On HBO's Girls

Or, "Why the Racial Controversy Over HBO's Girls Should Be Understood by White People"

The problem with HBO's series Girls is not that it does not represent people of color. The problem is that it doesn't realize it. What good is a television show that includes people of color but merely recognizes them as honorary white people, essentially flattening their difference in the name of “diversity”? Sure, Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) from The Office and Donna (Retta) from Parks and Rec are black, but does that significantly shape the universe of the show besides as a license for those actors to showcase “sassy” black attitudes? Also lame, but at least trying, are the miserably failed attempts by Glee to understand its characters as “Jewish,” “Asian,” etc. First, try addressing how and why the show pretends such diversity is the norm in Lima, Ohio. Let's not even get started on NBC's Outsourced.

If current mainstream television has failed to produce "acceptable" portrayals of people of color, what might it do instead? Lena Dunham has said that “next season she will try to make it happen.” Forget that. I don't want her attempting anything near creating a fictional subjectivity that is supposed to do the nuanced work of exploring race on her show (ie., a token character). Not because white people can't write characters of color – that is not the argument – but rather, because someone so ignorant as to the realities of lived racial experience – including her own – should tread very carefully when trying to make that an issue in her art/work.

Which brings me to what I'm trying to say, which is that Girls doesn't need to recognize people of color; it needs to recognize its own whiteness. I admit, I'm surprised that a group of hipsters living in Brooklyn doesn't have an Asian friend. I would have thought, for better or worse, that it would have been one of the mandatory boxes one checks for this stereotype, along with various markers about fashion, music, drugs, etc. I suppose I underestimate my own presence, or give far too much credit to the white people surrounding me in cafes and boutiques.

However, it certainly seems possible that a group of hipster girls in Brooklyn in 2012 live in a completely white bubble with no friends of color. What breaks my heart, though, is how oblivious it appears Dunham & co. appear to be about it. “Oh, there are other kinds of folks around? I didn't even notice!” As [I forgot who] mentioned, the real girls watching Girls interact every day with working-class brown immigrants in bodegas, restaurants, and public transportation, but the girls on Girls merely slap their money down on a counter with no one behind it. The streets of their neighborhoods are white. This is nonsense (well, not for Greenpoint, actually). Do people like Dunham and Lesley Arfin really not notice the brownness of their city, and, by extension, their own whiteness, such that they might look around and say, “Hmm, I'm in a group of entirely white people”? Does race only exist as something put upon other people; not recognized within one's self if that self is a privileged white girl?

Update, 9/7/14: Believe it or not, I still haven't finished season one of Girls. Hope to write something more thoughtful whenever that happens. P.S. Still haven't seen Mad Men either, nor The Wire...