"Girls" still racist
Rebecca's mention of Lena Dunham, creator of HBO series "Girls", I remembered that there was a storm of accusations that the show was racist a while back. This Salon article pretty well exemplifies what the controversy was about.
I'm finding some interesting corollaries between the controversy about "Girls" lack of/poor representations of people of color and the frequent lack of representations of women of color in feminist discourse. After all, "Girls" is a pretty revolutionary show with regards to its depictions of young women (young women as fully-fledged humans who have actual lives, who have conversations and thoughts that don't involve men every time, who are more than just pathetic attempts at "strong female characters"... even if they're a rather racially and economically homogeneous group of young women who drop a lot of silly one-liners). It's too bad that it has failed so spectacularly at portraying people of color/economically disadvantaged people.
In one of the show's subsequent seasons, the fantastic and talented Donald Glover made an appearance as Lena's short-term boyfriend. I'm not sure I'm willing to take on whether his character was a better and more fully-fledged representation of a person of color, but it did seem like a rather pointed and direct response to the previous accusations of racism (if I recall correctly, Glover's character leaves Lena's character precisely because of some issue the two were having about her understanding of race). In any event, given the show's female-centric nature, I would have preferred to see a woman of color.
Anyway, I'll leave you with this smart and funny webseries, "The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl". Unfortunately, the series appears to have stopped producing new episodes, but it was a great show created by a woman of color, from a woman of color's perspective, and it portrays a host of fully-developed characters from a lot of different backgrounds.
~Jessica Franzoi
see: Audre Lorde
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