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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas. Like, the reality is, to use a recent example, it makes more sense for a young kid in Queens who gets bitten by a radioactive spider to be a mixed black and Puerto Rican kid, not a nerdy white one.

Also, as noted below, there's a distinction between "media gets attention" and "all media." There are plenty of procedural shows on CBS that are still mostly white, especially when you account for guest characters and the like.

As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas.

This isn't true, though. "Aimed at the youth [in urban areas]" doesn't imply that the demographic properties of the characters reflect or have any significant similarity to the youth [in urban areas]. Of course, the argument that a character who fits Miles Morales's situation is more likely to be black than white is perfectly cromulent. But also of course, the idea that the distribution of demographics of characters in a fictional work ought to somewhat realistically reflect the real setting in which the story takes place is an artificial one that producers can freely choose to follow or not. And notably, a near-universal refrain from SJ when it comes to media has been that demographics in media somewhat realistically reflecting the real setting is neither good nor necessary; the demographics in media ought to reflect what they believe will help accomplish societal goals such as, e.g. girls and minorities being able to "see" themselves people with demographic similarities to themselves in respected positions of power so that they are more motivated to pursue such things. And given that "somewhat realistically reflecting the demographics of the real setting" as a priority has been basically abandoned and destroyed, I think it's clear the overrepresentation of minorities is a completely free choice that could be changed trivially to representation-reflecting-proportion-of-population.

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