Storytelling is the prime source of entertainment, but the media people consume has a responsibility to deliver content that can challenge or aid its audience.
All media must contain some intellect and challenge its audience, but noteworthy and excellent media does attempt to enable the consumer to rethink certain aspects of life.
A storyteller’s most important role is to provoke thought.
Many writers, television show creators and directors love to dive into worlds and characters that have stories they never really experienced before.
There’s great examples of this where people have won or were nominated for awards including the movie “Green Book” directed by Peter Farrelly won three Oscars and three Golden Globes.
The same year “BlacKkKlansman” directed by Spike Lee was also nominated for an Oscar, causing a lot of discourse among fans of the movie.
“‘Green Book’ does not sanitize history, nor does it have much to offer the present,” a Dec. 3, 2018 Guardian article said. “It is possible to do better. Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman,’ starring Adam Driver and John David Washington, for example, confronts the institutional racism of its 70’s setting head-on.”
Award shows and representation of the best artists are in itself an extremely debatable topic, especially with its past of racism.
“2020 still saw only a single non-white acting nominee and the 2019 awards awarded ‘Green Book,’ ” according to an Apr. 14, 2021 BBC article. “A turgid and extremely problematic film about race relations, the biggest prize of the night. ‘Green Book’ represented the worst sort of ‘progress,’ in that, similarly to ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ which won best picture 30 years earlier, it used racism as a tool to explore the conversion of a white, bigoted protagonist.”
Minority artists who produce media about their own culture, heritage and experiences should be promoted, praised and given more attention.
But there is also the concept of whitewashing, where if a minority story is told through a white lens, certain aspects of their identity or culture is lost because of the story being told through a privileged, white, perspective.
The definition of whitewashing is “to portray in a way that increases the prominence, relevance, or impact of white people and minimizes or misrepresents that of nonwhite people,” according to Merriam-Webster dictionary,
When storytellers dive into this side of the creative process, they may delve into writing characters or stories that represent identities they have no ties to, such as a white male director filming a story of a young Black girl, or a straight author writing a queer coming out story.
However, even though “Green Book” can be considered a controversial piece, media creators that have the opportunity and foundation to create stories should diversify their media to include more of these minority stories.
This is an incredibly controversial topic, but I feel like there’s great defense on both sides – to honor and respect storytellers having the courage to write stories so unlike their own, and to recognize that minority storytellers should have the honor of telling their own stories and be promoted and uplifted in popular media.
The concept of writing “what you don’t know” is incredibly riveting, but what is the consequence of this? Unfortunately, diving into stories that have a media creator who has no personal experience can easily emit stereotypes from ignorance.
In her TedTalk, “The danger of a single story” novelist Chimamanda Adichie talks about growing up as Nigerian and reading British novels that contained only white characters, and only being influenced by a single story.
“What this demonstrates is how impressionable and vulnerable we are of a story, particularly as children,” Adichie said in her speech. “Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things in which I could not personally identify.”
Adichie goes on to say that after discovering African books that are underrepresented in storytelling mediums, the world of storytelling expanded for her.
“I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate and whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature,” Achidie said. “I started to write about things I recognized.”
It is important to have minorities to see proper representation of themselves in stories, the danger of a single story is the audience only seeing one perspective, preventing them from seeing the richness in diversity. Understanding different cultures and backgrounds is vital to the human experience.
Fortunately, there are creators who are including more diversity in their stories, but it needs to be proper representation in order to break the stigma of infusing minorities into stories.
The Reading Partners, an organization of tutors and volunteers geared towards educating a community of readers including diversity within their learning,goes into great detail about how children can recognize stereotypes at a young age and that can be incredibly harmful.
“Stereotypes can be dangerous because they encourage people to believe sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people, and ignore individuality among us,” according to a July 1, 2021 Reading Partners article.
AnotherReading Partners article named “The danger of the single story and underrepresentation in kids’ books,” refers to Adichie’s argument in her TedTalk.
“The single story reduces people, rendering them incomplete, flat, one-dimensional,” a Nov. 18, 2020 Reading Partner article said. “As a result, it becomes difficult to recognize equal humanity in the characters of a single story.”
