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3 A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show CITY OF ANGELS and the plausible deniability of color-blindness kristen j. warner In a recent debate over the problematic characterization of Bonnie Bennett, the only Black female recurring character on the CW network series The Vampire Diaries (CW 2009), my challenger insisted that with all of the qualifiers I insisted she have, “maybe this is another hidden reason there are no minorities on television : everything becomes an issue and you just can’t win.” Indeed, the main quali fier I suggested that the series allow the character to possess—an innate sense of cultural difference—is difficult to grasp and maintain. However, I do not accept that just because race is difficult, it is impossible to represent in meaningful and complex ways. Characterization is one way to explore the possibility of meaningful representation. Yet characterization’s most basic underpinning lies in casting the best actor for the part. Casting, a vital practice in the Hollywood industry, determines the types of characterizations and representations that are allowed within media productions . Thus, rather than continue to focus solely on the actual televisual representations , I argue that studying casting practices enables media scholars to examine how representations are literally selected to be televised. An imperfect science further complicated by variables such as race, age, and gender, the casting process becomes a useful way to understand societal assumptions about people of color. Moreover, casting also shapes the nexus of labor directly impacted by casting decisions. The job of “character representation” involves not only actors and casting directors but also producers, writers, actors’ and writers’ guilds, and network/studio executives. Thus, exploring industrial casting processes not only enables scholars to understand race relations at a practical locus of specific interactions but can also shed light on broader social dynamics. Expanding on the possibility of illuminating social dynamics through casting, one practice that serves the industry’s sociopolitical needs is color-blind casting. On the surface, the link between color-blindness and casting practices may seem loose and perhaps even forced. However, I submit that this connection is 49 anything but loose; in fact, we rarely consider how both practices contain similar ideologies and assumptions that depend upon social consensus. Both color-blindness and casting are founded upon un- (and in-) articulated assumptions about the irreducibility of physiology; that is, in both cases individuals (casting directors or just ordinary people) assume an equality of opportunity in others, regardless of physical appearance, allowing for a so-called leveling of the playing field, where everyone can then perform the same roles without any cultural specificity. Because we have been socialized into “not seeing race,” when issues arise that are consciously or unconsciously informed by racism, color-blindness renders claims of discrimination and prejudice moot. More specifically, assuming “we are all the same” makes claims of racism appear as “oversensitivity” and the result of political correctness. Moreover, as Patricia J. Williams asserts, the failure to deal with the devastating effects of color-blindness can lead to a “self-congratulatory stance of preached universalism”: “‘We are the world! We are the children!’ was the evocative, full-throated harmony of a few years ago. Yet nowhere has that been invoked more passionately than in the face of tidal waves of dissension, and even as ‘the’ children learn that ‘we’ children are not like ‘those,’ the benighted creatures on the other side of the pale.”1 Williams’s quote is powerful because it speaks to the double consciousness of people of color who, on the one hand, want to belong and desire to believe in the collective “we” but who, on the other hand, also recognize that the cost of joining is that their difference cannot be acknowledged and, what is more, that even to suggest that difference might be important would transform them into instigators of racial division. The paradox is clear: a message of universal goodwill renders people of color invisible. In sum, practices of color-blindness and casting maintain a very idealistic but myopic view of the world based on normative (white) assumptions. Color-blind casting is therefore a viable lens for understanding the interdependence of cultural-racial politics and pop culture as related to television production. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to discover through industry trade articles and personal interviews how media industry professionals rationalize the everyday decisions they make—particularly as they relate to casting. Reconstructing the discourses...

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