Stop, for Diversity’s Sake!

Here's our new pitch for Netflix. It's Popeye, right, you know surly musclebound-sailor cob-pipe good ol' Popeye. But it's updated for "modern times", so Popeye is now an Afghani woman named "Poppy". (ha!)  Bluto and Olive Oyl and Wimpy are there of course. Few slight alterations though. Olive is now ambiguously black-ish and in a lesbian relationship with Poppy. Wimpy is an asexual Rain Man style figure somewhere on the spectrum, but still loves his burgers. Veggie burgers only though. Bluto actually isn't changed much, because he works already as a villain in our new story of "feminism" and tolerance and smashing the glass ceiling, while also saving the ocean from pollution along with a pro-marijuana message. We mean, "spinach", right? (But I thought the Poppy joke was about the fields in Afghanistan? - Shush...) 

The first episode is about the Taliban and Somali pirates teaming up while trying to stop Poppy from opening her own bank account!

The hat counts as a hijab.

Netflix would gobble this up faster than the old cis-white male hero would pack away a can of mushy greens. Twitter can celebrate another glorious triumph for diversity! 

Right?

No. For pity's sake no! Absolutely not, in fact! Whatever measly short term points supposedly won in the battle for equality are dwarfed, nay drowned by the long term repercussions of such poisonous pyrrhic victories.  

If you type the world "diversity" into Google, it gives you the following:

1. The state of being diverse; variety.

-  a range of different things.

2. The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.

The first one there seems pretty inarguable. The literal meaning of the word in the English language. The second one though, strikes us as very narrow to a certain social agenda which is in vogue right now. It is very specific to the people involved and the identities of said individuals. Affirmative action style diversity, not like the diversity of life in an ecosystem. There are, we believe, enough other sub-meanings of the word to have maybe a couple more definitions, at the least enough for a #3 and #4 if the first one is not good enough all by itself.

But Google has the second understanding of the term right there front and center for a reason. It's a hot topic at the moment. It is something which seems to draw out a lot of passion and vocality in a growing number of, shall we say, concerned citizens of the world. We are among that diverse crowd, yet it troubles us how much unhealthy rhetoric and shallowness pollutes the concept. We see a sort of corruption of intent. A co-opting of a movement to make profit or escape responsibility for selfishness.

The most tragic part is that not all people agree with soulless corporations and bigoted shills, yet still contribute to a toxic expression of diversity simply by not knowing any better. As children one of our mothers was prone to say that you should never attribute to malice what could be equally or better explained by incompetence and ignorance. There are more than a few movies which, on clear-eyed critical examination, have serious flaws and issues yet boast of 90% audience approval ratings or higher on Rotten Tomatoes. It is pretentious and elitist to imply the public is a herd of bleating sheep, yet the millions or even billions of dollars raked in by works with ugly faux-diversity can be very disheartening.

What often makes the process of course correction difficult is how sensitive and defensive many humans become when challenged on their principles and righteousness. For example, a person who publicly crusades for diversity with sincerity and zeal would likely consider this next sentence to be barbaric blasphemy:

"Diversity is not always innately superior." *gasp*

There are waaaaaaay too many of such people.

But for real tho'... If it was, then people would do it all the time! Turn the diversity up to 11, and make a better world! But reality is not so white and non-white as that. There wouldn't even be a debate surrounding the issue if it was clearly better and had no negative side-effects. Yeah, we know, break out the torches and pitchforks. But the hard truth is that diversity and inclusion do have downsides and there are valid reasons to avoid them.

Diversity, among other things, diffuses the ability of any specific real life human to connect with or relate to the fictional characters or the events taking place within the story. Let's say you want to tell a story about a person that heavily invested in or embraced a certain path, but years later has doubts and wishes to walk a different path. That's a story which pretty much anyone can self-identify with. The details are not the same as your specific life, but you can easily empathize with the protagonist and their struggles.

But what if said story is specifically about a woman in her late thirties, who after devoting herself as a nun while a teenager now longs deeply for romance and children and a more exciting life outside the cloister. It is suddenly more difficult for anyone not a highly religious single woman in her late thirties to subconsciously relate to the protagonist. That doesn't mean it is impossible, just that it becomes less smooth and natural.

Oh, and the woman is black. And a lesbian. And is deaf. And lives in medieval Ethiopia. 

Your typical middle-class white American liberal-ish secular straight man with normal hearing and no particular fondness for historical fiction might just not be interested in your story anymore. It's not that he refuses to give it a chance or anything. He's not avoiding your story on principle. He just won't gravitate towards your creation and is likely, given the choice, to watch or read something else. Can you blame him?

Media executives certainly don't. Storytelling may have been a religious or educational tool in the cave-men days, but in the modern era it's a business. And diversity is bad for business. Hard numerical evidence clearly shows that, at least for now, certain nationalities or genders or orientations or just basic subject matter and topics are more financially lucrative than others. The 2019 live action remake of Aladdin was a great opportunity to shake up the very, very Western cast of the 1992 version. But Aladdin was Canadian and Jasmine was British. Of course they are, because it's not like there are over half a billion people in the Middle East and North Africa, presumably a few of which are decent actors or pretty women. So, why did Disney use Will Smith for the genie instead of Ibrahim Al-Khairallah?

