Diversity is a topic many sociologist, film makers, politicians, and the common person have debated heavily over and present differing opinions on the subject. Diversity is the composition of something that has multiple elements, usually referring to race of people involved. It is stated that white people, or Caucasians, are the most privileged group in the United States. Not only that they also make up the majority of the roles in Pop Culture here in the United States. Although other races have been steadily involved in more roles in extremely prominent movies. In the Star Wars franchise there were almost no characters that were not white, but now it is rare to see a movie in the franchise does not have multiple races in prominent roles and side roles in the movies. Diversity has become a lot more sought after in recent movies but all of the attention towards the topic has not been good. In a sense Scarlet Johansson, who played the lead in Ghost in The Shell, received a tremendous amount of hate because of her being white and playing a lead that was an Asian woman in the source content. This could be seen as diversifying roles by freeing the perceived requirement that if the source has an Asian lead the lead in the adaptation needs to be Asian as well. Getting rid of that perceived obligation and expectation opens up the door for a lot more talent to emerge from all sorts of backgrounds and races. I see this increase in diversity as a really good thing in concept, but in practice I feel like it can really hurt movies or shows if better talent is just dropped simply to increase the diversity in a production. The opposite end of this obsession with increasing diversity are movies like Black Panther which was praised for its all black cast but also turned a lot of people away by them not feeling like they can relate to the movie or theme if they are not black. Another example of the products of this craze for diversity backfiring would be the situation with the character Rose in The Last Jedi. The actor received a insurmountable amount of hate on social media from “fans” of Star Wars that were upset at her characters writing in the film. A lot of people hate the character because of her Rose not having very good writing behind her character or not being integrated well is from the result of focusing more on the race of the actor playing a character, instead of making the character interesting and relate-able to the general audience and possible fans that have not yet been introduced to the Franchise. Diversity is always seen as a good thing, but do you think its having more of a positive or negative impact on Pop Culture as a whole?
Stay classy everyone ~Keishawn