Tokenism

Recently in quarantine I watched the popular sitcom Friends and while I enjoyed the light-hearted comedy and character moments in the show, the extreme whiteness of the cast was very apparent to me. The central six person cast is all white as well as, notably, nearly all of the recurring actors and actresses over the show’s run. This is somewhat typical of a show made in the 1990’s but did not manage to avoid criticism of this entirely. As to be expected after over ten seasons and upwards of two hundred episodes there are only two recurring BIPOC characters that I can recall who had any impact on the overall storyline. Julie, an Asian American woman, and Charlie, a Black woman, are these two characters and were both brought onto the show at different times to be love interests for two of the main men Ross and Joey. Looking at these characters started me thinking about the concept of tokenism in media and the many arguments surrounding BIPOC representation. While it is clear that having characters that portray minority people onscreen is beneficial to feelings of belonging, there is a tendency for this to be done for other reasons. Tokenism refers to the concern that many people have that the BIPOC roles added to or created for media are done simply to appease or satisfy an appearance of diversity. And while, of course, this argument does not suggest that every character that happens to be a minority that they are a token but specifically looks at characters that were brought on to address an obvious lack of diversity. The creators usually do not care about lending these characters a particularly flattering or accurate depiction of their race and may be rather inconsequential to the storyline or central relationships. In the case of Friends, this argument can be made partially as Charlie was so clearly added to the cast in order to combat criticism of the show’s extreme whiteness. While neither of these characters are depicted in an explicitly derogatory way, the inclusion of only two over however many hundreds of episodes that aired is very telling. In a city as diverse and multicultural as New York, it cannot be argued that this was representative of that place in that time but rather the lack of scrutiny that audiences had on sitcoms like this to hold them accountable for the value of racial diversity onscreen.