Sex and the Hopefully-More-Multiracial City

I was a major, unabashed fan of Sex and the City. (The show, that is—the movie was a grating, be-crinolined, poopy joke nightmare.) The things that bothered other people—the sex and status obsession, the what-planet-are-you-on depiction of a freelance writer's earning potential—never really bothered me. Its lily-white vision of New York, however, did. A lot. It wasn't just that there were no recurring characters of color, save Blair Underwood's dashing doctor. It's also that, whenever a person of color did appear, there was usually something cringe-worthy about it.

OK, so Lucy Liu and Margaret Cho made some non-disastrous cameos. But think of the sweet, misguided Pakistani waiter who tries to take Samantha home after she's been stood up; he gets brushed aside as a totally inappropriate partner. (By Samantha! She'll sleep with anything! She slept with this guy!) Or the horrifying, double-crossing Thai maid who inspires what is, perhaps, SATC's worst pun ever: "She wasn't so dim, that Sum." (No mean feat, winning that accolade.) And of course, as many, many commentators pointed out, there was Jennifer Hudson in the movie, playing the magical black helpmeet.

All of this is preamble to explain why I'm so interested in the new extras casting call for Sex and the City 2, which Gawker posted yesterday. Next Tuesday, casting agents will be looking for the following:

Fashion Models, Celebrity types, Upscale Socialites, Fashionistas, Urban Club goers, Gays and Lesbians, International types (Middle Eastern, Arabic, Asian, European, British), Professional Soccer Players.

I would love, love, love to see more "Middle Eastern, Arabic, [and] Asian" faces in the new movie. I hope that they're actually used for New York scenes, not just in scenes that are supposed to take place abroad. (It doesn't count if you show more brown people in a country where everyone's brown.) And of course, it would be even better if they cast some actual characters of color. We live in New York and like shoes and fancy dresses and expensive cocktails, too! We fall in love with wildly inappropriate men, too! How big a stretch would it be?

So, for the moment, cautious optimism for one of my favorite franchises. Is it justified, do you think?

Photograph of Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kim Catrall in Sex and the City: The Movie courtesy of New Line Cinema.

Tags: Race, sex and the city

Nina Shen Rastogi California native, theater and comics fan, Slate "Green Lantern" columnist

Comments

Liz W

By: p.bateman | Fri, 07/31/2009 - 05:00

you can say that for the sake of beloved political correctness.
but if i want to date or have sex with a certain type of personality, look, etc and i find those characteristics mostly in certain races then saying that 'i give equal opportunity to every race when im choosing a partner' doesnt make a difference.

more than looks and personality, people are looking for social adjustment and they prefer people of same race for long term relationships.

for short term relationships and casual sex, i have seen men to be less picky about race. men love to have casual sex with Asians, blacks, whites, Latinos etc. so yes men give equal opportunity to women of all races !! i dont know about women....ithink they are more selective about it. most women i know say they dont usually get attracted to chinese men and dont wanna have sex with them...but then again a very hot chinese man may change their thoughts.

i personally like to have casual sex with women of all races but when its about long term relationships, you sometimes have to consider race in a way.....but not in a "i only want to marry a white woman' way.

What if we substitute "equal opportunity" for "diversity"?

By: Liz W | Thu, 07/30/2009 - 12:35

"the DIVERSITY thing is good when its about jobs and opportunity, when its about personal/sex lives DIVERSITY is irrelevant and please stop trying to make people feel guilty about it."

How about equality of opportunity, then? That's an idea that I think is very applicable to my personal and sexual life. Just as I disagree with a company saying they'll only hire people of X skin color or Y gender, I think it's important for people to examine their thinking if they are only willing to initiate friendships on those same criteria. No, we don't all have to be best pals. But I don't believe in choosing relationships based on whether or not someone looks like me. Shared interests and activities, sure - but that is not determined by ethnicity. I'm sure there are people out there who will only have friends in their demographic group, and they can certainly choose to do so, but I think they owe it to themselves to examine their thinking and make sure they're comfortable with their reasons why.

usama, youre wrong

By: p.bateman | Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:55

nice job giving examples of colored men who are CELEBRITIES.

