LogFAQs > #978700876

Disney's heart is in the right place, but I can't say that I'm on board with *every* program having < 50% of the cast be comprised of members of underrepresented groups.

In the short run, it'll lead to tokenism where superfluous characters are added to inflate the numbers. That's no big deal because writers will start finding ways to make characters matter as soon as they're called out on tokenism. What annoys me about the scenario is that it limits the stories that can be told.

If they want to make an animated series based off of Beauty and the Beast, 18th century France is suddenly going to have larger Black and Asian populations because, "If magic beasts and talking teacups can exist, why can't they?" If Belle's best friend is Asian and the royal captain of the guard is Black, I could still accept that this is 18th century France through an idyllic lens. But if you reimagine it so that ethnic French people make up less than 50% of the cast, you might as well set the story in Middle Earth, Eternia, or Hyrule. "French" is an architecture and not an ethnicity.

Or if you wanted a western, you would have two options. The first would be to run the story through a filter of a minority family living in the old west. The other would be to make them all talking animal characters so that more than half of the cast can be comprised of actors from underrepresented groups.

I think it would be better if they mandated that 80% of programs adhered to the < 50% rule. Anything set in the present could mandate inclusivity. Anything placed in a historical setting could be more homogenous, but the number of such stories would be limited to less than 20% (unless it's focusing on an underrepresented group) so that everything isn't an excuse for "a small White town in Kentucky circa 1950," "a predominantly White town in 1880s Texas," "Medieval England with a 90% White cast," etc.