The Dangerous Fallacy of a Post-Racial Society

This is an open letter addressed to the team at @TheBoldType, the new Freeform show about female empowerment and ambition.
Edit: The writers of the show (@BoldTypeWriters on Twitter) have in fact responded to viewer comment on this same issue.
I just had a chance to watch last night’s episode of #TheBoldType, and while I loved it, I felt lost — abandoned — because I wasn’t in it.
My experience, and the experience of so many people, was treated with not just a lack of consideration, but as a non-entity.
In your depictions of female friendship and relationships — of young women’s journeys to self-discovery and agency — it is clear, I believe, that you are endeavouring to write from a place of truth and idealism.
But while parts of your story last night may have been depicted as the ideal, what was missing was the truth: we are not in a post-racial society.
When Kat and Adena were confronted by the bigot on the street while Adena spoke to her mother on the phone, the scene played out in a way that called out one particular form of injustice while silently denying the existence of another.
While Adena’s language and religious observances made her a target, so too did Kat’s skin colour — if not initially, then certainly from the moment she rightly came to Adena’s defense.
By simple virtue of being black, the situation would have unfolded much differently for Kat than it did in your script.
All four opportunities to address this were left unseized: 1, when Jacqueline picked Kat up and they were riding in the car back to the office; 2, when the girls were discussing what had happened as they sat and talked in the closet; 3, when Kat and Adena discussed things when she came to the office to return Kat’s phone; and 4, when Jacqueline brought Kat into her office and impressed upon her a new, more enlightened perspective on Adena’s actions.
This last scene, in particular, was written so that the burden of understanding fell on Kat as if she had no stake in the game or faced no risk of her own.
As a black woman, she would have been subjected, at the very least, to a spiteful hiss of “N*gger” the moment her fist connected with that man’s face — if not before.
As a black woman, not only would she have not been given any benefit of the doubt when the police arrived — she could have lost far more than a 12-hour block of time that was instead spent in jail; she could have lost her life. It has been known to happen for less.
The storyline as it unfolded positioned Kat as an outsider to oppression — as unaccustomed, unsusceptible and immune to prejudicial attack.
The deafening silence on these issues in this episode perpetuates the dangerous fallacy that the world in which we live is a post-racial one, where discrimination and oppressive action against black people is a settled history. It is not. To portray it as such is not only dismissive, but dangerous, as this allows the most sinister, most quiet crimes against us to be perpetrated unchecked and unacknowledged.
Adena’s assertion to Kat that “You have a choice” while she herself as a “Muslim lesbian living in today’s America” did not is woefully neglectful of the limited choices left to black women and men of all orientations and all faiths living in the very same America — and world — where our very blackness — a target for hatred and vitriol on its own — only compounds the discrimination we face when we be Muslim and/or lesbian in addition, as many are.
To highlight the struggle Adena faces as a result of her intersectional identities is both noble and just; but this cannot be done in such a way that the very real and often similar struggles of black people gets erased. The two realities can and must coexist in art as they do in real life.
Black people are not singular in the struggle for equality, and though we have made strides, we are no more immune than the communities whose fights are in the spotlight now. Anti-black sentiment in this world is not behind us. There is so much work to be done for so many people, on so many fronts.
We are fighting on the front lines. Please do not ignore our flank as you position yourself to defend the other.
