What does all that mean the Nazis invading Poland means the Polish are themselves oppressed their for Polish Media shouldn't be criticized for having pure white media? Like people criticize "feminist" media if they don't include people that aren't white. And using fantasy races as allegories for human races has been routinely criticized. Why can't we have Jewish or Roma humans or atleast Roma Coded humans in the Witcher verse? Why is having people of different phenotypes means it can't be a Polish game? As history shows a ethnic homogenous Monoculture is clearly not essential to "Polishness"
Okay, a few things. First: Race isn't real.
"White-ness" isn't real. It's "real" in the sense that people believe it exists, and that belief guides their very real actions, but "race" was a concept that was basically invented, codified, and popularized by proponents of scientific racism, eugenics, and ethno-supremacy, a deeply dumbed-down version of ethnic groups (AKA ethnies). Using terms like "white" and "black" and "brown" and "Asian" in modern common parlance is useful up to a point. It's useful when you want to use the terms to talk about how racists see the world and different people. But quickly becomes useless when you realize that "Asians" include the dozens of ethnic groups in China and the Yamato Japanese and the Ryukyuan of Okinawa and ethnic Koreans and the different Austronesian Pacific Islander peoples. It quickly becomes useless when you realize that "brown" people is used to lump a mind-boggling amount of geographic regions together, including Central America, South America, the Middle East, and South Asia. It quickly becomes useless when you realize that people from the Indian subcontinent are
both "Asian"
and "brown". Did you know that through much of the 19th and early 20th century, ethnic Germans and Irish people in America were not seen as white? Did you know that Jews were either "white" or "Asiatic" depending on how racist the U.S. government was feeling during the same period?
Clearly, even if "white-ness" is real - and it's not - not all "white" experiences were the same.
Describing Polish media as "pure white" is incredibly problematic because the experiences of the Polish people - the Polish nation - over the last two and a half centuries have been very different from "white" peoples who have enjoyed sociopolitical and institutional privilege in Europe and America. The Polish people - like the people of Yugoslavia, as
@Cetashwayo mentioned - were victims of colonization (in one form or another) for centuries. Because the problem isn't about "whiteness", which isn't real; the problem is institutional bigotry, who does and doesn't get a voice, whose stories have been told and whose stories have been suppressed. Again, would you criticize a Rwandan TV show starring an all-"black" cast as having a "pure black media"? If you say "no, because Rwanda was a victim of white supremacy"...well, guess what? Poland was too. And it turns out trying to describe who has been the oppressor and who has been the oppressed with terms like "white" or "black" or "brown" or "Asian" means anything resembling consistency falls apart very quickly.
Again, are Jews white or Asiatic? Are Indians brown or Asian? Are Germans and Irish people not white?
But okay, let's say that you believe that you
would criticize a hypothetical Rwandan TV show featuring an all-"black" cast as not being diverse enough. You want
all media to be diverse. You want the media in the U.S. to have more brown representation, you want the media in Poland to have more black representation, you want anime to have more depictions of the Roma in Japan, etc. That's not a bad endgoal to hope for, I think. But context kind of matters. So, uh...
Second: Context matters.
I'm actually really glad that
@Adloquium asked me the following question:
Does this hypothetical apply to the general case, or is it specific to Africa?
To clarify, I want to know if it would change matters if the criticism of "where is the diversity" was applied to Crazy Rich Asians.
Because I think this will help round out my answer.
No, I didn't think my example would be specific to Africa. I was thinking of peoples and nations whose voices, whose ability to self-express and self-determine were suppressed. This includes not only different countries across the world that have been victims of colonialism, but also ethnic minorities who have experienced subjugation in their own societies.
The case of
Crazy Rich Asians is interesting, though. The film, at least, was criticized for the erasure of ethnic Indians and ethnic Malays, who make up 13.4% and 9% of the population according to
the 2018 census. Diversity in representation in a specific media work is not an inherent net good in a vacuum, but context is important: Singapore is a majority ethnic Chinese state where ethnic Chinese majority enjoys sociocultural advantages, where there is racism against the ethnically Indian and Malay minorities. In this vein, the lack of inclusion of ethnically Indian and Malay characters can indeed feel like whitewashing.
I do feel, though, that a story can't be about everything under the sun. Kevin Kwan, the author of the original novel from which the film was adapted, is a Chinese-American born in Singapore, who I think was actually writing about the complex relationships between the different demographics of ethnic Chinese people: Between the rich and the poor, between old money and new money, between men and women, between the older generation and their children, between the Chinese diaspora and Chinese from the old country. (Disclaimer: I have not read the novel, only its plot synopsis.) It's not that I don't think the novel or the film couldn't have used ethnically Indian or Malay people, but I think it was obviously very much a story about ethnically Chinese people, and I think part of the reason the story starring an Chinese-American protagonist became popular was because Chinese-Americans - most of whom do not have families that come from Singapore - see shades of their own interactions with their first-generation immigrant grand/parents or their extended family back in Asia. I appreciate that Kwan maybe did not feel that he was qualified to write about the complexities of the Indian/Malay diaspora experience, and elected to stay in his own lane and let someone else more qualified write such stories.
So to come back to
@Konradleijon (and I do hope you're actually reading all this, I have been writing something like two thousand words in my replies to you because I hope I can help inform you on stuff that you may not have known, not because I have nothing better to do)...
Diversity is complicated. People push for more diverse media representation not because we think the citizens of the People's Republic of China or the Republic of Korea need to be represented in American media, but because we think
Asian-Americans are underrepresented in media, that they're marginalized socially and politically, and that their voices have been silenced for decades, if not longer. When the Oscars are being slammed for being "too white", it's not because we think that people from the Republic of the Congo or Federal Republic of Nigeria aren't represented enough in Hollywood, but because Americans live in a country where
African-Americans have been so systemically otherized, the police are shooting them in the streets. It doesn't mean that we can't call these groups out when they're being racist. But diversity means these people who have been oppressed, whose voices have been silenced for so long, get to tell their
own stories without someone asking why they aren't
also telling
someone else's stories. These can be formerly colonized countries such as Algeria, or an entire population still living under occupation like Palestinians, or a demographic group having previously been enslaved and are now being discriminated against like African-Americans...
...or, in this case, Poland.
