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Notes -
Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.
If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.
I think the disconnect is that representation advocates don't want proportional representation of the general population demographics — what they want is aspirational representation for every minority. The hope is for every black (etc. etc.) child to have just as many black characters in fiction to daydream about being when they grow up that a white child has. From that framing, no single demographic can be "over"-represented until each slice has exactly as many performers as every other.
(The above is an explanation, not an endorsement. Mind you, I would actually quite like to see Idris Elba as James Bond, but more in a race-blind-casting this-guy-is-really-good kind of way. Besides he's probably too old now.)
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