Girls: Inadvertent Racism or Intentional?
Although certain movies or television shows portray characters of various races, many are guilty of containing a primarily white cast- most notably sitcom powerhouses Seinfeld and Friends. Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek blame this on a concept known as “strategic rhetoric,” which can best be described as the ways in which the media portray Caucasians as the normalcy of society. HBO’s new(ish) show, Girls, has recently been under fire for this very thing. Girls, created by Lena Dunham (also the show’s producer, writer, director, and lead actress), is clearly guilty of racial exclusion. Despite the show’s Brooklyn setting, virtually all of the characters in the first season are white. Dunham eventually responded to the controversy, acknowledging that she did not provide her viewers with a "truly all-encompassing rendition of young girls in New York” (Fallon). Dunham then promised to involve characters of different ethnicities in the show’s future. True to her word, Donald Glover was cast as her character’s new boyfriend on the second season premiere. Glover’s character was both refreshing and well received, combatting various African American stereotypes. His character, an articulate and poignant young Republican, seemed to provide the show with a different perspective and added some much needed diversity. However, Glover’s character only lasted two episodes and then Dunham’s replacement love interest was, once again, white. The season is still in progress, so you never know- maybe Donald Glover will make a return. One can only hope, as until then Girls continues to perpetuate a vastly unrealistic viewpoint of Brooklyn.
Work Cited
Fallon, Kevin. "Lena Dunham confronts the Girls racism
controversy: Is she convincing? " The
Week. The Week Publications, 09 May 2012. Web. 29 Jan 2013. <http://theweek.com/article/index/227757/lena-dunham-confronts-the-girls-racism-controversy-is-she-convincing>.
I am baffled that anyone who's done close reading of the series- as opposed to a close reading of one episode - would conclude the Girls is trying to:
ReplyDelete1)present a representative portrait of Brooklyn, NYC, or anywhere in the five boroughs
(if so, in addition to "African Americans," it would also also need to include POC from every island in the Caribbean (because someone from St. Thomas doesn't want to be portrayed as the same as someone from Anguilla), Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, South Africans, Senegalese, et al. Also Hasidic ,Lubavitchers, Yemenites, Orthodox, Reformed, merely Observant,and secular Jews; also Columbians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Brazilians; also Armenians, Serbs, Romanians, Italians, Sicilians, and 8 million young marrieds of all races pushing strollers. And those are just the major groups living in a five mile radius of my old neighborhood. Brooklyn is not even anywhere close to being an "African American" borough. It's an everything borough. My landlords were from the Virgin Islands, my ex and I (white lesbians) lived on the first floor, the couple above us were straight upper class WASPS, and on the top floor was a Jamaican from London who lived with his white Australian wife.
And parts of Brooklyn are chock full of blindingly white, straight, overpriviliged, unformed, unINformed people like the characters in Girls.
2) a prescriptive or normative portrait of white 20 somethings. Look up "unreliable narrator." Every character in the show is an unreliable narrator. Every action is a mistake, most of them not yet realized by the characters.
No one is likable.They live in a self-imposed ghetto of people just like themselves (white, post college, neurotic, insecure, unsuccessful). We are supposed to laugh at them. They are clearly portrayed as people from such protected and privileged class that they don't even know what they don't know. They are not admirable, they are not meant to be. But what Hanna Horvath is or does not necessarily correlate to what Lena Dunham is or isn't.
I'm not a cheerleader for the show, I'm not trying to be a Lena Dunham apologist and I'm not trying to be disrespectful to you. But your post, like other "analysis" of the show that I've read seems heavy on anecdotal digesting of celebrity controversy, light on actual textual analysis of more than one episode of a show now on its 14 or 15th (? I don't have cable anymore) episode, and quick to label the creators as "clearly guilty" of racial exclusion.
Have you read Kareem Abdul Jabar's review? Even though he said it was important and worthwhile, it wasn't at all a positive review. But, instead of drive-by "analysis." he presented textual examples from the whole series to support his points, which were complex and thoughtful and dealt with actual faults of the text as opposed to finding Dunham "guilty."
He also made the accurate point that a show about a white ghetto (see above) and added
"I don't believe that people of color, sexual preference, or gender need to be shaken indiscriminately into every series like some sort of exotic seasoning. If the story calls for a black character, great. A story about a black neighborhood doesn't necessarily need white characters just to balance the racial profile. But this really seemed like an effort was made to add some color -- and it came across as forced."
The very definition of analysis is breaking a text into its component parts to arrive at a conclusion. This post omits component parts and arrives not at a conclusion but a verdict.