At Clutch magazine, The Root contributing editor Demetria L. Lucas says she's not bothered by the racial makeup of HBO's Girls because her own group of friends isn't ethnically diverse, either.
I don’t like Girls. Revolutionary thought, right? I know. Since the HBO show’s premiere two weeks ago, I’ve read all types of moaning about the show, the story of four twenty-something brown-haired white women making a way and doing slightly better than Florida Evans in seemingly homogeneous Brooklyn. The prevailing complaint about the show has been about all those people of non-color living, mating, and getting by in America’s biggest melting pot of a city. How could it be, many, many (too many) people have wondered, that they couldn’t find any color in Brooklyn?! I mean, besides the homeless Black guy that yelled at “Hannah” to “smile!” (There are people of color in Girls’ world, they just, well, color the margins life for the people of non-color.) …
I will have lived here ten years come late August, and I have just one non-Black friend. She’s Puerto Rican, from The Bronx. Unlike Zoe Saldana and LaLa Vasquez-Anthony, she doesn’t claim “Black” even if she could be mistaken for such. I rarely see her, maybe once a year, as she’s a workaholic and a mother. We met when her husband was still her boyfriend, and clicked. End of story. Everyone else who I could call at 2 AM in the midst of a crisis and actually expect to answer and care is Black …
I didn’t think there was anything odd about that, until reading all the fuss and disbelief about “Girls” and its all-white world of friendships. I have multiple gripes with the show, mostly how they make 20-somethings look terribly lost and pathetic and their reality as young women mirrors no one I knew as a 20-something or any 25-year-olds I know now. (As someone who wrote a book about being in her 20s that some called “un-relatable”, I do accept writer Lena Dunham’s “truth”). But I can’t take genuine issue or validly complain about the color consistency of her world, or anybody else’s, especially when mine, and most people I know, is so similarly composed, just, well, darker.
Read Demetria L. Lucas' entire piece at Clutch magazine.
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