Who? Yeah, exactly.

Which of these two would you prefer getting an autograph from? Why?

But it's not all greed and risk aversion. To be fair, arbitrary diversity also gets in the way of good storytelling. How are we supposed to make our bad-ass epic Lord-of-the-Rings-quality fantasy trilogy about precolonial Mesoamerican mythology if we are forced to include a bunch of black people? Their very presence would be both historically wrong and rip apart all of our carefully crafted verisimilitude the moment they show up, regardless of what role they play in the plot. It is wrong to mock or discredit Master and Commander or The Shawshank Redemption based on gender imbalance. Anything more than literally zero women would be just factually offensive.

This is not to imply that diversity inherently diminishes a story or that it prevents a person from creating "true art". No, of course not. It's just that an artificial requirement to be a very specific form of "inclusive" is both foolish and impractical. No creator should be forced to alter their creations to be accepted as valid. No work should be heckled or punished for no reason other than that it doesn't tick enough boxes. The manifesto of a supremacist school-shooter should be dismissed as the inane hateful gibberish it is, but the reason to mock or discredit it should not be because it was written by a white person and doesn't pass the Bechdel Test... Does that make sense?

When we say "true art", we mean this 1978 masterpiece.

The true meaning of diversity or inclusion or tolerance or respect or open-mindedness is a deeper thing than some list of buzz-words. We are not here to pompously preach to anyone. We won't lecture you the long-suffering reader with our philosophical opinions on humanity and media. But we can give a practical example of a form of diversity that is not included in most conversations regarding such matters.

Consider traditional Luo oral storytelling, Luo being a large ethnic community in East Africa. You see, the nature of a story or how it is told are also forms of diversity, not just the genetics or lifestyle of the characters and the details of the setting. Luo storytelling traditions are defined not by elephants or spears or witch-doctors. What makes it strikingly different from modern German or Chinese storytelling are things like the live interaction between storyteller and audience. The non-linear or cyclical narratives that usually lack a climatic or happy ending. That is if they even have a conclusion at all. The use of gesture, costumes, props, song, and banter that ignore the distinction between stage and audience. The way that stories are intentionally changed every time they are told, depending on who is listening and why, or when.

Wanna hear about why chickens don't fly? That hand gesture is part of the story.

You could tell a story about Little Bo Peep's feud with Red Riding Hood in a Luo way, and it would be just as if not more "African" than a typical Hero's Journey tale from Hollywood that takes place in the Congo. It's not merely the surface level stuff, it's the very nature of the story itself and how it is told that displays culture and values and heritage.

We have an idea for a mini-series or something like that. A straight white healthy bad-ass goes to another planet and shoots a bunch of aliens while searching for lost artifacts amongst some ruins. So, that might not sound very radical at first. But perhaps we can change that impression. Let's start with our very un-diverse sounding protagonist!

Samus Aran, the heroine of the Metroid series of video games, has, to put it lightly, changed throughout the years. From a handful of pixels whose gender was only established in the last few seconds of the game, through an experienced and competent explorer-warrior, all the way to a petite waifu in a skintight blue leotard (complete with battle-heels) desperately seeking the approval of her male commanding officer. Suffice it to say that a picture speaks a thousand words, so you should feel almost spoiled here by three of them for demonstration.

How do #1 and #3 fit their hair inside the helmet?

Let us, for sake of argument, focus on the middle period, specifically the best game of the entire franchise, the 2002 entry Metroid Prime. 

For those unfamiliar with the game, know that it is a universally respected and beloved game in its own right, regardless of the gender of its main character. A well crafted, spooky, cerebral experience which focuses on the themes of legacy, corruption, decay, and renewal.

The risk here is that, in the effort to be more "emotional" or "help audiences relate to the characters", show-runners could easily warp Samus's identity or mangle the tone and themes of the story. Imagine that they devote multiple flashbacks to Samus reminiscing about her mixed-race 8-year-old son who was killed in a space-pirate raid or something like that. Nothing of the sort happened in the games! Yet it is the type of tripe far too often added for "diversity" and to remind the audience that, in the eyes of media moguls, womanhood is automatically intertwined with motherhood. 

No, in order for a Metroid Prime movie to truly respect and celebrate Samus Aran, she needs to be a stoic, introspective, very quiet loner.

In the void of space, nobody can hear you tweeting anyways.

Consider Cartoon Network's widely hailed series Samurai Jack or Primal. Classic films such as Papillon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cast Away, or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Modern masterpieces such as There Will Be Blood. High quality, respected works which have long stretches with little or no dialogue but still express emotional and intellectual depth in addition to intense, riveting sequences. All of those examples and a dozen more we could list have a man as the central figure. Do you truly want diversity? Gender balance? Create something akin to those works with a female protagonist. But for pity's sake that doesn't mean flipping the chromosomes in an otherwise uninspired repeat, al-la Ghostbusters 2016. Nor does it mean a sci-fi reimagining of Cast Away with Zoe Saldana replacing Tom Hanks.

