Making Diverse Content That Doesn't Suck

How To Have Representation Without Wokism

Hollywood is taking a pasting right now. Disney is making movie after movie and losing money. Box office is down across the board. Critics love a lot of what’s coming out, but audiences don’t. Hollywood executives scream about how audiences aren’t ready for the product they’re producing, acting like it’s the paying customers fault that the studio made content that people don’t like. It’s not the movie goers fault that they won’t spend their money on Hollywood movies or TV shows. It’s the studios that deserve the blame.

But before I get too far into this I want to add the disclaimer: Yes, Hollywood, Bollywood, New York TV studios, Youtube producers and the guy who makes videos in his basement with his cell phone camera from 2015 have the right to make whatever content they want and that includes Woke content. I mean that literally. I would be offended by anyone who said differently. The fact remains that your right to make content does not equate to a responsibility on my part to consume it. As long as Wokists are not stopped from making or marketing their product their rights are being respected. And no, I don’t have to support what Wokists want to consume. That’s what wokists are for. If they want to see content that they like based on the ideology then it is their job to pay for it, not mine.

Something else I need to define is Woke vs. Non-Woke. This isn’t hard if I use examples. You will probably notice that pretty much all of my examples are going to be from the world of Science Fiction, Fantasy and other related genres. That happens. It’s what I’m into.

So, we’ll start off with a popular television series that many wokists would call Woke, but that pretty much non-Woke person does not. It’s call Star Trek: The Original Series. I take it that most people are familiar even if they’re not fans, right? So let’s explore this.

First off, let’s acknowledge the obvious: The majority of the crew is white. Lieutenant Nyota Uhura is a black woman played by Nichelle Nichols. She has an important job - she helps the ship keep in touch with both their high command and any ships locally. Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu is an Asian man played by George Takei. So that’s representation of two non-white races and women (although there were a bunch more women on the Enterprise and the planets the visited.) The Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” contained the first ever inter-racial kiss on American TV. All of that furthered the causes of “representation” but none of it was “Woke” for the following reasons:

1.) There was no lecture or undue focus on race. There were simply important characters that were important to the story that were members of minority groups.

At no point did we hear a lecture about how Uhura was treated (and on the Enterprise she was treated just like everyone else) and we never witnessed Sulu gazing into his own almond shaped eyes and contemplating his Asian-ness. They were there and they were competent. A ship without a helmsman goes nowhere, and Sulu was the helmsman. A ship with no ability to communicate has no purpose in exploring the universe and Uhura performed her communications duties like a champion (and is pretty much the archetype for communications officers in Science Fiction stories). They were valuable members of both the crew and the story. They were relevant.

The only ST:TOS episode I would consider to be Woke was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” In this episode we are treated to two different white actors in face paint. They are painted white on one side and black on the other, but the sides are reversed. We’re forced to sit through two lectures. The first one is by one of the characters proclaiming that people that are black on one side are superior to people who are black on the other. In the second lecture we hear all about how the two men look basically alike and need to figure out that there is really no difference, yada, yada, yada..

Listen, not only is this heavy handed (one might even say hamfisted) it’s boring and unnecessary for any viewer with an IQ higher than that of Forrest Gump.

2.) The story doesn’t center around race/gender/sexuality

Listen folks, there is a lot of good content out there with non-white or LGBTQ+ main characters. Pretty much anything by Will Smith comes to mind, as does the Blade trilogy starring Wesley Snipes. Black Panther was the highest grossing movie of all time when it came out (it was later surpassed) and nearly the entire cast was black. But when you watch those movies or Star Trek: The Original Series you don’t get a story centered around race. Even when Will Smith played himself in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the story was literally about a black man who came up poor being forced to make his way in a world of what was mainly (outside of the people who lived with him) a bunch of rich white folks. He does face racism occasionally, but it’s in character. In ST:TOS racism has been eradicated. It’s enough to see people function at a high level.

For the record, I know that this is the kind of story that wokists call for most often. Based on box office and ratings they don’t support products well enough to make them profitable. That’s fine for an academic press I suppose, those are non-profit, but not for a major corporation looking to make money. And, given an corporations legal requirement to act in the best interests of its stockholders, profits are more important than your political message.

3.) It respects its fan base.

The original Star Trek series began with (as hard as it is for those of us who don’t remember a time before it) a brand new cast of characters. But later iterations, namely the Star Trek reboot by JJ Abrams, flirted with making Sulu a gay character. Even George Takei, who is both gay and the man who originally portrayed Sulu, thought this was a bad idea. Changing an existing character and breaking the trust between the fans and the studio is a very bad idea. Takei himself called for a new character to be created if JJ wanted to represent gay people. Takei was right. The movie was eventually scrapped due at least in part to backlash from the fans.

Gender/race swapping beloved characters is the wrong way to go in the vast majority of cases. It can work (think Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury) but it most often fails and is more likely to fail in the modern era given the politicization of race/gender/orientation.

It’s also worth mentioning the director of the next Star Wars movie, Sharmeed Obaid-Chinoy has disrespected her fan base as well. In her case, it’s not because of a race/gender swapped character, and not because she’s the first minority woman to direct a Star Wars film, but because she explicitly stated that she “is going to make a movie to make men uncomfortable.”

