Television Diversity Begins With the Script

Kelly A. Barton’s Aug. 16 Counterpunch article, “Why Not an African-Swedish Scientist?,” seems to have missed the point. The issue is not whether a talented performer like Wendy Davis suffers from a stunted sense of the world because she cannot conceive of an African-Swedish scientist. As a friend and colleague of Davis, I can assure Barton that she is a worldly and sophisticated person, more than capable of conceiving of the notion that the African Diaspora reached even the shores of Scandinavia.

Singling out her ironic comments as indicative of part of the problem seems almost willfully wrongheaded on Barton’s part. Arguing as she does that it will be a much better world for all when actors of color can come in with impeccable European accents and get parts they would not “initially be seen as right for,” she does not appear to understand the context or the stakes. And she certainly does not seem to understand why Davis was so amused at the notion of playing a Swedish scientist.

Davis was, of course, amused at the notion that she would be offered a role as a Swedish scientist with not a single rewrite to accommodate one of the most visible things about her, because she recognized a fundamental paradox of race: Sometimes the situations a person of color finds himself or herself in are so convoluted that the only sane response is to laugh.

She laughed because television has done such a poor job of holding a mirror up to the American face that even people with the best of intentions, like the person who called Davis for the audition, can find themselves doing something that is a bit of a reach.

The thing of interest here is why the scientist was not African American in the first place. Possibly the writer and the producer fell into the trap that often awaits many, one of assuming that if race plays no dramatic function, then the character has to be European. This is the myopia we need to battle against, Ms. Barton.

Remember, it was not too long ago that an incoming producer of a superhero show on one of the networks changed the racial composition of the existing cast because he believed the very notion of one of the characters, an African scientist, to be implausible. I assume he was untroubled by other aspects of the show, such as the flying car or the mechanical exoskeleton that made it possible for the paraplegic black hero to walk and have superhuman strength.

Sure, Ms. Barton, there are African-Swedish scientists. There are almost certainly people of African descent everywhere, doing all manner of things. And the notion of people of color being able to read for and win roles intended for people of European background is a laudable one. But the principal question for right now, in this matter, is how it is possible that so many television shows that purport to be about life in America can manage to leave out so much of the population. And how it is that someone’s proposed solution to this is to have an African American actor playing someone Swedish.

To suggest that a possible solution to the conundrum is for people of color to learn how to do European accents is disingenuous when the real question is why the New York of “Friends” bears no resemblance to the real New York. But then, based on what we know of L.A. as it appeared on “Melrose Place,” there aren’t a great many blacks in L.A. either.