Is this writer from GIRLS racist, stupid or cleverly ironic?

[Ashwin Pande]

http://gawker.com/5903468/a-girls-wr...eople-problems

This week, on the internet, we are talking about 25-year-old prodigy Lena Dunham's new HBO show Girls and race. (Girls and gender was last week's topic. Keep up.) On Monday, after the show's premiere, Jenna Wortham wrote on the Hairpin about her disappointment in the show's overwhelming whiteness: "[T]hese girls... are beautiful, they are ballsy, they are trying to figure it out... I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen, right alongside them."

On Wednesday, Girls writer Lesley Arfin seemingly responded to Wortham's and similar criticisms in a tweet. "What really bothered me most about Precious," she wrote, "was that there was no representation of ME."

Was there ever a chance that Girls would get race right? (Or even get it at all?) The young urbanites that Dunham depicts are more diverse than they're often given credit for. A show set in that milieu — the post-college-publishing-internship-Greenpoint-apartment scene — featuring a nonwhite main character (or two! Or three!) wouldn't feel unrealistic in the way that a black ad executive might feel on Mad Men. It would be nice to see a show that that acknowledged the existence of young people of color as privileged and narcissistic (albeit relatable, to some of us) as Dunham's characters.

But a nonwhite friend at your opium-tea dinner party doesn't make you John Brown, and the young white people who write and are depicted by the show are just as uncomfortable and unthinking about race as most white people in this country. There's been a lot of pressure on Girls to be the voice of a generation — or "a voice of a generation," as Dunham's character Hannah puts it in the first episode. Its writers certainly seem to have captured my generation's awkwardness about race.

More in article.

[Kedd]

Just stupid.

[GelfXIII]

Maybe they're just lazy. Taking on race as a topic calls for way more exertion.

[Ben]

As a white guy, I don't think about race much either except when I'm actively discriminating against people of different, non-white races. Would you rather these girls spend every episode discriminating against people????

[Fourthman]

I often find myself on the side of these racial controversies that doesn't represent my self interest. No surprise here; I'm willing to overlook Arfin's tweet in response to the huge backlash to this (2 episodes aired) show - it was clueless but it wasn't Mein Kampf, and she seemingly regretted it immediately.

The show is good, and I think we need to give it a chance to explore who these people are before we deal with race. I didn't watch Friends, or Sex and the City, or Seinfeld, but I do watch Mad Men and The Sopranos. And it seems to me that on a show like Girls, if it's given time to explore itself before it explores race, the statement will be that much more poignant.

[thatguyfromsyracuse]

Everything is racist. EVERYTHING!!

[capntightpants]

Just stupid.

Yeah, just stupid.

[Kedd]

I like that an idle wish that a show depict a more racially diverse world is somehow twisted into claims that the show is racist. *shrug*

[Kedd]

"I can identify with many aspects of this show, but I wish there was a non-white presence in the cast."
"Quit this McCarthy witch hunt bullshit! We aren't racist! You're racist!"

[JoeE]

She was just ridiculing the notion that you need to share the skin color of the people in a story to relate to them.

ONE episode of her show had aired, some bloggers tried to lay down a racial guilt trip, and instead of the standard ass-slathering apology they got a well-deserved fuck-off, at least before she retracted it.