I think we need a new phrase to better express what this term is supposed to mean, and it should be “Organic Diversity” vs “Advertised Diversity”.
This is what people who use the phrase “forced diversity” are actually advocating for. This would be diverse characters that make sense in the time period and the setting. The dynamics encountered are representative of what they’re supposed to be and what makes sense for the period or the piece as a whole.
Good examples of this in media would be, as a famous example, Moana from Disney. The culture and cultural implications throughout the piece are well-researched and subtle, working their way through the entire piece, such as the practice of Honi.
Probably the most famous examples of high-quality organic diversity would be The Wire or OZ, which I won’t get into the specifics of here but everyone knows about anyway. Another recent example would be The Wall, despite what Tumblr thinks about it. Europeans are European, Chinese people are Chinese, and both act in a reasonable sense for what they’re encountering and the time period in an action movie.
Another personal favorite of mine would be Silver Linings Playbook because it does some good research into what BPD actually looks like and the struggle with it is the struggle of the movie, and it isn’t fixed or resolved in 2 hours because he met a girl.
Organic Diversity gets the name because the story unfolds organically and the characters have self-sufficient reasonings for what they’re doing and they feel, live, and breathe both as individuals and as individuals from their respective cultures.
Instead of “forced” we should use the phrase "fetishist”, where the Diversity itself becomes the point of the characters and the diversity. This is the diversity that feels/is applied from a board room and lacks sincerity, authenticity, and actual meaning behind it.
An example would be a book review I saw and reblogged a couple weeks ago where a new author was promoting their new fantasy piece with a blurb that was 4 sentences. The issue, though, was that more than half of the pitch was making sure you knew that the main character was a Latin@ lesbian girl and that there was a lesbian relationship in the piece.
A more famous piece would be the movie RENT, where they…just have a checklist of characters. The friends have no real reason or organic bond between them, but they just circle around one another because here’s a white guy, a spanish woman, a black man, a trans latina, and it goes on. It becomes more about what the various minorities actually are than the characters.
This is also the type of diversity that often promotes lazy stereotypes since little to no actual thought is put into the characters. They just need 3 black people so they apply the most broad and nondescript “black” characteristics onto them because the actual characters don’t matter other than to force the movie along.
jbbartram-illu
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