Make or adapt a new story with a character who was female or otherwise outside the so-called "norm" from the very beginning! The version of Samus Aran in Metroid Prime combines the independence and drive of Lara Croft with the believable competency and toughness of Ellen Ripley. Yet it does so without the literally in your face phallic imagery of Alien or the little replacement daughter Ripley clings to in the sequel. Let's not even get into the gratuitous booty shots of Tomb Raider... 

Girl power...?

A Metroid Prime film done correctly would be diverse not in genetics or lifestyle, but in its intent and execution. 

The lack of any typical villain figure. The minuscule cast and very limited dialogue. The short, dangerous fights with no kung-fu theatrics or slow-mo explosions. No romance. No metaphors for trendy social issues. Just pure uncut unfiltered Metroid Prime. Alas, Netflix would never fund this idea over our other Popeye reboot one. But believe it or not, a film about a straight white healthy bad-ass shooting aliens can be, deep down, more diverse than a rainbow hued bowl of Fruit-Loops.

It is worth noting that when we spoke a few paragraphs ago of repeats, we don't necessary limit ourselves to licensed reboots or sequels where some element has been changed for diversity's sake. We mean also thematic or stylistic repeats, which are identifiable as to their references and predecessors but don't explicitly declare as such. Take, for instance, the 1976 film Rocky and the 2021 film Bruised.

They are similar yet so very, very different.

One may, if they want to weigh the matter, claim that Bruised is a diversity counterweight to the straight-white-male centered Rocky. The main character is somewhat akin to the protagonist of Raging Bull, another straight-white-male boxer, but the plot of Bruised hearkens more towards Rocky. A struggling martial artist and the intense training they endure before a big fight that lasts unexpectedly long and doesn't have an obvious winner. But Rocky never dealt with a plot tumor in the form of his previously abandoned small son that he suddenly needs to start taking care of again as a single parent. Rocky doesn't have a failed relationship with a violent abusive man then immediately afterwards an exploratory lesbian romance that ultimately goes nowhere. And he most certainly does not almost defeat Apollo Creed through the power of family and friendship, but lose due to a biased jury at the end. 

Those diversity scales are balanced only in a very narrow numerical sense on the details of the protagonist. But Bruised is ultimately far more deeply stereotypical and never strays from well-trod expectations. Rocky fought and trained in small, but reputable local gyms. Bruised involves some illegal ghetto dog-fights with "no refs, no rules." Because apparently the only respectable athletic activities for black people are golf and the Olympics. I mean, does anyone remember when the black man beat the crap out of the white guy but nobody really made a big deal out of it? (Perhaps in part because it was based on a true story that happened only a year before the film came out.) Rocky was a complete mess by the end, but in his defeat managed to claim a very personal and philosophical victory. The whole thing reads a bit differently when the dreadlocks-sporting much-older black lady is getting kicked around by a white person. A black lady literally called Justice! We shit you not the character's actual name is Jackie Justice. This movie was made after the whole BLM thing became a thing does anyone think it has an ounce of subtly?

Are these movies balanced because one is a black bisexual woman and one is a white straight man, or because one is brimming with positivity and the other crammed with negativity?

But whether Bruised is good or bad does not particularly matter. It will be slapped onto the flip-side of a coin with two different looking heads. It will be lumped in with every other movie regardless of quality when computing the oh-so-quotable statistics bandied about when the topic of diversity and representation in media inevitably comes up. And maybe it's just us or something, but doesn't it seem to come up a lot?

We are not innately experts on the matter, as we the authors are by and large not representative of every different possible angle of inclusiveness that human nature can be fractally broken down into. But from what we see there are four main types of unhealthy faux-diversity. These being what we call cosmetic diversity, tokenism, inaccurate representation, and minority typecasting. All four are commonplace and all four are bad; so when we discuss them it is in no particular order. Worth noting as well that there is usually overlap between them and more than one is typically a problem in a given work at the same time.

Let's start with...

Cosmetic diversity. If you can change the genetics of a character, such as gender or ethnicity, without making any difference on the character's role in the story or how that character is treated by others, then the genetics of said character are functionally meaningless. The character becomes akin to a bottle of flavored water. It is not overtly unhealthy, to be sure. It enticingly proclaims right on the bottle that is has 0 Calories! So this drink won't rot your teeth and won't make you fat. But it also has no nutrients. It's objectively not as natural or healthy as milk, or fruit juice, or herbal tea. 

Sort of pretty, yeah, but notice how none of them have any faces and all have the same exact outfit...

