never Miss a beat

I started writing a book about myself yesterday but then I stopped because I realised it wouldn’t have any Chinese people in it. That’s a problem, right? That my book about myself wouldn’t have any Chinese people in it… Because there are Chinese people in society. And I’m not reflecting that. I am not reflecting the real world where Chinese people exist.

Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I need to take a bigger look at my life and ask WHY EVE… WHY are there no Chinese people in your life?!!! Is it because you are not living in the right environment where you have the ability to meet the biggest cross-section of society and mingle with all different races and ethnicities and minorities, including even the odd person who still likes Downton Abbey? Only then can you write the book about your life and your experience of living because only then will you have the right to comment on the world. But now you are just ignorant of how life’s experienced by EVERY PERSON of EVERY RACE and EVERY ETHNICITY because you do not currently have any Chinese people in your life. When was the last time you knew a Chinese person? Was it really as long ago as University? THINK ABOUT IT. Have you buried a deep-seeded racial prejudice against Chinese people and never noticed until now when you sat down to write your book and realised you couldn’t write it because you couldn’t be the voice of your generation while not knowing everything about every minority?! Didn’t you realise that writing a book about stuff means you’ve elected yourself the most proportionally representational House Of Commons OF THE WORLD?! 

[Note: I’m NOT being racist against Chinese people, I’m just exaggerating shit to illustrate some nonsense that’s been going on regarding criticism of Lena Dunham’s show Girls and its apparent “racist” agenda with it’s lack of casting ‘Women Of Colour’. Don’t get all weird on me now.]

Your Political Correctness hasn’t just gone mad, it’s gone counterproductive, it’s become insulting. Here I am thinking about how to actively not be racist by being hypersensitive about people of other races purely because they are of another race. WTF. When I went to see Rob Delaney on Friday night he joked about multiculturalism. Something about how it would be really weird to actually walk into a pub reflecting the perfect microcosm of society where a white girl, a black dude, a gay Muslim and a transgender Japanese person would be sitting round a booth together all drinking a pint of Stella. That would look a bit… staged. Whereas if the diversity is allowed to just actually happen all by itself it ends up totally random - say three Ukranian women with two black New Yorkers. It was funny. I laughed. I recognised the authenticity of that situation.

Of course, sometimes diversity doesn’t happen or isn’t apparently staring at you in the face because it just is. We don’t need to constantly pat ourselves on the back for living in a multicultural world, we can get on with enjoying it, enjoying being humans together. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we all are - humans. That’s the thing we were trying to progress towards with all this positive discrimination stuff - recognising that we’re all merely the same weird facial expressions, awkward hand gestures and weird knobbly bits on our feet.

But no. We are still going over it. Highlighting our differences and searching for our own “type”s in everything we consume. And because Lena Dunham hasn’t included black people in her TV sitcom she has been actively racist against the black community by denying them a voice in her statement dramedy. As someone who got on the school bus once and was met with the comment “YA DIRTY JEW” I fail to appreciate where the racial slur lies here. Maybe it’s too subtle for me. When I think about all the subtlety of this racist act some more, I begin to realise… I guess I never related to Will Smith in Fresh Prince Of Bel Air because I was white. I guess I related more to the characters in Skins because it was a salad bowl picture of youth in all its various races, genders and sexualities even though it didn’t have a realistic plot or make any sense to me whatsoever. I guess I only ever related to Monica Geller in Friends because she was the only girl that was Jew-ish. WRONG. I related to Phoebe the most because she was  CRAZY. 

[I saw a group of people just like this on Primrose Hill earlier today]

THIS IS ALL TOTAL BULLSHIT. I can’t understand why Lena Dunham writing about what she knows makes her a racist. It’s beyond my comprehension. Surely encouraging someone to write about their life but *hold on make sure you have a token few “WOC”s in there* is a far more discomforting affair. It’s augmenting someone’s experience, altering someone’s reality to make it more reflective of some Platonic multicultural society we desperately want to remind ourselves is working. What’s more, this is an issue that’s existed since television, nay THEATRE began. It sounds to me like the world has seen a prodigal, female, forward-thinking brainbox who has made a cool, relevant sitcom that’s actually saying something about my generation and decided to offload this centuries-old issue upon her in a bid to DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY. Well world, screw you. You don’t deserve Lena Dunham. Or Fresh Prince. Or Star Wars. Or Woody Allen. Or The Godfather. Or Destinys Child. Or even The Flintstones. You deserve Affirmative Action policies to be applied to all TV sitcoms so that they look like United Colours of Benetton adverts. What was that show called? Oh yeah, MTV’s The Real World. “Realistic”.