A YouTube video published in 2022 titled “The Day Rue ‘Became’ Black” by Yhara Zayd discusses the topic of the need to break the stigma of casting Black characters in movies, specifically using the example of the racist reactions of “The Hunger Games” fan base when the movie adaptation to the book trilogy by Suzanne Collins came out.
”Despite these characters and the color of their skin literally being described more than once, a section of ‘The Hunger Games’ fans were still unreasonably surprised because white fans in particular are very used to being the only kind of people who exist in their favorite books.”
There was a lot of backlash for the casting of Amandla Stenberg for Rue, who was originally characterized as African American in the books.
In the video, Zayd went through Twitter threads posted by the fan base that had severe racist remarks about the casting, one that stood out among the rest was “call me racist but when I found out Rue was Black her death wasn’t as sad.”
Many of the fans believed Rue to be a white character in the books, even though she was characterized as dark skinned, mainly because white tends to be the default when it comes to reading literature.
“Western literature in general tends to center white writers and, in doing so, centers whiteness,” Zayd said. “How many times have you found yourself reading a book and noticing when an author describes a character as being Black, Asian, or Hispanic? It feels sudden not only because this is the first character of color you’ve come across in the book, but because no other characters have had their race or skin color described. And you realize ‘Oh. they don’t need the description because they are understood to be white.’ ”
The reaction to Rue being Black shows how even a book, released 15 years ago, that attempted to break the stigma of young Black girls, readers were still being racist towards this character especially when the movie was adapted and was put on screen.
”Studios don’t question whether a teenage Black girl will be able to relate to a story about a teenage white girl,” Zayd said.
This conversation needs to be had, even though these reactions were so hateful toward a young Black teen girl being casted in a movie that had a large fan base, it was a step in the right direction to break that stereotype.
“They ask if white girls will be able to relate to Black girls and then decide they can’t,” Zayd said. “Which ends in Black girls getting little to no light-hearted stories about high school or coming of age.”
There needs to be more movies about African American girls casted in roles that aren’t just about discrimination or racism in order to normalize identities without using stereotypes. Creators must humanize and treat these characters like actual people with cultural backgrounds, heritage and complexity.
Regardless, these conversations need to be had. “The Hunger Games” movie adaptation was released in 2012, only 11 years ago. Although we have television series like “Ginny & Georgia” and “Never Have I Ever” streaming with a diverse cast and getting a lot of attention for breaking the stereotypical mold, the consumers must realize the impact this media is having on them and where it’s coming from.
There’s also the young adult book series called “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” By Rick Riordan, where all the characters in the books were characterized as white. However, the television series adaptation, coming in 2024, has a diverse cast, notably Leah Jeffries for the leading female character Annabeth.
Annebeth’s casting had a similar reaction to Rue’s in “The Hunger Games” series, many fans were upset that the character was not casted as white or a different race, the author who is taking a big part in the production of the televised adaptation posted a response to this hatred on his website.
“You refuse to believe me, the guy who wrote the books and created these characters, when I say that these actors are perfect for the roles because of the talent they bring and the way they used their auditions to expand, improve and electrify the lines they were given . . . You are judging the appropriateness for this role solely and exclusively on how she looks. She is a Black girl playing someone who was described in the books as white. Friends, that is racism,” Riordan said.
Just like Riordan, it is up to the creators of these stories, no matter what media format, to be responsible for publishing work that elicits healthy representation to break stereotypes.
So, where is the line? Can storytellers of all kinds of mediums produce stories of experiences and identities they’ve never experienced?
The answer to that question is complicated to say the least, and there is no right response to this, but I believe that there’s a line between creativity and authenticity.
Consumers should promote and further uplift stories solely about minority experiences to minority creators to show a more authentic, representative, and validated story.
But for creators that do want to explore different identities, they should put in the research and take into account other people’s experiences when writing minority narratives.
Stories should have a strong foundation, no matter the medium. None of us want poorly developed characters that don’t fall into stereotypes but fall flat because of being told through an unrelated lens. The audience desires complexity, and in order to nurture a society that is prone to being entertained by storytelling, these stories need to instill healthy representation of characters.
