Larissa Mair has an interesting explanation for her now somewhat notorious “any race except Caucasian” casting call — quickly retracted — for a male CBC Kids host.
“We were asked to seek a cast of diversity. We mistakenly took that to mean that the production was not seeking Caucasian actors,” she told the National Post, offering profuse apologies. “Of course, it’s open to all ethnicities,” she added.
Hmm. I wonder.
Casting a television show isn’t like staffing a supermarket. Fictional characters have ethnicities, and require actors of comparable ethnicities to portray them. In a news broadcast we might hope for pure meritocracy, but we all know (as my colleague Matt Gurney relates, from experience) that many other factors decide who gets on the screen or the airwaves.
CBC’s Patty and Mamma Yamma, the show being casted, falls somewhere between these two genres. The show already has a white female host (and an anthropomorphic yam). The network has decided — apparently uncontroversially — that it definitely wants a man as well. Does definitely wanting a brown man tip the scales into impropriety?
The reaction suggests yes. Ms. Mair declared herself “mortified.” CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson calls it an “error” that violates guidelines for scripted and commissioned programming. Those guidelines, as maddeningly vague as you would expect, demand that programming reflect “Canada and its regions, as well as the country’s multicultural and multiracial nature.” They say CBC is committed to “attracting a diversified talent pool, thus ensuring that diversity is incorporated into the way it recruits and develops its workforce.”
OK, so … is a white man, a white woman and yam puppet theoretically broadcastable or not? Ms. Mair thought not. And indeed, I somehow suspect we may well in the end see a non-Caucasian male join the cast of Patty and Mamma Yamma.
That’s fine, of course. But if that is who CBC is looking for, it does no one any good for it to pretend otherwise. If it’s OK to hire someone for a job in part based on gender or ethnicity, it should also be OK to say that’s what you’re doing. It should be OK to admit that you are necessarily excluding other potentially qualified candidates. If that isn’t the case, perhaps you don’t have quite as diverse, inclusive and confident a corporation — or a country — as you thought you did.
We’re doing better than the Brits, though. Holy cow. Their incredibly concerted effort to stamp out public expressions of racism in soccer has had a very bad year. Notably Chelsea captain John Terry faced a farcical criminal trial to determine the context in which he directed the words “f–king black c–t” towards an opponent (he was acquitted, then suspended by the Football Association); and Luis Suarez of Liverpool was banned for eight games for insulting an opponent in a way that mentioned his skin colour.
And to celebrate the end of this inauspicious season, the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) booked for its awards do on Monday night … Reginald D. Hunter, a black American comedian best known for controversies related to the N-word, which he reportedly unleashed with abandon to a shocked and appalled audience.
PFA chairman Clarke Carlysle calls the booking a “huge mistake,” and I think we can all agree on that.
But bizarrely, media reports did not report any of what Mr. Hunter actually said. There was much shock at a joke pertaining to Mr. Suarez … but we weren’t privy to it! In the vacuum, reactions ranged from a Guardian blogger who suggested that if a black man from the American south was OK with the N-word in a comedy context, Brits should probably feel free to laugh; to a Daily Mirror sportswriter who argued on Twitter that context is completely irrelevant, always, to the N-word.
That was the closest anyone that I saw came to criticizing Mr. Hunter himself, which is understandable in a way. He is a mainstream presence on British television and his shows have received positive reviews in the mainstream press. But how can someone cause a racism scandal without doing something wrong?
It was maximum incoherence. And it’s the product, I think, of an anti-racism movement that values denunciation, often in the form of criminal charges, vastly more than it values open dialogue and confronting uncomfortable truths — which is how you stamp out racism itself, as opposed to its public expressions. Both Canada and the U.K. could stand to shine some sunlight on their respective issues.
National Post