I love this guest post by Melbourne writer and actor Nicole Lee, and I think you will too.

I love Lena Dunham. Say what you will, but the fact that the girl wrote, directed and acted in her own show, while at the same time managing to make a nuanced commentary on the struggle of today’s Internet drenched, recession happy, self-focussed generation - before the age of 25 no less - makes the star of HBO’s new series ‘Girls’ nothing short of a genius.

Much has been made of the ‘whiteness’ of the ‘Girls’ world over the past week. I won’t repeat all the arguments here (you can read some very compelling and insightful arguments online: Hairpin, Jezebel, Racialicious, Gawker and an entire Room For Debate on New York Times), but the general gist of it is that for a TV show that paints the Gen Y female experience with such painful clarity, the glaring absence of ‘ethnic’ (and I put that in quotation marks because everyone is ethnic to some culture or another) characters seems a sore disappointment.

I have only seen one episode, the pilot. From its opening scenario I was hooked. As an ambitious drama school graduate, I have had to take on low-paying jobs, accept parental handouts and turn my face away from more ‘stable’ opportunities in the name of becoming a fully-fledged ‘artist’. So too did I identify with the closeness of the female relationships portrayed on the show, their complex relationships with their bodies, and the strange and inexplicable relationships they have with guys - when the males of our generation have been brought up on an easily accessible diet of Internet porn, why wouldn’t you both be convinced of the dysfunctional nature of it? ‘Girls’ resembles my life closer than anything I’ve seen on television. The only other show that came close in terms of values was ‘Sex and the City’ - albeit much glossier and sexier than my life could or would ever be.

So then what’s all the fuss? Before watching the show I had read a glowing cover story in New York Magazine about the show - the brilliance of its star, the openness of her relationship with producer Judd Apatow, the comparisons to ‘Sex and the City’. At back of my mind was the criticism about the cast being all white, but for the first watch I cast it aside. So? I thought. Most American TV shows are. And yet, despite two racial stereotypes popping up (which, it could be argued, is what made the show even whiter), at the end of the half hour it did seem strange that a show about New York had gone by without a single memorable blast of colour.

I got it immediately. Lena Dunham’s characters were all white because she was trying to paint a ‘white people’s problem’. As a child of affluent artistic parents (and indeed all of the lead females are famous progeny, whether it was intentional or not) she had probably grown up around other privileged artistic kids and was portraying what she knew. In making her feature Tiny Furniture, made for an impressive $25,000, not only did she raise capital from family and friends, but her parents gave her their apartment to use and acted in it (like rowing, filmmaking is an elite sport). At Oberlin college, she studied creative writing. White kids everywhere there. Clearly she was surrounded by a supportive and affluent environment.

But on reflection I changed my mind. I had responded to the show because I identified with it. Hipsterdom and artistic lifestyles are not the realm of the white and privileged. At drama school my other ‘ethnic’ classmates were from different privileges and backgrounds, as were my white classmates. I had begun a career pursuing something much more stable but left in the hopes of becoming, much like the ironic comments of Dunham’s character Hannah in ‘Girls’, one of ‘the voice(s) of my generation’. Like the author of ‘Stuff White People Like’ Christian Lander suggests, ‘white people’ really refers to an outlook, not a racial identity: like Hannah my friends and I are ‘left-leaning, inner-city hipsters who believe (we)’re unique — despite the fact (we)’re actually all the same.’ Where was I in this picture?

For some shows, this is excusable. ‘Mad Men’, of course, is clearly about the lives of white advertising men in the 60s (although it does seem strange that only now a prominent black character as been brought in). ‘Game of Thrones,’ which I dearly love, is obviously based on a mythology whose otherness is based around dragons and ‘white walkers’ (although Starz new TV series ‘Marco Polo’, to be shot in China and based around the adventures of Kubla Khan’s court, might now soon appease those who have been wondering when the world was going to get its first English-language epic Asian historical fantasy series, myself included). ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ were made in times when whitewashing was the norm. But with The Wire’s Baltimore, Glee’s Ohio highschools and Grey’s Anatomy’s Chicago being racially, sexual orientation and size and shape diverse, should not Girls’s 2012 New York be assorted also?