Take for example the impressively multi-racial cast of the 2004 film The Terminal. Tom Hank's character being a non-US citizen that can't speak English is directly linked to the plot. However, replacing the Eastern European Caucasian man with a Hispanic woman from an equally war-torn Central American country would have little if any impact on the sequence of events or how the supporting cast interacts with the lead. 

Other characters are similar. Take the janitor that persuades the lead to help him find out more about the visa officer he secretly pines for. If you changed the Latino man and black woman playing these roles into an Asian woman as the janitor and a white man as the visa agent, it does not make a single lick of difference. The Star Trek joke at the end is still funny and heartwarming, the airport supervisor's threat to fire the janitor is still completely valid as to the technical rationale he uses as an excuse. 

The one big exception is Gupta, the older Indian janitor. His race, age, and gender are intrinsically connected to his personal story. To recap he owned a small shop, and was increasingly harassed by a corrupt police officer that demanded ever larger bribes. Eventually, in a fit of anger, Gupta stabbed the officer; fleeing the country in fear of an unfair trial. However, many years later he has a change of heart, willingly getting deported and returning to his wife and children.

Now, if you were to modify this character into a 25 year old highly-educated white lesbian woman from France, it breaks down the subplot. It is not believable that the petty bribery Gupta describes would happen that specific way in a developed European country. The very valid fear Gupta expresses about an unfair trial is, again, a big stretch to imagine troubling our alternative version of the character. If the character is changed to be much younger, the motivation for the deportation is silly, as they could never have been apart from their children for decades. You the reader can surely imagine other reasons why such a change in the character's identity would disrupt the narrative.

The faces of the other characters when the director informed them that Gupta actually already is a woman...

But that is one character. The head of security for the airport? Change him to Hispanic and you don't even need to change the character's name, let alone a single word of his dialogue or stage directions. This cosmetic diversity is not a "bad thing", but it is not a reason to celebrate either. It is highly commonplace, but can we as an audience stop praising empty, calorie-free diversity pandering? The critics lap it up like aspartame ice-tea, but we should focus on other, more nutritious diversity. Again, we need to stress that colorblind casting or realistically proportional representation are not innately wrong, but they are far too often empty, hollow gestures undertaken to throw meat, errr, tofu to the mob. 

A mob which wasn't always really a mob. Back in the good 'ol days it was more a small gang of rabble-rousers. Like this one fellow named Martin Luther King Jr. He wrote this book in 1964 that, among other things, directly discussed the problem of tokenism. Let us quote:

"The Negro wanted to feel pride in his race? With tokenism, the solution was simple. If all twenty million Negroes would keep looking at Ralph Bunche, the one man in so exalted a post would generate such a volume of pride that it could be cut into portions and served to everyone."

That almost nobody under the age of 65 can recognize one of the most famous, uh... "black" men of his generation demonstrates how trivial and temporary tokenism truly is.

Oh, Dr. King, if you only knew... 

One thousand million Sub-Saharan black Africans nibble on their tiny portions of Black Panther. Symbolically speaking, of course, as all the financial profits and artistic glory was divided between a handful of Westerners. But look! An African superhero. We call her "Storm"! No wait... not Storm. But she is Kenyan... She is? Yeah man. Huh, I don't recall that coming up in those movies... Whatever, I meant the guy from the completely fictional country.

T'Challa. Yeah, that one. A beacon of Afrocentric hope and joy that shines like a trial-by-combat chosen one from the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro all the way to the shores of the Ivory Coast. The international community can endlessly hype it up all they want but you just can't smear a single American across a table with 50ish seats at the UN and expect an entire continent to profusely thank you for the meal. 

Imagine the opposite. Take a moment to really image this: The entire Western world from Canada to Australia, with every American and European between them, has Batman. Nothing else, just Batman. No Wonder Woman, no Hulk, no Superman or Spiderman. Definitely nothing outside of DC/Marvel like Hellboy or Flash Gordon... Oh, and the only villain is the Joker, by the way. Yeah, none of the other Batman staples like Mr. Freeze or Catwoman, just the most obvious one. Oh, and when we say Batman we mean like just a couple movies not all of them. The dozens of Batman video games, TV-shows, etc all need to be forgotten about and ignored. A handful of paper comics and 1.5 movies is all the white people need.

It sounds absurd when you put it like that. The entire multi-billion-dollar Superhero industry would completely collapse. But have no fear, Black Panther is there to make sure all the brownish and blackish folk feel included and respected and acknowledged. You're welcome.

Just race and/or gender flip all the most popular characters. Except Batman because it's not believable for anyone other than a white man to be that rich. So he stays white but becomes gay. Everybody wins!

Tokenism is nothing but deception that offers empty pride without real power. It is extremely commonplace. We could spend 1000 words listing examples from across the decades and across every form of media. It is downright pervasive, and it needs to be addressed that many of the content-creators championing a very specific form of supposed "diversity" are far too often the most guilty of displaying it.

