“I might also add that many Copts do not identify as Arabs, preferring to see themselves as the descendants of the original Egyptians.”

That is one of my contentions: would they see themselves as white? It’s like people with African ancestry here: whom you identify them as may not be what they see themselves as. They take pride in their own sense of conception. Where we try and make team white skin, light skin, brown skin, black skin is for what purpose? what game are we playing with this?

I’m rather doubtful of this. I’ve known a few Copts* (I grew up near a Copt immigrant family), and they were well within the Southern European phenotypal range. Are there any studies comparing the complexions of Muslim and Christian Egyptians?

*I might also add that many Copts do not identify as Arabs, preferring to see themselves as the descendants of the original Egyptians. Hence, using them as a benchmark for the “Arab” phenotype is somewhat problematic.

live in North Hills.

If most Arab Christians in America were, say, Egyptian Copts, we wouldn’t think of Arab Christians as white.

First, you need to take into account that blacks make up a disproportionate percentage of TV viewers – somewhere on the order of 20%. So there will be some level of disproportional representation to cater to black viewers. It’s not a question of PC values, or promoting a social agenda, it’s a question of trying to not turn off a significant percentage of the audience completely.

Second, there is the effect of black sitcoms to consider. Black sitcoms have fallen off the air recently, but they were a major force in TV up until last decade, and they did make a big difference in these studies, which took in data when UPN was still around and had several black-focused shows. The details in the links I provided explicitly mention the general segregation of networks and shows, although admittedly, this is pretty similar to real life.

I haven’t really watched television since 2000 or so, so I can’t comment directly on House or any other show. Black doctors do exist, however, comprising around 3% of all American physicians. I do have to say in my experience TV writers don’t generally write high IQ well – most are of average to slightly-above-average intelligence, and have a hard time having their characters come up with something more clever than they would do themselves. However, even the idea of a high IQ black doctor isn’t impossible in real life. I found a list on this site of black Mensa members, meaning their minimum IQ is probably something like 131. Two of the featured profiles are in the medical field, and while a few seem to have significant white admixture, most are around as visibly black as Omar Epps. Yes, it’s very unlikely, but unusual characters are the staple of fiction regardless.

As for black men in relationships with beautiful white women, in my experience this is very common, provided they are from the same social background. I live in Pittsburgh, and in my experience white urban white girls in their teens and 20s date black or white guys pretty indiscriminately. Perhaps upper-middle class white women in suburbs don’t, but that’s more a question of not knowing any. Black-white interracial marriage, on the other hand, is pretty rare – but I don’t think interracial marriage is commonly depicted on TV anyway.

I do admit there is a grain of truth in what you’re saying, but as I intimated in the first paragraph, it springs from the expectation from media consumers that there will be “characters they can relate to.” As an extreme example, when the roleplaying game Dragon Age came out a few years ago, a lot of players were pissed because it was impossible to create a black main character. Never mind it was a setting based upon Britain in the middle ages, and the premise of a U.S.-style color line existing would require a nonsensical backstory it wouldn’t make sense to include. Of course, like every other such game in existence, it kept to modern ideals of gender equality, leading to female knights and other such silliness.

This is the primary tension, I think, which causes us to see “Affirmative Action” in TV and other media. Developers want products which everyone can relate to. Black people have money too after all, and if a black doctor gets black people to watch the show, all the better. I highly doubt this really influences people to think there are far more black doctors than there are, however, as few white people probably ever have a black doctor in real life.

15. and 18 help me with this point that I’d like to make that the word white now is total bullshit, and that it is really just a P.C. place holder for the privileged class. Think about it like this: it could be used to group those with light skin; people whose genetic ancestry comes from Europe; people practicing a European derived cultural form; those engaged in European religious practices. I’d say in that level of obviousness, cause c’mon it is a shorthand styling. I feel like the last two sort of go along for the ride.

Most people we identify as white belong to all categories. But for those that don’t all you are saying is if you walked down the street in blue jeans and t-shirt (basically no overt ethnic styling, wearing of hair, etc.) you would blend in and people would intuitively include you in the majority privileged class. It’s more or less not being subject to negative profiling. (And then with he addition of accepted religion won’t persecute you should they find out)

I hope you’d continue reading my post. https://plus.google.com/u/0/100351212284692297995/posts/askKoa6Dqt5

That’s how successful assimilation works: People don’t notice.

