Diversity, Representation, and Storytelling on the Screen (or Stage)

Like so many of us, I was swept up in the Hamilton craze a couple of months ago when a live performance was made available on Disney Plus. Though I admit I have never been a fan of musicals, I found myself genuinely moved by the show’s brilliant performances, energetic choreography, and vibrant music. All these elements made the story of this nation’s founding relatable to someone like me – that is, someone who, until a criminally recent date, had little interest in early American history. As a kid, the founding of this country was always sold to me as some stale origin story involving a bunch of rich white guys discussing high falutin’ political concepts that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Indeed, my interest in American history over the last several years has been more about sussing out the parts that never made it into my K-12 textbooks, the kinds of histories revealed, for example, by Nicole Hannah Jones’s 1619 Project. To put it quite plainly, then, what I liked about Hamilton is that it featured talented people of color who looked like me, who spoke like me, who sang music that sounded familiar to me, and thus awakened in me the faintest interest in this history I had until then largely written off. 

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that there were many serious critiques of the hit Broadway musical. The most frequent criticism of course had to with the minimization of the founders’ participation in the institution of slavery, especially that of the title character himself, Hamilton. Others pointed out how the play contributes to the ongoing erasure of violence against Native Americans, which was so pivotal to this nation’s founding and expansion. There were also objections to the sidelining of female characters who function largely as archetypes (loyal wife, unrequited lover, seductive mistress) and primarily drive the plot among the men.  While most critics conceded that the play successfully carved out a space for brilliant “triple threat” performers of color, even this accomplishment was inseparable from the most substantive critique – namely, that by casting people of color to play these roles, Hamilton did not fundamentally alter or challenge the triumphal story of America’s founding. Instead, the play uses people of color to perpetuate the same old lies. Worse yet, it sets those false narratives to a catchy hip hop soundtrack, making it attractive to a new generation of Black and Brown Americans who are then destined to misunderstand their own history in this country.

For these reasons and others, many intellectuals, critics, and other brilliant commentators have sought to set the record straight for the last five years, and they got a lot noisier two months ago. To my knowledge, these efforts have resulted in at least one comprehensive “curriculum as corrective” entitled “Rise Up,” and one counter-play funded by the grande dame herself, Toni Morrison, which aims to expose Miranda as a naïve if well-intentioned dupe. These critiques and the reactions they’ve prompted are serious and it is to Miranda’s credit that he has handled them with such grace and dignity to date. But the conversation reminds me of questions I’ve mulled over before – namely, regarding the power and the limits of representation. In keeping with my previous post on the politics of identity in fiction, then, I’d like to take this opportunity to think about the meaning of representation in the world of theater, television, and film media – industries that in recent years have been sorting through their own reckoning and, possibly, awakening when it comes to identity and storytelling. In the world of visual media, what does “diverse representation” actually accomplish, and is it even a worthy goal?

Before diving in, it’s important to note how tremendously American cultural politics around race and representation have shifted over the last decade, and even in just the last five years since Hamilton first arrived on Broadway. We might call it the Obama effect. In 2008, the Obama presidency ushered in (for some) the illusion of a post-racial colorblind utopia, and while “we were eight years in power,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates has framed it, many talented creatives of color came out into the light. Indeed, in his collection of essays describing the impact of the Obama presidency on his own writing career, Coates rightfully counts himself among these dazzling Black intellectuals, writers, and creators who found their moment and their muse in the nation’s first Black president. But there were limits to what Black creatives could accomplish when, after all, they must still cater to predominantly white audiences. As Coates points out, Obama had “a remarkable ability to soothe the racial consciousness among whites” (We Were Eight Years in Power, 147). Similarly, the price of admission for BIPOC creatives was to adhere to colorblind storytelling that would appeal to white viewers. ThatHamilton featured Black and Brown cast members yet consistently drew a predominantly white audience throughout its Broadway run is, for example, a well-established fact.