It has been odd reading about the issues of race on television and film in the US recently, because in Australia the lack of diversity casting is so widespread that it has always been the case to look towards the Northern Hemisphere for examples and support. Many times as a young actor I have been advised that of someone of colour I should go to the US to look for work, and in all honesty, the numbers look more promising. On ‘Hawaii Five-O’, two lead actors are of Korean origin; ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’ promoted heavily diverse ensemble casts; ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is a pioneer of colour-blind casting; ‘The Office’, ‘Modern Family’ and ‘The Good Wife’ all offer diverse casts in all areas, including race. In Australia growing up I was spurred on by the Asian faces I saw reflected back at me in local children’s television shows; as an adult, however, I see myself rarely, if at all. Recently, the government body ABC’s high quality TV drama ‘The Slap’ observed a highly colourful and eclectic portrait of contemporary Australia; however these kinds of shows are uncommon and rare.

But it is clear that this is a systemic problem, not just one of a single network or television show. In both the US and Australia, the lack of diversity amongst casts on stage and screen means that entire cultural groups are being denied their right to be part of their nation’s story. What we want to see is not necessarily our ‘refugee’ stories or ‘slave’ stories or ‘immigration’ stories, (although these stories are valid too and deserve their own space and come with their own set of struggles and limitations - something misunderstood by ‘Girls’ staff writer Lesley Arfin in this Twitter post), but our faces as the common people; the girl who goes to college, sleeps with the wrong guy, stresses over money. Any of these characters on ‘Girls’ could be white; but just as easily they could be of African, Asian or Mediterranean descent. And it would still be the story of a girl.

This is a guest post by Monica Tan, one of my all-time favourite people, favourite writers and one of my soon-to-be bridespeople. I hope you enjoy it as much as I - and my writing hero James Fallows - did.

Answer at the end of the piece. Full portraits here.

The Chinese taxi driver had a big incredulous smile plastered over his face. “Where are you from?!” he asked, hardly containing his laughter. To any ordinary foreigner this is an ordinary question. But to a Chinese Australian in China, the question contains an unintended implication which stings, just a little.

“I’m Chinese,” I replied.

This made him laugh even more. “HAHAHAHAHA, no you are not! I mean you LOOK like one -”

“But I certainly don’t sound like one,” I finished for him, with a sigh.

It’s been a year and a half since I landed in China. Back then I didn’t have a lick of Chinese, any kind of Chinese. I couldn’t even say “I don’t understand,” so people would speak to me and I would open my mouth, but then say nothing. Just stare at them, open-mouthed and silent. The road from there to now – conversational Mandarin – has been a hard, brow-beating slog of masochistic proportions. And after all of that my white foreign friends will be applauded for the simplest of ni haos, while my Chinese will always be substandard.

For according to my appearance, it should be flawless.

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The V&A is currently showing an amazing exhibition of contemporary South African photography, investigating race, gender, sexuality, street style, HIV/AIDS, post-Apartheid life and more through the eyes of some of the country’s leading photographers.

The above shots are taken from Graeme Williams’s ‘The Edge of Town’ series.

I had the privilege of seeing the show this afternoon under the tutelage and guidance of my friend Amy, who wrote the exhibition catalogue. And thus, needless to say, knows her stuff.

If you’re in London between now and July 17, I highly recommend checking it out.

Elsewhere: Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (Victoria and Albert Museum)

I’ve already drawn attention to Beppie’s post on intersectionality and privilege in last week’s “Best of the rest of the internet”, but I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about in more detail here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, “intersectionality” is a way of talking about power and privilege that recognises that these things operate on multiple axes. People aren’t just female, or Black, or Asian, or straight, or working class, or trans, or a parent, or prone to depression - everyone falls into a number of different categories that colours their experience of the world in specific ways. In the feminist context, it serves as a useful reminder that not all women have the same experiences, and calls into question the still dominant notion that the neutral “female” experience is one that is white, heterosexual and middle-class.

I’m also a fan in part because it just makes feminism a whole lot more interesting. Gender is not the only front on which the personal is thoroughly political, nor should it be the only one we talk about.

Beppie’s post is about “addressing the squishy bits”, those parts of our political engagement where we face up to our own assumptions and privileges (or lack thereof) and are forced to step outside our own comfort zones. She writes about identifying those times when we should speak up, and those times when we shouldn’t.