the change comes from the other end. ie the real society. when inter-racial relations become more common in real life they will ultimately be shown in media more often and in a more normalized way. because media makes money and it makes money from whats accepted by the society at large.

ill give you an analogy. a lot of feminists whine about media portraying women only as housewives and never men being househusbands. the fact is that there is no onus on media to bring about a change. media will show what already happens in the real world. only when men start becoming stay at home househusbands you wont see them in ads of washing powders, vacuum cleaners and baby products.

you would have noticed that mexican/latin-white couples are common in US and they are shown frequently in the media. but white women hardly ever date chinese men so you never see that in media (only rarely) 90% of chinese-white couples are white male - Chinese female. so its true that white women hardly ever date Chinese men.

the author seems obsessed with POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

By: p.bateman | Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:45

whats wrong if the story was about 4 white women? the show was based around the love/sex lives of 4 white women and DIVERSITY and PC are the last things on peoples minds. whats wrong if people prefer do date and have sex with people of a certain race? why cant we have preferences? why is it so politically incorrect for a young white woman today to say that she is not into asian men when it comes to dating...why the hell do you sensitive lot, the anal retentive lot has to label that sexist?

the DIVERSITY thing is good when its about jobs and opportunity, when its about personal/sex lives DIVERSITY is irrelevant and please stop trying to make people feel guilty about it.

It wasn't just lily-white...

By: MizLiz | Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:32

SATC was positively *bleached* lily-white! All of the main characters were not just white, but WASPy white. (The kind of people that my grandfather's generation sadly deemed the only "True Americans.") Look at the names: Bradshaw, Jones, Hobbes, and York. Not a Liebowitz, a Murphy, a Ferrara, a Pappas, or a Schmidt among them. Huh? That simply does not happen in New York, not even in the most rarefied circles. It makes me wonder if Bushnell or the show's creators ever actually lived in New York at all - or even seen it from somewhere other than a double-decker tour bus!

Its fair to say that certain

By: Usama3 | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 17:57

Its fair to say that certain older people are less willing to accept what younger, more open people do. Generation Xers are simply not as adept at normalizing interracial and multiracial sexual relations as the younger generations who one can find in interracial relations on an regular basis.

Moreover, one can speculate that the more insulated and insular the childhood and upbringing of the screenwriters' and writers' of American media, the more rigid they are in obstructing and resisting the normalization of interracial relations.

America's pop TV and movies are actually behind the curve in social development regarding interracial relations.

The number of prime time TV characters in long term interracial relations is probably a mere handful- the number of 'colored' men with 'white' women is even fewer.
Except in reality, this is far more common. Clarence Thomas' wife is European American/white. 100s of African American football, baseball, and basketball players have Euro-American/white wives. Tiger Woods has perhaps the most famous multiracial relationship: him being Thai, African American, his wife being Swedish.
Dave Chapelle and his Asian wife.
Heidi Klum and Seal and on and on.
Halley Berry and her European American husband/partner.
And so on.

But from my estimation, the writers, producers, and executives of America's media (consisting mostly of white males?) are far more willing to retain rigidity and the semblance of separation of 'race' in social relations for their own purposes. Just as they intentionally resist and obstruct Arab and Muslim presence and integration into American media and culture (usually for political purposes), so too do they resist the increase in social integration of multiracial groups.

Thanks for the article Nina!

By: petalsbloom | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 16:49

Thanks for the article Nina! Sarah Jessica Parker's "booty call" moment with JHud in the first SATC movie made me cringe for sure. It only served to highlight the wide race and age gap between the two characters, making their relationship seem all the more contrived.

Touche, taram.

By: Nina Rastogi | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 13:15

Touche, taram.

unwarranted optimism

By: taram | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 11:41

A call for extras that describes people of color as "International Types" suggests to me that SATC:2 will be as racially clueless as the franchise always has been.

Whole 'nother topic

By: Nina Rastogi | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 11:35

Of course, as one Gawker commenter noted, this doesn't even touch on the awkward question of what a gay or lesbian extra is supposed to look like ...