One of the most infuriating aspects of tokenism is how smoothly and frequently it is merged with the next big type of unhealthy diversity: Minority Typecasting. As in, the only Asian character in the work is also good at math and stingy with their funds but secretly knows ninjutsu. Unless the Asian is female, then she will be either a beautiful yet submissive bimbo or a vicious, calculating Dragon Lady doomed to violently die by the end. 

Netflix acquired the rights to the downright revered Japanese series Cowboy Bebop through what we can only assume was innocent ignorance or soulless greed on the part of some Japanese people not involved in the creation of the original show... They then promptly decided that some changes were needed. Drastic changes. Among other things they promptly changed the character of Jet from a white man to a black one. 

And then they made him a bad father and husband desperate for redemption. Note that Jet from the original show had no such issues. He had no children at all, and did not speak with his ex-wife for years after she left him. In fact, he moved on completely after coincidentally seeing her in a new life. But Diverse-Jet in the Netflix show has serious drama involving his daughter that is shown in numerous scenes. So the question is... why did they do this?

For pity's sake the one on the right was made for free by a single fan. Did anyone at Netflix even watch the show? Jet's beard doesn't cover his upper lip and the shoulder pads are made out of metal! The cigarettes are an important part of the story!

We know why. It's because, supposedly, black men always have issues with the daughters they didn't take care of in the past. Anybody remember the NASA guy in season three of Lost in Space? Another Netflix adaptation. Or the 2021 film Fatherhood. More Netflix. Let's break the trend here... Remember in 2016's Suicide Squad when they changed the usually white Deadshot into a black man, and had those scenes with his daughter? Oh, and in the 2021 sequel The Suicide Squad Will Smith was busy so they replaced Deadshot with the suspiciously similar Bloodsport. Another black man who is motivated to cooperate with the shadow feds because of a daughter that he never had in the original. 

The original character, by the way, was a deranged bastard who went insane due to a bunch of factors involving draft dodging and Vietnam. The new movie completely changed the core fundamentals of his character. Changing him from a psychotic American to a calm, level headed British guy who is trying to stop his daughter from following in his footsteps. We can not repeat ourselves enough that the studio making both these films made extreme changes to the very basics of the characters. And one of those changes was adding in father issues. Because, supposedly, all black men are terrible parents that will do anything, particularly suicidal risks and sacrifice, to restore previously tarnished paternal honor.

There are a hundred other stereotypes we could talk about. We are not going to list them all here. We don't need to. You already know what they are. How could you not know what they are? You see them over and over ad nauseam in just about every genre of every form of media... It does not need to be this way. It should never have gotten this bad, but now that it has we need to accept that like a boulder rolling down a hill it won't just suddenly stop without intentional effort by an outside force. Hollywood and Twitter and The Pride Parade organizers are never going to be that force. They are not the boulder, but they knowingly step aside out of its path rather than face it head on. In their eyes, throwing a few minorities and a handful of flowers in front of the boulder is all they need to make a profit and win awards.

It is not progress to include something that is underrepresented or otherwise at a disadvantage if the thing you are including is a cheap, shallow caricature. Ever heard of Wong Liu-tsong? Probably not. How about her stage name Anna May Wong? She was a talented, lovely actress who, in the 1920s, became the first Chinese-American movie star. In less than a decade she became so frustrated and disgusted by the racism and typecasting that she literally left the country to try her luck in Europe. It wasn't much better there. Here we are, 100 years later, and most people still see nothing wrong with the glaring fact that of the 1300 top grossing films worldwide from 2007-2019 only 44 had an Asian as the lead character.

Wong Liu-Tsong is not impressed by your script... Tell her again why she can't kiss Douglas Fairbanks, Cary Grant, or Clark Gable on screen but Charlie Chaplin is acceptable if shot from behind.

3.4%. Three point four percent... Think that number is bad? 19 of those 44 were either The Rock or Keanu Reeves! Half the human beings alive are Asian! 3.4% is not even remotely close to statistical expectations but here we are anyways with Matt Damon defending the Great Wall of China from aliens. Wong Liu-tsong is not rolling in her grave. She is rolling her eyes at the airheads celebrating the so-called triumph of Crazy Rich Asians. 

Actually both that movie and The Great Wall are also good examples of the fourth and final form of unhealthy inclusion and representation. Specifically, inaccurate representation. If you showcase a type of person or a place or culture but mangle it and distort it then that is just as bad, perhaps even worse, then not displaying it at all. Exaggerating or over-simplifying an entire culture, misleading audiences to the reality of being or living with a certain trait, or worse showing/saying things which are objectively wrong and factually inaccurate completely negates any positive aspects you may have regarding diversity.   

Toplessness is a good example. Pocahontas is the only female main character from Disney's extensive animated canon who is ethnically Native American. (We haven't forgotten Kenai from Brother Bear but our point is about the ladies.) Much shade is thrown around regarding this flaw or that flaw of the 1995 movie, but rarely is it mentioned that Powhatan women were topless during summer. Most people are to their credit vaguely aware that the details of the story and the real life people it involves are not historically accurate. But nowhere near as commonplace is it known that the basic fundamentals of the native culture are horribly warped. Where are the tattoos!? 