Part of the reason it’s so important for people who occupy particular privileged positions to just shut up sometimes is because it’s impossible to escape that privilege: because no matter how good one’s intentions are, that privilege is embedded in the structure of the language that we use, it’s embedded in seemingly innocuous cultural assumptions, and simply by speaking, if we occupy that privileged ground, we reinforce that privilege.

Her post reminded me of a workshop I went to at a conference recently, ironically on feminism and intersectionality. It was clearly a “squishy” topic for a lot of the people there, because much of the conversation was uncomfortable and stilted. What perhaps made me most uncomfortable though was that in this room of 20-25 women, only two were not white, and neither of them said anything throughout the entire session. I wondered if they found the situation as ironic as I did.

The internet feminist textbook would suggest that, as a middle-class white woman, this would have been a very good time to shut up. I didn’t, mostly because I feared that shutting up would make the conversation even more stitled than it already was. I also considered asking the two non-white women in the room what they thought, but I figured this too would be rude and presumptuous - what if they simply didn’t want to say anything?

And so the entire session played out in pretty much exactly the way intersectionalist feminists critique clueless white women. I don’t know how it could have played out any differently, though. Perhaps better moderation would have done the trick? In any case, it definitely qualified as a “squishy bit”.

Have others encountered similar situations? What would you have done if you’d been in that workshop?

Image: See, hear, speak no evil.

Related: We are all bad feminists, really.
The problem with pop feminism: why Emily Gould is right.
My feminist agenda. What’s yours?

Or a little bit of both?

Something you may not know: as part of my last job, I was responsible for sourcing and lightly photoshopping images for publication. This could mean different things, depending on the image in question - cropping for size, creating composites of different celebrities, adding a question mark or an arrow to an image, and so on.

Regardless of the other work involved, every image would undergo two procedures before it was uploaded to the website: it would be sharpened for clarity, and we’d play around with the ‘curves’, making the image brighter or, yes, lighter.

On images of white people, this has the effect of creating that glowy, luminescent look you see in so many glamour or advertising shots of celebrities. It’s part of the reason they look prettier than the rest of us. On images of non-white people, as in the case of Gabourey Sidibe above, it has the unfortunate effect of making them look whiter.

In my case, I had enough social/political/media studies knowledge to keep this in mind when employing my rudimentary Photoshop skills on images people of colour. But the experience does make me look at these controversies, when they inevitably arise, a little differently to some of my feminist/media blogger counterparts.

I emailed professional retoucher Abbie Muntz of FauxPink for her view on the Sidibe cover. Below is an edited version of her reply:

One retouchers’ trick is to increase the most highlighted parts of a models skin to make it seem more dewy. It’s the same seen here with Naomi. Glowy highlights blown out.

The lighting of the ‘before’ shot in the blog post you sent me has a completely different style of lighting [to the lighting used on the Elle cover]. Classic beauty lighting often involves a silver lined umbrella and card and this technique is not necessarily the way to shoot dark skin.

Still, the Jezebel blog post used a very extreme example in the other direction. Here is [an unretouched shot] of Sidibe on the red carpet with different lighting again…

The fact is that skin reacts to all different types of lighting in all different ways.
It all starts with how the photographer shoots the subject. In this case, the image should have been darkened all over. Looking at the colour of Sidibe’s hair on the cover shot, it’s really really light.

In other words, it isn’t that white magazine editors hate black people, it’s that they erroneously employ photography and retouching strategies that work best on white people. It’s not unlike the issues Jezebel identified the week before with how Sidibe’s hair had been styled - seemingly by someone inexperienced in styling African American hair.

None of the this, of course, is to excuse the image. Racism that stems from the blind assumption that what works for white people will work for all people is still racism, even if its roots lie in ignorance rather than prejudice or disgust. And one of the first things I learnt as a student editor was that what people make of what you have to say is as important as what you intend to communicate: the systematic whitening of black models’ and celebrities’ skin has been discussed enough that it’s something any magazine editor, art director or retoucher should be aware of when designing a cover.

I don’t think covers like these stem from a perception that black skin is ugly - although they probably do stem from an assumption that white models, and white magazine buyers, are the unmarked default - but by this point, editors must be aware of what the consequences of their choices are likely to be.

What do you think?