“It’s funnier than the promos can show,” said the promo while flashing pictures of Chevy Chase in rimmed glasses sitting behind a college desk.

This Thursday was the debut of the new comedy, “Community,” a sitcom about community college.

Dwayne and I had a couple good laughs, but by 11pm, I was getting more and more irritated over the casting of the show.

The motley cast that makes up the core characters in “Community” is supposed to represent the diversity found at community college. 

There is the white thirty-something lawyer who’s had to return to school because he lied about his education.  There’s the African American mother.  The Indian kid with Aspergers.  The African-American jock.  The anal white girl.  The old guy (Chevy) taking classes for enrichment.  The Chinese-American Spanish teacher.  And then the “hot girl from Spanish,” a blond haired, blue-eyed, twenty-something High school drop out, who is now dead serious about her studies.

I don’t know what community college the writer’s at NBC are basing the show on, but it surely doesn’t represent the community college I’ve taught at for the last three years, nor the University campus where I live.

True, half the cast on “Community” is a conglomerate of other races, but the two main characters are still white, and the supporting roles are still caricatures.  

Forgive me this post for just a moment. 

It’s not appropriate, or helpful, for me to categorize the communities where I teach and live by race, but I’m going to right now to prove a point about the casting of “Community.”

Since the Spring of 2007, I’ve taught English at the largest Community College in Southern California.  In all of my classes, I’ve been the only white female, save one other white girl in my second semester of teaching. 

In each of my classes there’s been no more than one or two white males.  The rest of my students are from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.  Some are English Language Learners, but other students have families who’ve lived in the States going back forty-fifty years.  And none of them are white.

This past week, I had my students study an essay by Peggy McIntosh called, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” 

In the essay she enumerates 25 “conditions” that she describes as the “unearned assets [she] can count on cashing in everyday,” because she is white.  In listing these privileges she’s attempting to undo some of the systematic racism that exists in our culture due to the denial of white people regarding their privilege.

One of the “conditions” she names is being able to buy “flesh” colored band-aids at the pharmacy and have them match her skin.

Another condition is, “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.”

The irony of this last “condition” hit me, after watching “Community.” 

For my students at the community college and for the students who live and study here at the University where I live, “Community” does not represent their experience at college.  It doesn’t represent their life.  In short, it doesn’t represent them.

I recently saw a cartoon, which I have been unable to find since, and so will probably botch up.  But the gist of it has hung with me. 

It showed a line of people standing outside a building, each holding up their own sign.  At the front of the line was an Asian-looking man holding up a post that said, “Asian-American representation in the media.”  Behind him stood an African-American woman with her own sign.  And in front of this crowd stood a Latino man, looking lost.  He had a sign of his own but it was dropped along the ground. 

The Asian man says to him with a sigh, “Get in line.”

Peggy McIntosh says in her essay that most of us are conditioned to believe that racism is only in “individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on [her] group.”

I am a part of that group that has been given dominance.  And I’ve seen the power white people have to right the tables.  When we’re willing to talk about the invisible advantages and disadvantages that exist according to skin-color, we validate the voices that have been speaking this message for decades. 

And so here I am, after watching “Community”, trying to write a blog that will point out the systematic racism at least in this one show, if not in all of Television.

I mean, I just would like to see a show come out that actually represents the demographic make-up of the city I live in. 

I’m shocked that the TV industry, which prides itself on being so progressive, so green, so liberal, so counter-cultural, continues to churn out sitcom after sitcom, show after show, in which the main character is most often a man, and nearly always white.