It's no exaggeration, then, to claim that Obama’s rise coincided with a brief, golden age of colorblind storytelling on the big and little screens featuring BIPOC actors, pushed and peddled by BIPOC writers, seeking to tell BIPOC stories, all without alienating white viewers. In their sometimes successful attempts to draw racially-diverse viewers into a single big-tent audience, several hit television shows cast BIPOC characters in lead roles but ensured that their race or ethnicity remained incidental to the main storyline. To my mind, the best example of this phenomenon in the last decade is Shonda Rhimes’s hit Scandal whose lead character, Olivia Pope, embodies a near accidental Blackness in all but a handful of episodes. Lots of folks have written compellingly on this particular topic, and I am indebted to Robin M. Boylorn of the Crunk Feminist Collective whose piece, entitled “A Scandal and a Lawnchair: Why Olivia Pope Can’t Save Us From Racism,” spurred my thinking on this subject (Brittney Cooper et al., The Crunk Feminist Collection, 240-243). These days, however, it would seem that both Scandal and Hamilton belong to a bygone era, “a fossil imprint of a more optimistic time.” 

Indeed, much can be learned if we simply follow Scandal’s lead actress Kerry Washington and fast forward to March 2020 when she appeared as Mia Warren in the Hulu adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere. For those unfamiliar with Celeste Ng’s work of fiction, the novel weaves together three mother-daughter tales, including that of the nomadic artist Mia Warren and her daughter, Pearl; that of Chinese immigrant Bebe Chow and her newborn daughter, May Ling; and that of the formidable Elena Richardson and her daughters, perfectionist Lexie and rebellious Izzy (Elena also has a husband and two sons). In the novel, Ng asks questions primarily about how class and, to a lesser extent, race impact the way we understand motherhood. But apart from Bebe Chow and newborn May Ling, the reader is left to assume that the rest of the characters are white. (The story is, after all, set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in the 1990s.) That said, Ng has recently shared that she sought to remain ambiguous on the subject of Mia and Pearl’s race in the novel. “I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and in our culture,” states Ng, “But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.” (For more on these politics of identity in fiction, see my last blog post.)

In the Hulu adaptation, however, showrunner Liz Tigelaar, a white woman, made the bold choice to cast Mia Warren as Black, and just like that, the story was utterly transformed. Themes of race and racism, while undercurrents in the novel, became undeniably overt in the miniseries and the relationship between Mia Warren (played by Washington) and Elena Richardson (played by the incomparable Reese Witherspoon) took on whole new dimensions. The resulting product wasn’t every critic’s cup of tea and I admit that, at times, the desire to lean into our contemporary social justice moment led to some truly cartoon villain moments for Elena. Nevertheless, I appreciate that the show’s creators recognized that, in their choice to “diversify” the cast, they had a responsibility to update the story, as well. And I was glad to learn that Tigelaar recognized she was not, on her own, the right person to tell that updated story. She had to build a diverse writer’s room in order to get the story “right.” Thanks to the work of writers of color intentionally recruited into the show’s writing room, the very bones of the story were broken and reset around a radically new racial dynamic between Mia and her daughter, on the one hand, and Elena and her clan, on the other. 

Importantly, it wasn’t just that Mia and Pearl’s Blackness became pivotal to their relationships with members of the Richardson family. Rather, and this is critical, the unbearable whiteness of being, particularly of Elena Richardson, was on bright white display. It’s the kind of storytelling that only “diverse” writers could impart, familiar as most BIPOC must become in the course of their lifetimes with the inner workings of whiteness (In her collection of essays Thick, which appeared in 2019, Tressie McMillan Cottom has called this phenomenon “knowing your whites”). Little Fires Everywhere thus shows us how diverse representation can usefully, if not perfectly, lead to the exploration of new themes layered upon the old storylines but only so long as those in charge don’t stop at superficial choices related to casting. As such, the miniseries provides a good – though, again, not perfect – example of why representation matters: namely, when done right, diverse casting demands diverse writers, and together they fundamentally inflect and alter the original story. 

