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I think it's at least worth noting that the racial demographics of the United States were substantively different in the '50s-'80s (about 85% of the country was considered "white" by the 1960 census, and most of the rest was black) such that, while white characters may still have been overrepresented in those eras (not doing a formal study here), the background expectation should be much different today, where closer to 60% of the country fits that description. Complaining that the culture of yesteryear looks like the people of yesteryear seems a bit misplaced, in my opinion, although I don't have quite as strong of thoughts on current television demographics.
This, of course, doesn't apply to the gender breakdown of leading roles, so your mileage may vary.
Well, as you'd say I'd still push back on gender representation in those time, but yeah I'm generally fine with all of that. I wasn't actually trying to attack the past for their practices here.
My point was, people complain about ubiquitous diversity in everything as one of the annoying consequences of SJWs getting their hands on the rudder of popular culture. So if the question is 'what would it look like to defeat the SJW movement', and the current levels of diversity in media are a hated consequence of the SJW movement, then what's the alternative? What would 'defeating' that look like?
As you say, having media be 'representative' today would involve a ton more diversity than we had with 'representative media of the past. I cited to someone else a study showing that even today, minorities are still underrepresented in most media sectors compared to the actual population average.
So if 'defeating SJW's absurd push for diversity' means just moving to representative proportions instead, and representative proportions would actually be more diverse than what we have now, then what are we actually asking for?
A few people narrowed the complaint down to, paraphrasing, 'race-swapping, implausible world-building, and bad writing' which, sure, that's a lot more reasonable and is a definition we could discuss.
I kind of think that winning on those types of corner-cases would still leave you with a media landscape that looks a lot less changed from the current one than I feel like some people are asking for, giving the volume of complaints, is the thing.
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