Not perfect, but a lot better. Alice, Wendy, Lilo, Penny, Vanellope, Tiger Lily, Eilonwy, Riley, and others were all children so why make Movie-Pocahontas a 30-year-old D-Cup?

But lo, that was in the distant past of yesteryear. Behold yonder much newer film! The one where Disney and its sycophants gushed about the inclusivety and diversity. Moana! It has tattoos! Hurray! Wait what tribe is she again? Polynesian you say? That is not really a tribe...  Even freakin' Pocahontas was not a generic "Native American" girl, she was specifically Powhatan. That mattered you guys, there is a big difference between say the Lakota and the Algonquin. She is just "Polynesian". Alright fine, then why is she not topless? Why are none of the other characters in the film topless? Maui is! Oh stop that you know I meant the women. What is that tube-top rag thing she has magically staying up around her chest? 

We mean do the words "Google Image Search" mean anything to you diversity proponents? There are literally thousands of photos and hundreds more drawings and written descriptions of women from the various pre-colonial Pacific Island sub-groups. Social justice warriors say things like "whitewashing is bad" or "we need to respect other cultures as equally valid to our own" or maybe "breasts in those cultures were not always an inherently sexualized matter". Yet they are too cowardly or hollow to really put their money where their mouth is and, if they can't handle partially nude teenagers who are above the age of consent or half-naked old women, insist that at the bare minimum at least Moana's mother be topless. (But really though every single female in the film should be, get over it you pearl-clutching culturally censoring Victorians.)

This is especially glaring when contrasted with the beautiful title sequence of Lilo & Stitch. The women practice performing a (mostly) authentic looking Polynesian dance. Traditional instruments are shown being used, the song is sung in the Hawaiian language, the ladies are barefoot, they even have grass skirts. And underneath those grass skirts they are wearing pants with a white top. This is perfectly normal, something you would see in real life if you went to Hawaii and watched a similar performance. Modern day Polynesian women are not usually topless let alone bottomless, and it's not censorship or inaccurate to show that. The clothes are accurate to what a Hawaiian dancer would actually wear circa 2002, in a way that the clothing in Moana is not accurate to what they would wear several hundred years ago.

Moana only has authentic, realistic culture when it is convenient. It takes place not in the modern day but some vaguely defined distant past. That's helpful, you can skip doing research and avoid historical inaccuracies if it's all vague and blurry. They just picked the parts of some abstract Polynesian-ish culture that will make Disney look woke while blithely refuting anything that might cause waves in the magical ocean. Did you notice the slanted eyes of the dancers in Lilo & Stitch? They even bring attention to it by having the central dancer slowly blink while staring directly into the camera. The eyes of the white or black people in the film look completely different. Yeah, that's authentic and all but big round googly eyes make more money so no more of that in Moana.

This is the "good" kind of diversity and representation.

This the "bad" ki - awwwwwww. Wait we forgot our priciples and morals for a moment...

Inaccurate representation is not just about culture though. Another great example is mental illness or various forms of mental disability. Anyone who has dealt with the real life stress and pain of, say, a family member clinically diagnosed with Bi-Polar Disorder or Schizophrenia or even Depression will tell you that Shutter Island or The Electrical Life of Louis Wain are, in proper medical parlance, piles of shit regarding the hard truth of the mentally unwell. A Beautiful Mind is a great movie! A masterpiece of storytelling and acting and cinematography. But that is absolutely not what such an ugly, devastating illness is actually like. It's a fantastic piece of art but it does not bring relief or joy to those who are marginalized and misunderstood in real life.

The nuances, the proper context, the parts of life which are not sexy or glamorous or funny are not required when making a work of fiction. Yeah you probably didn't expect us to say that huh? But we get it; people watch or read fiction because they want something different than the real world. Escapism or wish-fulfilment or even something like racial fetishism are not incompatible with being a good person. However, if you display a minority or a foreign culture or anything else in such a way that it becomes "not the truth", then you are not worthy of praise regarding your efforts at inclusion or diversity. You are, in a tragic irony, actually making the problem even worse.

Another problem, troublesomely, is that not everything neatly fits into the four categories we just discussed. Consider the 2018 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Green Book. A story centered around a real-life black musician named Don Shirley. It covers all the usual topics for black-people biopics like racism and prejudice and Jim-Crow era mistreatment, etc etc. The very name is a reference to a historical book intended to help black people. Thing is, the story may be centered around a black man and black issues, but the protagonist point of view character is white.

Why? Why not just have Don Shirley be the main character? Of course Tony Lip was also a real person, so it's totally fine to include him in the story, but why not as a supporting actor? In the film, witnessing the pain and vileness of how Don is treated makes Tony increasingly appalled and protective of Don. The entire experience of discrimination in the American South is examined through the eyes and feelings and reactions of a person who never suffers from that discrimination personally. This film, though in theory a noble condemnation of a social ill, is ultimately nothing more than voyeurism intended to entertain and sooth the conscious' of a white target audience.