Significantly, Little Fires Everywhere also serves as a telling example of how far we’ve come in our cultural politics in the last decade, at least on the left. Just as the Obama era opened an avenue for BIPOC storytelling with the necessary caveat that it remain colorblind in an age of the nation’s “first Black president,” the Trump era, it can be argued, has at last created the conditions necessary for many white viewers to be open to hearing more authentic BIPOC stories in 2020 than they perhaps were before the nation’s “first white president” took office. (That the first Black president paved the rise to America’s first white president is Coates’s formulation in We Were Eight Years in Power. McMillan Cottom echoes this analysis in the aforementioned chapter of her work Thick). Indeed, speaking as an (admittedly progressive and daily radicalizing) woman of color, I would go so far as to claim that most major television shows can’t really get away with an all-white cast these days without looking painfully out of touch with reality. Shows that try – Momon CBS or even one of my own personal faves Schitt’s Creek on Netflix – have an odd early aughts retro energy about them, a time when BIPOC storytelling and representation onscreen took a nosedive.

But Americans love a remake, which begs an important question: how do you remake a classic that, for understandable reasons having everything to do with the history of identity, privilege, and access, feature exclusively white characters while factoring in the present-day imperative for “diverse representation,” especially if “diverse representation,” when done well, demands that you change the story? The recent conversation surrounding Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women provides an interesting case in point. Last year, as the film was nominated for Best Picture, more than a few noted how jarring it was to see an all-white cast in a major motion picture in 2019. This was, after all, just four years after activist April Reign’s hashtag #OscarsSoWhite first gained traction, and during a year when the Academy clearly sought to “do better” (other nominees included BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, Roma…and the 2019 winner, Green Book). But was that criticism warranted for a film based on a 19th-century book written by a white woman who sought to depict women like herself whose circumstances were constrained by their (relative) lack of wealth, power, status, and privilege? To answer this question would force us to engage in the moral politics of whose stories “deserve” to be upheld in this moment, an ethical question we will leave for another day. For now, let’s instead focus on this: even if the criticism were warranted, how does a director appropriately “update” such stories to meet the demands for “diverse representation” on-screen?

Some argued that Gerwig ought to have gotten more “creative” with casting in order to better connect with – and reflect – a modern audience. I’m thinking in particular of Natalie De Vera Obedos, writer for Teen Vogue, who observed that Jo and Amy’s love interest Laurie was described in Alcott’s telling as “canonically half-Italian” and thus racially other for the age (the novel was published in 1868). Because this particular valence would be lost on contemporary viewers for whom anti-Italian sentiment may not register as racism in the 21stcentury, Obedos argues that the creators should have cast a BIPOC actor in order to convey Laurie’s racial otherness. In the end, Obedos claims that casting Laurie as a man of color would have been both “historically plausible” and “made Little Women feel more inclusive than ever.” At first glance, this reasoning may sound odd, but it’s not entirely out there as a proposition. Several modern-day adaptations of Wuthering Heights, for instance, have played with Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity as described in Bronte’s masterpiece and cast the role with Black and mixed-race actors for precisely the same reason. Of course, in the example of Wuthering Heights, the novel itself hints at Heathcliff’s potential Blackness; to do what Obedos suggests for Little Women would, by contrast, entail casting a BIPOC actor as an act of historical translation in the service of increasing diverse representation on-screen. These are two very different things.

If Gerwig’s remake of a classic presents the conundrum of how to jam in “diverse” actors into all-white stories, what of those “classics” that already feature “diverse” characters and even “diverse” storytelling? Having met their “diversity quota,” such classics ought to be beyond reproach, right? Well, not exactly. A recent discussion about West Side Story is instructive here. According to writer and translator Carina del Valle Schorske, the 1957 musical is an abomination that nevertheless “remains one of the most enduring representations of Puerto Rican life in American pop culture, and the entertainment industry won’t leave it alone.” Like Hamilton, Schorske admits that the show is a great vehicle for Latinx actors. But, also like Hamilton, it doesn’t accurately reflect Puerto Rican life, music, or culture since, in fact, it wasn’t written for them or by them. “The show’s creators [Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim] didn’t know, or didn’t seem to care to know, much about their own material,” Schorske writes. And despite multiple efforts to update West Side Storyover the years, she argues that “there’s only so much Latin rhythm they can bring to the musical while maintaining a working relationship with Leonard Bernstein’s score,” commenting brilliantly that it’s “perhaps an object lesson in the limits of reform, whether aesthetic or political.” Getting right to the heart of the matter, Schorske concludes: “Maybe the next generation of dancers won’t want to adapt ‘West Side Story’ anymore. Maybe what we want is independence, to shine within a tradition we’ve authored ourselves.” In other words, rather than repeatedly wedge ourselves into stories that were not made for us or by us, it’s high time for Hollywood to greenlight more projects by BIPOC creatives. Only then will we get that special blend of authentic storytelling and diverse representation on screen that modern audiences so crave.  