I didn’t say minorities in general were way overrepresented on TV and in the movies. I said blacks are. The article you quoted doesn’t contradict that. Blacks having 16% of prime time roles is a 30% over representation, before even considering what parts of society TV usually finds interesting to portray.

As well blacks are way overrepresented in prestige, very high IQ jobs on TV and in the movies, and a lot more black males are portrayed having sexual relationships with very attractive white females than happens in real life. To pick one example among many, what are the chances that jet black Foreman would not only be on House’s nation leading diagnostic medicine genius team, but be the star on that team, and have a relationship with the gorgeous 13 for a season or two to boot?

I mean everyone on that team with the possible exception of the Aussi surgeon Chase is portrayed as having an IQ of 145 or above I’d say. Using a standard black mean IQ of 85 and the 12.5 SD La Grife du Lion says blacks have, and applying a normal distribution though Excel’s normdist without trying to compensate for fat tails, that puts the percentage of blacks with IQ’s at or above 145 at 0.00008% of the black American population. Let’s round up for fat tails to 0.0001%. Fat chance.

To try to claim that Hollywood isn’t trying to do social engineering in favor of blacks would I think be pretty disingenuous.

As for slightly over representing whites, whites are also over represented in leading positions in American life. Television and movies tend to either be about organized crime and police or other detectives, or people in the upper middle classes or above.

Regardless, all show essentially the same figures – whites and blacks over-represented, but just by a few percent, with Latinos under-represented.

Latinos are also underrepresented in leading or most interesting positions in American life. They mostly do the grunt work here, which isn’t very interesting most of the time. Latinos certainly weren’t underrepresented in the drug wars mini-series Traffic.

I don’t think whites are overrepresented in the sorts of roles that TV usually finds interesting to portray, but blacks most definitely are. As well many shows especially cable ones are set in other eras when whites were even more dominant socially than now, and Hispanics virtually non existent. Boardwalk, Deadwook, Mad Men, Pan Am, The Playboy club are examples.

Alia Shawkat: Iraqi father

Shannon Elizabeth: Syrian father

Danny Thomas: Lebanese

Kathy Najimy: Lebanese

Tony Shalhoub: Lebanese

Ralph Nader:Lebanese

Vic Tayback: Syrian

Wendie Malick: Egyptian father

John Sununu: Palestinian

Spencer Abraham: Lebanese

Adrian Pasdar: Iranian father

John Abizaid: Lebanese

Catherine Bell: Iranian mother

Sarah Shahi: Iranian father

The general impression is one of successful assimilation; i.e., no one seems to really seem to care about their ancestry. They are just White people.

From 2002:

Despite the ever-increasing diversity of American society, prime time continues to depict a largely black and white world. Findings from the second year of the study revealed that both black and white Americans are over-represented in prime time, with whites accounting for about 74 percent of all characters, compared to only about 69 percent of the U.S. population. Blacks accounted for about 16 percent of all characters compared to about 12 percent of the population.

Latinos accounted for only about 3 percent of all characters in prime time, compared to about 13 percent of the U.S. population. This more than four-to-one representation gap seems particularly anomalous given recent public discussions about the emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest minority group.

In 2008 the Screen Actors Guild did a study of all TV and movie roles and found 72.5% white, 13.3% black, 6.4% Latino, 3.8% Asian , 0.3% Native American and 3.8% other.

A 2010 study of prime-time television (studying actors, not roles) found 74% white , 16% African-American, 5% Latino, 2% Asian, and 2% other. There was no significant change since a similar study in 2000.

I was also considering linking to a study showing the guests on cable news are overwhelmingly white, but this is somewhat tangential.

Regardless, all show essentially the same figures – whites and blacks over-represented, but just by a few percent, with Latinos under-represented. Adjusting for those in the U.S. who speak English well enough to follow American TV and movies, this is a pretty accurate representation of the U.S.