The Value of "True" Diversity in Media

Doglatine writes about his frustrations with “diversity casting”.

I'm going to provide some perspective "from the other side" so to speak. Have you seen the show Ramy? It's so good. So so so good. I was crying from laughing so hard. And I realized halfway through that I finally understood what it meant to be "represented". I'm an Arab immigrant to the US and an inordinate amount of the material on the show just had me keel over in appreciation. I loved the dichotomy portrayed of trying to date as a Muslim and justifying all the rule breaking you engage in when you have sex. The scene where Ramy's sister hooks up with a white guy is hands down my favorite 90 seconds of television ever. When Ramy's uncle accuses the jews of being tipped off on 9/11, I laughed because my uncle said the same thing. When he travels to his home country of Egypt and fills entire suitcases full of Bengay to dole out as gifts to his family, I remembered the hours of suitcase Tetris my mom played before any trip trying to cram as many banal pedestrian "gifts" as possible. I was watching it with my girlfriend at the time and I just kept exclaiming how true and legitimate all the jokes and references were because I lived them.

It was amazing to consume a piece of media that was almost surgically tailored to serve me. It got to the point where I was doubtful that anyone that wasn't a millennial Muslim would find it entertaining, but the show did extremely well somehow.

So I understand the platonic goal of being "represented" on a visceral level. But here's the thing, it almost never happens.

I remember watching the first season of Mr Robot (another fantastic TV show). The show is about an introverted brilliant hacker. He also sometimes works with a hacker posse, and aside from the one neckbeard, the other members are an attractive white lady, an older black man, and a shy Iranian woman who wears a hijab. I remember how jarring it was to see the group being presented as "elite hackers". It just didn't seem believable. I am obviously operating on stereotypes, but I think the show creators were operating on the complete opposite which ran past the threshold line of belief suspension. It felt like they were pressured to have as much of a technicolor cast, maybe for legitimate reasons of not following a group of dweeby unattractive dudes, but also to avoid the bad optics.

But in the process it just felt cheap. Whenever I saw the hijabi, I just kept thinking "What is she doing here? Why is she involved? What is her interest in all of this?" to the detriment of being engaged with the story. None of it really gelled.

I have been playing a ton of Kingdom Come: Deliverance lately, an open world RPG set in the year 1403 in what is now Czechia. It's a fantastic game with very well developed setting, plot, and characters. But then I also remembered that there was a "controversy" when it was released because it didn't portray any people of color and because the villains, the Cumans and Hungarians, are conveniently also foreigners. This appears to echo a trend in contemporary cultural commentary where narratives are criticized if they don't present an ethical or progressively minded scenario. It doesn't appear as anything but an attempt to shoehorn someone else's narrative into something more superficially palatable.

Recall, for example, the controversy around the novel A Place for Wolves. The controversy was especially notable because the author worked as a "sensitivity reader" whose whole job was to examine other books for offending ideas. The novel was about two gay teenagers finding love during the Kosovo war, which perhaps should be catnip normally, but then the author was asked "Did you have to make the villain a Muslim?"

Maybe the objection that I have is that very few narratives try to engage deeply with the character's backgrounds when they make a deliberate effort to differentiate them. I can think of two brilliant examples. One is "Justin Bieber" from Atlanta portrayed by a black actor. It's so weird, and so unexplained, and so startling, but it fits completely within the surreal ethos of the show and I agree it puts the real Justin Bieber's behavior in a different context. The other example, and one of my favorite from recent memory, is HBO's Watchmen. I don't want to spoil too much, but it deftly handles the premise of "real life vigilante crime fighters" and seriously grapples with the idea of exactly who would feel the need to put on a mask to fight crime. There is a VERY big difference practically speaking of a black person putting on a mask to fight injustice, and a white billionaire doing the same. It puts into question why the latter would ever feel the need to hide their identity because they definitely would not face the same hurdles or tackle the same problems.

So basically, I like the idea of "diversity" in media depictions, but it has to be more than just set dressing. It has to feel that you went out of your way to diversify because you wanted to seriously engage with how their role would be different, instead of just working your way up a quota.