A few weeks ago I gave a lecture at Yale University about race on film. In the Q&A portion a woman in the front row asked what I thought about Lena Dunham’s point that she didn’t feel comfortable writing a part for a woman of color because she herself isn’t a woman of color. (No, this is not an anti-Lena Dunham post. Here at Every Single Word we don’t point the fingers at people but at systemic trends and patterns). I’ve been thinking about this question ever since and didn’t totally understand why it bothered me so much. So I’ve decided to answer it publicly here.

First, I had to find the real, full quote. It was from an interview Dunham had done on NPR in 2012.

“This show isn’t supposed to feel exclusionary. It’s supposed to feel honest, and it’s supposed to feel true to many aspects of my experience. But for me to ignore that criticism [about the show’s lack of diversity] and not to take it in would really go against my beliefs and my education in so many things. … Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to.” (Fresh Air, 2012)



Clearly Dunham was aware of the show’s criticism and offers a thoughtful response. I re-watched the Girls pilot. And I really enjoyed it. It lovingly and hilariously lampoons privilege, and captures the hope and despair of some people’s early twenties. Also, I was reminded of the strength of Lena Dunham’s writing. And yet, the quote still made me uneasy. In looking to unpack her idea that she didn’t have the authority to write a part for a non-white girl I was so busy looking for things I didn’t like about the pilot, that the real reason the quote didn’t sit with me was just the opposite: I did like the pilot. I, a person of color, identified with her characters.

Girls is about privilege and aimlessness, not about about whiteness. I know many women of color just like the show’s main characters. Women of color who are college educated, financially supported, brilliant, and questioning what fuck they’re going to do with their lives. The notion that Dunham couldn’t capture the “specificity” of a woman of a different race seems to be operating on the myth that there is a different way to be a person of color. Considering that these characters are written as privileged, not white, it would have been so cool to see a woman of color grapple not with her color but with her privilege.

The show that kept coming to mind was The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, specifically the Hilary character. She was so refreshing, not because she represented ALL black women but because she represented SOME black women. She was a materialistic valley girl, loveably out-to-lunch, and black. All three of those truths existed simultaneously. The gift of that show, aside from the immortal theme song, is that it complicates what it means to be black. Because being black is not a singular experience.



Naomi Ekperigin, a writer for Broad City and a good friend, recently did a great interview with Marie Claire. She declares that her “next great push is for women of color to be allowed to be that flawed, to be potheads, and to be aimless. Aimless is the key word. We have all the women trying to find themselves. But, if you’re a black woman on TV, you better be running a damn empire, sleeping with the President, saving people’s lives, teaching people law. You have to have a very strong skill.”

Let’s complicate what it looks like to be a person of color on screen. And yes, that means showing privileged, aimless people of color too.