Lakitha Tolbert
2 min readFeb 29, 2024

--

I agree, This isnt just about the numbers of diverse individuals that show up in a form of media, but also how they interact with each other. It doesn't work for a story to have more than two or three women in it if those women don't interact at all (this is very common) or all hate each other for...reasons.

I've seen stories where there are more than two Black, gay, Asian, Latine characters, only for those characters to only ever be one thing (they are only Black, only Asian, only white and gay), where they never acknowledge each other's existence at all, exchange more than a word or two, or never work together to solve a problem, and this is usually how I can tell that particular story was written by someone with only a surface level understanding of inclusion and diversity.

I also wanted to add that television has gotten a lot better at this than movies. It takes a while for the film industry to catch up, mostly owing to how movies are made, in that by the time a film is in post production the rest of society has progressed to some new issue. Television is a much faster vessel. I've seen TV series turn themselves around and improve mid-season based on social media interaction alone.

That said no matter how much people hate Disney, is is killing it in the diversity and inclusion part of this. they have learned ot have more than one type of diverse character in their stories, characters that are not centered around white men, who interact with each other, and work together to solve a problem (a perfect example is the new Marvels film, and the series Echo!)

--

--

Lakitha Tolbert
Lakitha Tolbert

Written by Lakitha Tolbert

(She/Her) Busybody librarian from Ohio.

No responses yet