Andrew Golis

Jonathan Adams over at RaceWire is wondering why it is that “According to an Entertainment Weekly study of scripted-programming casts for the upcoming fall 2008 season, each of the five major broadcast networks is disproportionately whiter than the United States population.”

The best answer to that question I’ve ever heard actually comes from Shonda Rhimes, founder/head writer of Grey’s Anatomy.  In an interview in 2005 with Tavis Smiley, she described the bizarre and pretty shocking uphill battle to cast people of color on the show:

Rhimes: What was interesting about it was we sent out the script and they only sent us white actors.

Tavis: So even when you didn’t specify that the actor had to be white, they still sent you white actors.

Rhimes: Yes. And we had to call back and say, excuse me, where are all the actors of color? Where are the Hispanics, where are the Asians, where are the African Americans, where are the actors of color? And they went, oh, so this is a diverse role. And I said, they’re all diverse roles. All of the roles in the show are. And now we’re at a point where when our casting director sends out something for a guest-starring role, everybody knows. If you have an actor who you think is great, we don’t care what they look like. We don’t care what color they are. Send them over, because they might get the part.

It’s times like this I feel bad about making funny of my lefty professors who would talk about the “invisibility” of whiteness.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 6:55 pm and is filed under media, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.