NAACP on Hollywood
Again the NAACP is calling Hollywood out on the carpet (not the red one) for not being diversified.
There are minorities on shows with ensemble casts but there aren’t enough minorities who are leading the shows.
But then maybe it depends on where you look and how you look. What is classified as black or if someone who is multiracial but playing a white character counts?
On the Fox show prison break the lead character is a white guy. But the actor who stars in the show, Wentworth Miller, is multiracial (which some might classify as simply black since he has some African American ancestry).
Jessica Szhor looking like a pretty biracial girl
The same is with Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szhor. She has a parent that is African American.
But I, too, would like to see more black looking black people on the four networks and have them the focus on the show. Or some shows with Asians on it. Or Hispanics. And while we are at it I’d also like for them to pull off the forensic-type shows. It’s a bit old.
One of the problems is that Hollywood doesn’t know how to make a black show with mass appeal. Good Times and the Jeffersons were new for the 70s and they stumbled upon the Cosby Show in the 80s. But now the main images of African Americans come to us through music videos.
“A lot of times, they’re not looking for your type,” Corbin Bleu of High School Musical fame said. ”Especially because I’m mixed, especially. A lot of times they either want to go full on Caucasian or they want to go full on black. They either want somebody who is really black and from the street, and urban, and a little bit ghetto, or they want a Caucasian. That’s probably one of the hardest struggles for me. You never know when work is going to come in. “
And that is it in a nutshell. Black in the media is limited to being urban and street, whereas white gets to portray anything.
The NAACP is raising the possibility of calling a boycott against an unspecified network if things don’t change. But over the years of them chastizing the networks and issuing these reports, have they ever changed?