I get the fact that there are many female Star Wars fans. My ex-wife and both of my daughters are among their ranks. There are a lot of male fans as well though, and they now have a reason to avoid the movie. Most people, regardless of their social justice status, go to a movie to be entertained, not to be made to feel uncomfortable. She’s already lost a huge chunk of her potential audience based on that one statement and I don’t think she’s even started filming yet. For the record, I will most likely be one of the men who doesn’t see the movie for precisely that reason. There is no shortage of demand for my dollars and I’ll spend them on something I need or enjoy. Things could change based on what I hear from friends, but I’m not optimistic.

4.) Star Trek never felt the need to treat every white person in sight as being stupid.

I am well aware that racism exists. I am not denying that it does. I would argue that characters like Sulu and Uhura were never treated in as being stupid. For matter neither were King T’Challa from Black Panther, the titular character from the Blade series or Captain Hiller from Independence Day.

There is no reason why every white person has to be a moron either. Forrest Gump and Bobby Boucher (the latter from Water Boy) both lack intelligence and it’s not like those characters offend me. There are plenty of dumb white people and in over three decades working with the public I’ve met more than my fair share. The fact remains that stereotyping white people as idiots (ala the Velma series that came out awhile back) is a turn off for white people and we’re a huge part of your potential audience. In the case of the Velma series, I gave up on it in the first episode after I saw Daphne and Fred looking like a couple of dumbasses. I had better things to do. Seriously, I have no more reason to watch consume content that treats me like a doofus than a black person would be to consume content that treats them like they’re dumb and for the same reason. This is, in some ways, also part of being respectful to your fan base.

5.) Having a cast with no or few white people in it is fine. Trying to tell me that you’re being “inclusive” by excluding people who look like me is not just dishonest, it’s an insult to my intelligence.

I call this the “K Tempest Bradford Rule.” For those that aren’t familiar, Bradford is a black female author that told her fans not to read any straight white male authors for a year. She certainly had the right to do that. This was supposed to strike a blow against white privilege and promote the work of minority/female authors I think. It was racist. And yes, I said that.

Going to see the musical Hamilton was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my entire life. It’s hard to believe that I had sworn that I would never see it at one point because the original cast swore they would never allow a white person to appear in their play. I eventually relented because they stopped excluding white people and in fact had a few (the majority of the cast was black and that was fine) in the production of the play on the day I went to see it. But excluding me will result in me excluding you from my budget. And no screaming “How does it feel?” isn’t going to get me to change my mind and hand you my loot.

Star Trek has always featured a diverse cast. I’m pretty sure (I wasn’t around when the story debuted. I’m too young.) that it was the first show to do so. I can tell you that I’ve never felt excluded by it though. There has been a black captain (Benjamin Cisco), an Asian Captain (Sulu, in the movies) white female captain (Catherine Janeway), two minority female captains (Burnham and Georgiou) and only God knows how many female and minority officers, diplomats, planetary rulers, etc. Star Trek: Discovery features a gay couple, and that’s not a problem. They’re new characters, so it makes sense.

And that’s pretty much it. So how do you make a non-woke but diverse product?

1.) Don’t lecture your audience about race and/or sexuality, etc.

Put the characters there. Make them a real part of the cast and make them matter based on something other than their intersectional status. Give your diverse characters a reason to exist that goes deeper than their diversity.

2.) Don’t center your story around race/sexuality.

I really wish Mercedes Lackey’s The Last Herald Mage series and Tao Wong’s The System Apocalypse series had been made into movies so more people would get this, but both were multi-volume book series centered around diverse people (Vanyel Ashkevron from The Last Herald Mage was gay and John Lee from the System Apocalypse was Asian American) that carried their entire series, but being gay or Asian was a fact about them, and not what drove the series. Use your characters the same way.

3.) Respect your fan base.

The Ghostbusters reboot that featured an all-female cast was a dismal failure. Ghostbusters: Afterlife made phat bank. The difference was that Afterlife respected the existing fan base by not gender swapping the characters even though they added a new female Ghostbuster, albeit a young one.

And keep in mind that you’re making a movie to be a draw to everyone. Making it your goal to make someone uncomfortable is producing that asks those people to spend their money on something else.

4.) Don’t use your product to make the people you want to sell tickets to like bumbling idiots.

The occasional dumbass is okay, but most of the white people in your work should be of average intelligence (approximately) and not complete buffoons unless the story specifically calls for such. Note that this doesn’t mean that your diverse characters have to be stupid: Lieutenant Uhura was smart and talented. Lieutenant Sulu was too. Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation was black and he was a freaking technical genius. Just treat your white characters with the same respect you treat your diverse characters with. And yes, I know that this isn’t “edgy” but “edgy” doesn’t sell.

5.) Feel free to have a cast made up of all or mostly diverse characters, but be inclusive by being inclusive, instead of being inclusive by being exclusive.

Your characters are your characters. If you want to make a movie that takes place in a minority community (think Lean On Me with Morgan Freeman or Stand and Deliver with Edward James Olmos) that’s awesome. There’s no need to include straight white males per se. Just don’t exclude them as some kind of political statement if you want their money.

And that’s really all there is to it.

Thanks for reading. Save this post if you enjoyed it. Let’s get the message out.