The recent media firestorm over the whiteness of the HBO series Girls is somewhat puzzling for two reasons: One, why pick on Girls when so much of television is glaringly white and two, why be surprised that a show set in New York City could still lack racial diversity?

Girls is being bashed for being all-white because it is at least not yet another show written by men about women. As Mauren Ryan writes over at the Huffington Post,

women and people of color, who are often treated as the tokens they usually are, are typically the junior members of a writing staff, hardly able to challenge those around them and push for the kind of stories that would reflect their lives and worldviews more accurately.

In other words, shows like How I Met Your Mother are forgiven their whiteness because they are not breaking through the glass ceiling in terms of who is writing the show.

The other…

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