THOSE looking for hints of racial tone-deafness on the second episode of “Girls,” last Sunday on HBO, wouldn’t have been let down. In an early scene Hannah, played by the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, and her nonboyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) have sex; as they’re finishing, Adam promises to make the “continent of Africa on” Hannah’s arm, a vexing intersection of eroticism and geography. Later Jessa (Jemima Kirke), nervously facing down an abortion, insists, “I want to have children with many different men, of different races,” as if they were trinkets to be collected, like key chains or snow globes.

Of course none of those men are to be found on “Girls,” which set off a media-class kerfuffle upon its debut this month, assailed — though with concern, not vitriol — for failing to depict much beyond the wages of white privilege.

Call it progress. Whiteness is too often invisible on television, so much the norm that it no longer begs evaluation, and for whatever advances “Girls” makes in expanding the range of women on television, and the sorts of conversations they’re permitted to have, it certainly lacks for other forms of diversity. All the central figures — four young women scavenging New York for bits of love — are white. So far nonwhite characters are tertiary at best, with just a handful of lines among them.