Representation... what a topic. Time to take a seat in the Ivory tower and flex our sympathy and morality muscles kids.

To be honest witcha, I see talking about the "issue" of representation of minority groups in mass media to be a vapid and superfluous exercise. I say this because firstly, entertainment and the arts in general are free markets, you can't create laws that make people make the kind of content that you want. The only solution to representation in the media is for you to go make whatever content you want. If you want to see more islamic, half white, urban, girl who has vitiligo and likes golf centric shit then sorry to say, but ur gonna have better luck just making that one yourself than demanding some creative make it for you. It's really boring to me to sit in a classroom with a bunch of other middle to upper class kids who wanna gush about how much they hate nazis and the kkk and how sympathetic they are for minorities. I feel like this kind of discussion is just elitist talk into a vacuum where topics like "Hey look at these ghetto black people, we need to help them because they aren't like MLK" come up. Being a middle class kid I've learned all my life that your race doesn't mean much if you have money. I think you are more likely to relate with someone from your social class than from your racial group. The Boondocks episode about trying to elevate black culture was a prime example of this elitism where the creator feels connected/responsible for a group of people just because of their skin color. Just because you share a skin color with someone doesn't mean you have some special responsibility for them, these people don't have to be freedom riders just because they are black, they can live however they want. My friends and I who were hispanic or black all enjoyed similar shows, similar anime, similar comics, and similar video games. To say that being white defines me as a person more than my upbringing, the area I grew up in, the media I consumed throughout my life, and the people who I've met throughout life just seems naive and thick headed. It's not like just because I'm white I can go up to a fucking kkk member and relate to them, they probably never even watched Naruto. The point I am trying to make is that using representation in popular media is to focus on surface level content rather than deeper meaningful content. I see representation as a cheap sidestepping of competition where, maybe you write a subpar sci-fi space adventure that would never get any acclaim, but slap a minority as the main character and you appeal to a new audience and earn more praise for what I see as a very surface level reason. Take this very school for instance, you see a school with a bunch of areas they can approve upon, but instead of addressing problems like scheduling, housing, or acceptance rates they throw a few banners up saying how "Equal means equal at Ringling" or something like that. This to me is a cheap sidestepping of the schools actual responsibilities in a sense, because they followed a vapid trend in order to get easy approval instead of sinking more resources into fixing more substantial issues at school. Everyone who attends Ringling College has more in common with each other whether they're from Nigeria or South Dakota because they have the means to shell out a quarter million dollars to make pretty pictures, than they do with some random person who is the same race that they are. In entertainment, I firmly believe that focusing on creating more well produced, well thought out, and boundary pushing universal stories that anyone can pick up and relate to is much more progressive than saying, we need to include an equal number of every race in every story ever made. At the end of the day I say just make good shit, and don't pander.