The center of the film is the guy definitely not in the center of this poster...

This happens a lot, but the issue is one that lays unevenly across the four broad categories we discussed. Which category/ies are most relevant depends on the context and details of the specific work. Other issues are no easier. Does the identity of the person making a work matter, or only the content of the work itself? Saying it does not matter at all seems to be unjustly apathetic. But saying it does matter conflates the diversity of a work with the diversity of real life, and that opens up a whole different can of worms. These difficult to clearly and objectively describe concerns are numerous, albeit nebulous.

A particularly nefarious trend is the way many content creators do what they see as the bare minimum to avoid criticism and earn praise. What is the bar and how low or high is it? Well, from what we see all around us, the acceptable threshold for diversity is not hard to clear...

The show Young Justice, in its third season, introduced a Muslim teenager as part of its main cast. The character, who has multiple names but uses the hero moniker of Halo, is notable for her dark skin, thick accent, place of origin, and consistent use of what is clearly a hijab. 

Hurray? Islam in super-heroics, let alone specifically the big boys Marvel and DC, does not have an illustrious, enlightened history. Indeed, Muslims in general, particularly those of the Middle-Eastern variety, are far more likely to be nameless goons and terrorists than recurring characters. What few exist are usually villains or at least frustrating bureaucratic hindrances to attempts by the heroes to solve problems and save people.

What little representation Islam itself receives, positive or negative, is oblique and inferred rather than explicitly stated. Major, influential characters like Ra's Al-Ghul being an excellent example. He uses a scimitar, is from the Middle-East/North Africa, has an Arabic name, and engages in international terrorism on a regular basis. But the comics don't dwell on his religious beliefs as a young man or elderly villain. It wouldn't be unreasonable or out of character for him to throw out a few megalomaniacal claims to being the Mahdi or something like that, but he never does.

So Halo being, ostensibly, an openly Muslim lady in the show is an interesting and refreshing surprise. Especially since the character of Halo in the original comic books was white and non-Muslim. Wait, did we say ostensibly? Yes, we said ostensibly. Let us briefly explain why. Spoilers ahead!

Well, at first glance everything seems pretty halal...

In the show, the first appearance of the girl that would become Halo is a domestic servant in the royal palace of a nation called Markovia, a small fictional Eastern-European country akin to say, Macedonia. She promptly dies a few minutes after first seen on screen. Her corpse is thrown into a small mass grave, but suddenly returns from the dead! That's just the first episode so now come the spoilers... 

It is revealed much later that she was a poor refugee named Gabrielle Daou from a Syria-analogous middle-eastern nation called Qurac. But twist! An advanced, intelligent alien computer called a Motherbox, after being torn apart and on the edge of "dying", merged itself with Gabrielle's corpse in desperation.

Alas, human brains were not designed to house hyper-advanced alien artificial intelligences, causing a sort of amnesia and timid confusion while the space WiFi adjusts to its new, mostly biological body. But eventually confidence and personality are restored, resulting in a hybrid entity. An identity that, when informed of the story regarding her body, directly and forcefully denies being that woman called Gabrielle Daou. 

Can you blame it/her? The mind and soul is still the alien computer, forced by circumstance into a new container that is not fully bio-mechanically compatible. Gabrielle Daou died, and her corpse was recycled into what would later choose for itself the name Violet Harper. 

So... is Halo a Muslim super-heroine? Well, let's recap. She...

A: Does not/did not recieve her powers directly or indirectly from Allah or a similar figure.

B: Does not perform any other Muslim specific ritualized behavior such as daily prayer, hand/foot washing, going to a mosque, etc. 

C: Does not speak of or seem to care about concepts such as halal/haram or Hajj. For example, she voluntarily drinks alcohol and when presented with meat, never asks how the animal died.

D: Does not apparently own a Quran, let alone actually read it or make any references to its wisdom/proverbs/etc.  

E: Does not express any Muslim-coded secular culture. I.E. decorate her living space in a visually Islamic way, cook/eat traditionally Muslim food, listen to music connected to any Muslim culture, dress in clothing specific to any Islamic style or fashion (aside from a generic loose hijab), or express any particular interest in Muslim history/heritage.

F: Does not speak Arabic or any other language from a Muslim majority region such as Dari. Her initially thick accent even diminishes with time during the show.

G: Emphatically and repeatedly refuses to acknowledge her biological relatives as "family", and related to this does not self-identify with either her original birth name or in general as an individual originating from her birth country when introducing herself to others.   

That doesn't look like tea to me... Positive Muslim representation huh?

By the way, early in the show when directly asked by another character why she wears a hijab when she has total amnesia, she just shrugs and says "it feels right". So she doesn't have a reason, in universe, to wear it outside of muscle memory from her stolen body! It's not a chocie she makes due to a desire for modesty or tradition NOR a coercive control tool of the patriarchy. It's just an old habit that's hard to break. She wears a hijab for the same reason she holds a pen in her right hand. There is no deeper reason than that, even after the software update amnesia wears off.

