saldana”. The men, on the other hand, fit in boxes. Watch episode 1- Jim Gordon is so “good” it seems parodic (he wears blue suits because Cop), and his fedora-clad partner is the definition of a foil.
Regardless of my annoyance, people are watching it. For some reason, critics aren’t denouncing it. In direct contrast to the incredible Nolan Batman trilogy, Gotham has rejected the landscape of reality and created its own, and in doing so has casually become a platform for television inclusion of many kinds. It’s weird, but maybe it works.