When it comes to adapting the classics, clearly the creative caste is still working out how to meet today’s calls for on-screen diversity while staying true to original material now that colorblind storytelling is, as I’ve suggested above, no longer an option.  That is, given the rise of a 2nd Civil Rights Movement under an overtly white supremacist president during a global pandemic that has laid bare the disproportionate impact of the virus on communities of color, it is simply unfathomable to imagine a story where race and racism do not impact the lives of both white and BIPOC Americans in this country. And, at the end of the day, Schorske is exactly right. “It might be nice for some to think that culture is not a zero-sum game,” she muses, but ultimately we need “new narratives,” and that requires “new distributions of power.” In the creative world of Broadway as well as television and film media – just as in the world of fiction and frankly any other industry or field that wishes to become more “diverse” and “inclusive” – this brings us back to the perennial issue of gatekeepers. In an industry where those who hold power are predominantly white and male, what is to be done? 

The answer is obvious, and has been alluded to throughout: diversify the industry, diversify the gatekeepers. The “doing” of that diversity is, however, another matter. And while we wait for all those diverse hiring initiatives to yield returns, I would propose two half-measures. 

I already suggested above that Tigelaar’s remake of Little Fires Everywhere offers a possibility with one major caveat: even though BIPOC writers were indeed recruited to adapt the material, I would argue that it still falls into the trap of trying to “add race [to an existing story] and mix.”  By contrast, director Damon Lindelof and his talented Watchmen co-creators provide, to my mind, an exquisite example of how you get it right, from start to finish, and in the process manage to update a story for a modern audience incorporating authentic narratives that ring true to the historical experience of minoritized populations in this country. Like Tigelaar, Lindelof staffed his room with writers who were women and/or people of color when he decided to revamp the Watchmen franchise. He also recruited two Black men to serve as executive producers. And the jewel they created is truly a marvel to behold. Unlike Tigelaar, they didn’t just retell the story of Watchmen, making some characters “diverse” and backfilling the plot with race-related storytelling as necessary. Instead, they rebooted the franchise, setting it in the same narrative universe as the original graphic novel while shifting the timeline forward by several decades to reflect back to us the burning issues of our current moment. That is, Watchmen both stayed true to the spirit of the original material and helpfully extended its narrative framework to tell us something important – and uncomfortable – about ourselves in the here and now.

I won’t bother to dissect the plot here; that has already been done, excellently, elsewhere. What I will say is this: Lindelof’s “journey” to Watchmen began with serious self-reflection  about his record when it came to producing all-white stories, as well as some serious engagement with Black authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates. Indeed, it was while reading Coates’s Between the World and Me that Lindelof learned of the Tulsa Massacre, scenes of which open the HBO series and ignited a national conversation in their own right about this oft-forgotten episode in our national past. Even still, Lindelof admits he was “scared” to take this “risk.” He worried about all the (white) folks he might set off with a creative direction that featured lead Black characters telling stories about Black Americans under both historic and current-day conditions of white supremacy that, squid storms aside, frankly don’t look as different from real life as one might hope. But he persisted. In addition to staffing the writers’ room with writers of color, he engaged in active power-sharing, either giving up gatekeeping authority or, if that sounds too optimistic, at the very least opening the gates to those traditionally excluded, and we’ve seen the excellence that has resulted. 

Which brings me to my final point: how much talent is wasted, dies on the vine, lives in obscurity because it was never nurtured, cherished, never had a chance to thrive? As with any industry defined by systemic whiteness, power sharing and, let’s be honest, power transfer will be necessary to create authentic stories for diverse audiences that go beyond surface-level attempts at representation. That’s not something to mourn. Rather, it speaks to the true promise of representation – productive disruption, radical reimagination, and a new drive to discover heretofore unknown kinds of excellence in this world.