This woman, even putting aside the alien computer merged with her brain, is not a Muslim! Slapping a hood, not even an actual hijab just an ordinary hood, onto a superhero costume does not a Muslim super-heroine make. No more than arbitrarily slapping a burka purchased via Amazon on any random woman suddenly makes that lady a tallymark on the scoreboard of diversity. 

We cannot, unlike our superhero representatives, read the minds of the people that created Halo and Young Justice. We were not there in the room when the script or concept art for the character was approved, let alone when the first draft was rejected for whatever reason.

But let's be completely frank here, there are logically only a few possible reasons... 

The directors and producers and scriptwriters and executives for the show where either too lazy, too ignorant, too greedy, or too bigoted to include authentic diversity in their creation. They clearly did not feel an actual Muslim woman had any place in the story they wanted to tell. But they were internet woke enough to vaguely capitalize on the whole "diversity fad" and tease the concept of something new before popping the champagne cork on an inclusive job well done.

We discussed this character at length not because the show Young Justice is of any particular importance in the grand scheme of things. Not because that character is overtly more offensive than 50 other examples we could have used instead. We did it to demonstrate and give context to just how little effort the crew of the show felt was necessary. To really prove a point, not just insinuate things or lob incendiary accusations. That shallow, cursory offering was, in their eyes, good enough to meet the public's new diversity expectations.  

"We are not as quite as bad as that other studio/author/country! So pick us instead of them!"

The sad part is that, far too often, it really is enough to keep the critics away! See, DC is not truly the problem here. They are just a part of a much larger problem. Disney is not better. Ubisoft is not better. Netflix is not better. The New York Times is not better. All of the big studios and content creators in every form of media from books to music to children's toys are swindling the masses! Rye bread and animal-rights-conscious circuses for the plebeians! 

We mean look at how bad this brainwashing cancer is...

"If we could all vote unanimously on a movie that has a perfect balance of diversity and story, that is Black Panther. First, every character is not just defined by their color or culture, but also has a rich background, characterization and development. Second, the cultural background of the film gives viewers an appreciation of the unique and colorful African culture." 

Bianca Padilla - April 26, 2021 for Onemega.com

Unanimously huh? How-about-we-link-you-to-some-people-that-disagree?

You wax poetic about diversity of skin color and such but apparently you are not so into, oh, diversity of thought... Anyhows did we watch the same film? As we recall tribalism and social-class are very much so on display in the film. Multiple characters, such as T'Challa's best friend or the big guy that challenges him to the throne, are absolutely defined by their ethnic group and the traditional role that sub-culture plays in the overall society of Wakanda. There are issues with the king and his sort-of-secret girlfriend specifically because of what she is, not who she is as a person. And the main villain is totally all about Black Power issues, he definitely is defined by color and culture, not to mention his inherited position via genetic lineage!

"...the unique and colorful African culture." 

If Wakanda is somewhere in this circle why does the border patrol wear those blue Lesotho blankets and the capital city have West African inspired skyscrapers?

The culture? Uh, Africa is a continent, not a country. Even if it was, it wouldn't have a single unified culture. Many African nations seriously struggle with issues of discrimination or prejudice or outright violence, in part because the various groups within those countries consistently do not get along or have social balance. But let us magnanimously pretend that person meant pan-African aesthetic trends. Indeed, Africa overall is famous for its military battle rhinos and the ninja-shoes worn by its special forces. Did you see the part where one of the Wakandan tribe leaders literally says "Glory to Hanuman..." during the film? Hanuman! Yeah, the popular monkey god from Indian Hinduism... Let us all take a moment to bask in the "African" culture perfectly appreciated in Black Panther. 

And then they made a sequel! Kunta Kinte and ourselves suffered through watching it, and then surprise guest Pablo came over and we all watched it again though the "Mayan" lense. The film was... well... shall we say less than perfect. *cough*

By Pinocchio's nose we could talk about why Black Panther is bad for hours. (The skyscrapers are made of mud! - Shush!) But let us restrain ourselves to a slow shake of the head at the ignorant, foolish, blind idolization of unhealthy faux-diversity that dominates such a large portion of what should be an intellectual, open-minded discussion. We are not attacking the morality of the author of that article. Truly, it's not about them. We are expressing disappointment underscored by sorrow at the literally millions of people such a quote represents even now in the midst of 202X.

Hell is full of good meanings, but Heaven is full of good works.

For diversity's sake please, please stop rewarding such retrogressive so called "diversity" with praise, or even worse with money! If you truly want a more balanced, healthy corpus of media in your life or the life of future generations, seek out and reward the diamonds among the coals that work towards such a goal with more honesty and integrity. They exist! Perhaps not as famous or numerous, relatively speaking, but there are alternative options. If all else fails, here is what we can only hope is a clarion call to go out and make something diverse yourself. 

We will be your first fans.

Begging is for dogs, but we will ask very nicely!