A critique of Lena Dunham’s popular HBO show, Girls, often focuses on the lack of diversity in the cast. To paraphrase one snarky reviewer, “A group of 20-something year olds living in NYC in 2012 and they don’t have one black friend?” New York City, according to Philip Kasinitz’s article “Becoming American”, is home to the “majority minority,” or, to put it in Dunham’s context, the single least likely city that a heterogeneous group of native born white women would call home. And yet, is implausibility more cause for complaint in Girls then it is in, say, the opulent sexual dramas of CW’s Gossip Girl or ABC’s Desperate Housewives? Clearly, the criticism stems from a plot flaw that is far more complex.
Like a bad penny, contemporary American society consistently stumbles over the debate discussed at length by Michael Walzer in, “What Does It Mean to Be an American?” Simply put, are we a nation of many different ethnic groups, held together as a sheaf of arrows under the firm grasp of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property? Or, in naturalizing in a new land, have we all agreed to a new ethnicity as the non-delineated, vaguely anonymous American? Do we have obligatory roles and patriotisms just because we were born American, or can we still identify chiefly as the first part of our hyphenated identities and remain forever more Italian than American, more African than not?
In many cases, especially those for which the color of their skin poses no obstacle and their religion is either tolerated or lapsed, their balancing act seems dismissible. However, Kasinitz’s argues that not only is immigrant and minority identity a matter of personal importance, but it translates into their daily role within American society (and often harshly.) Kasinitz presents a concern regarding the potential downwards trend of second-generation immigrants that, grouped by ethnicity or immigrant status into low-income and poorly performing areas, find themselves mired in bad schools, dead-ended jobs and worse reputations. The concern is valid, after all, when the Peopling of New York students presented their family immigrant history, many of those stories explained particular location choices with, “Well, there were a lot of (insert nationality or ethnicity here) living in the area back then.” Of course, in the case of the Greeks or the Armenians, this may never present as much of an issue as they begin to dress like Americans, pick up English and better jobs unencumbered by skin or spirituality. If the community chosen is still tarred with racism and intolerance due to history or bigotry, the new immigrant (and his American-born children) will find their mobility struggling against the bonds of stereotype and lack of resources. In some ways, Kasinitz seems to be presenting the case of a sort of naturally forming and naturally segregational ghettos. And if we can’t say what is definitively American, we can at least say that those are not.
So what is the complaint against Girls, truly? Exactly this. To present “native whites” as existenting in a social group wholly their own, of paths of mobility and support that are entrenched in a specific culture without acknowledging neither the blended cultural fusion of NYC nor the “other arrows in the sheaf” lends only farther credence to the ethnic segmentation of immigrant America. In doing so, they give voice to thought that ignores a crucial point. Regardless of the first side of your hyphen, the second part will always be American if you want it, too.
