Spring Break
Minority voices are drowned out on 'Glee'
by Karen Chau
Arts | 10/27/09
Posted online at 12:45 AM EST on 10/27/09
In episode seven of Fox's new hit show Glee, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the cheerleading coach and the show's primary antagonist, tries to splinter the high school's glee club in order to cause it to fail. Working with another teacher to divide the club into two groups to perform two separate numbers, Sue chooses all the minority students within Glee Club and says, "I don't want to participate in a group that ignores the needs of minority students." Glee Club coach Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) responds, "You have got to be kidding me!", to which Sue responds, "I wouldn't kid about this, Will. And maybe that's your problem. Bigotry is no laughing matter." As a satire, Glee caricatures characters for the purposes of lampooning traditional representations of high school. Yet the scene where Sue calls Will's inherent bias into question actually resonates with a problem not only prevalent in Hollywood but within the program itself.
Initially billed as an ensemble show, Glee thus far has centered its storylines around five white, able-bodied main characters: Will Schuester, guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury, talented student Rachel Berry, football-player-turned-glee-clubber Finn Hudson and head cheerleader Quinn Fabray. Most of the press surrounding the show has lauded its innovation and diversity since other members of the glee club are gay, disabled, black, Asian or Latino. While these characters are celebrated for what they bring to the show, they often get pushed aside into nonparticipatory roles. There have been entire episodes in which these diverse secondary characters have one line or no lines at all, and in terms of singing, most of the songs have gone to the five leads.
This is hardly a new trend in television, a medium that has proven to be slow to change. Television programs most often feature white actors in lead roles, with minorities serving as secondary characters. In 1999, controversy over "whitewashing" in television programs led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to threaten the major networks with a lawsuit if they did not attempt to include more minorities in their casting practices. That year, the LA Times reported that "in 26 new prime-time shows slated to debut on the four major networks this fall, every lead character and nearly all the cast regulars will be white, even those on shows where the action takes place in urban high schools and New York City nightspots." Things haven't changed much since then. According to data released by the Screen Actors Guild on Oct. 23, "Caucasian roles as a proportion of total roles crept up in 2008, after falling in each of the past two years. Caucasians [account] for … 71.9% of roles in episodic television." Entertainment Weekly claimed that "each of the five major broadcast networks is whiter than the Caucasian percentage (66.2 percent) of the United States population, as per the 2007 census estimate."
Initially billed as an ensemble show, Glee thus far has centered its storylines around five white, able-bodied main characters: Will Schuester, guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury, talented student Rachel Berry, football-player-turned-glee-clubber Finn Hudson and head cheerleader Quinn Fabray. Most of the press surrounding the show has lauded its innovation and diversity since other members of the glee club are gay, disabled, black, Asian or Latino. While these characters are celebrated for what they bring to the show, they often get pushed aside into nonparticipatory roles. There have been entire episodes in which these diverse secondary characters have one line or no lines at all, and in terms of singing, most of the songs have gone to the five leads.
This is hardly a new trend in television, a medium that has proven to be slow to change. Television programs most often feature white actors in lead roles, with minorities serving as secondary characters. In 1999, controversy over "whitewashing" in television programs led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to threaten the major networks with a lawsuit if they did not attempt to include more minorities in their casting practices. That year, the LA Times reported that "in 26 new prime-time shows slated to debut on the four major networks this fall, every lead character and nearly all the cast regulars will be white, even those on shows where the action takes place in urban high schools and New York City nightspots." Things haven't changed much since then. According to data released by the Screen Actors Guild on Oct. 23, "Caucasian roles as a proportion of total roles crept up in 2008, after falling in each of the past two years. Caucasians [account] for … 71.9% of roles in episodic television." Entertainment Weekly claimed that "each of the five major broadcast networks is whiter than the Caucasian percentage (66.2 percent) of the United States population, as per the 2007 census estimate."
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Nina
posted 11/10/09 @ 6:37 PM EST
Excellent article.
Early promotion and publicity for this show had me horribly mislead. I should have know that they were only casting diverse characters for face value and had every intention of only focusing on the white able-bodied characters. (Continued…)
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