Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Deadline Apologized For The Diversity Article, So Everything Is Fine Now

You can read snippets and commentary from the AV Club here.

Or you can read the whole thing.

Either way, the question is, would they have cared if there wasn't a public outcry about the article? Or would they have just continued to think it was okay to say that actors of color are stealing roles from white actors that they don't deserve? My guess is, the problem would have never occurred to them.

Joshua Alston for the AV Club's analysis of the situation seems to back up this idea:
"Hollywood has a nepotistic, network-driven culture that incubates, then normalizes deeply entrenched discriminatory attitudes against performers of color... Andreeva’s story isn’t really a case of tone-deafness in that it accurately captures the tone of Hollywood; it merely exposed that tone, to which Deadline’s editors have become accustomed, to the mortified public-at-large."
I actually worked in TV casting for a number of years, and the general public would be disgusted with how we talked about people. As a requirement of the job, we completely reduced casting candidates to things like their race, weight, and gender. It was gross, and I'll be happy to never return to that world. Unfortunately, that world doesn't appear to be going anywhere. It's things like this that make me question - is this really the world I want to work in?

1 comment:

  1. This is why I really have an appreciation for writers like Shonda Rhimes. Shonda writes colorblind characters which is why her casts are so diverse. Unless something is an ethnicity centered show or the character absolutely requires an actor to be a specific race, castings shouldn't have racial qualifiers (but alas, this is Hollywood). In some ways, we've moved forward a tiny bit. New Girl is sort of a take on Friends, and Winston and Coach show that not all of the friends have to be white in order for people to relate to the show.

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