Thanks to PERSONNELENTE at https://personnelente.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/racial-disparity-at-cbs/  For the link.

To these open racist white supremacists any inclusion of non-white people is wrong and discrimination against white people.  These people want to go back to the era of Jim Crow laws.   They feel letting blacks be anything other than labors and lower class workers is harmful to white.   No white no matter how bad or lacking in skills and education should lose a job to a “colored person”.  They are horrible people who don’t have the skills to earn a position and hate that a black / brown person might have more skills than them.   They believe education, especially higher education should be for white people only.  Very sick people.  What they don’t understand is non-white people make up a large part of the population.  The smart people trying to make money want to sell to them also.   Hugs.  Scottie 

by Frank Vyan Walton

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

 

Saturday, April 20, 2024 at 12:12:21p EDT

 

 

I discovered this story because of this video between Dr. Rashad Richey and Journalism Student Juan Villasmil on the issue of CBS new policy on DEI.

 

https://youtu.be/5-EhKwi5Q-g?si=GQ3a2cQzl_ODiays

  

https://youtu.be/5-EhKwi5Q-g

 

The policy they are discussing is this which was implemented at CBS in response to Black Lives Matter.:

 

CBS is aggressively stepping up its efforts to be more inclusive to diverse television creators and writers, setting a slew of targets for the 2021/22 season.

The broadcaster is committing 25% of its script development budget to projects from creators, writers and producers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. The scheme will begin with the 2021/22 development season.

It is also mandating that writers’ rooms for CBS shows must be staffed with a minimum of 40% BIPOC representation for the 2021/22 broadcast season. This will be increased to 50% for the 2022/23 season.

Deadline understands that at least six new and current shows for this coming fall schedule are expected to hit this 40% mark.

To set this up let me show you the previous levels of diversity in Hollywood from a 2016 survey published in the WaPo.

The 83-page study examined 234 comedy and drama series across 18 broadcast, cable and digital platforms in the 2016–2017 season.

Here’s a snapshot of what they found:

• Fewer than 10 percent of the shows were led by minority showrunners
• 14 percent of writers across all shows were members of a minority group, even though minorities represent nearly 40 percent of the population
• Two-thirds of the shows had no black writers
• Black writers overall accounted for less than 5 percent of the 3,817 writers across the shows, even though black people make up 13 percent of the population
• More than 90 percent of the shows on CBS — which aired 25 scripted shows last season, second only to Netflix, and is the most-watched network — had either just one black writer or none at all

The lack of diversity extended across all platforms, including digital spaces such as Hulu. The report also singled out AMC and Amazon for failing to include black showrunners and writers. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post). The report said the lack of diversity at AMC and Amazon was especially troubling given their relatively new status as influencers of TV content.

A member of the writing staff for “Seal Team Six” subsequently filed a lawsuit with Stephen Miller’s law firm America First Legal after he was not invited during the 2021-2022 to remain as the script supervisor for the show.  He’s a white male.

From the New York Post.

CBS and parent Paramount Global are being accused of “blatant” discrimination against a white, heterosexual male freelance writer as it imposed stringent diversity rules for writers on its “SEAL Team” series, according to a federal lawsuit.

Brian Beneker, a script coordinator and freelance scriptwriter for CBS’ “SEAL Team,” was unlawfully denied a staff writer position due to his race, sex and sexual orientation, according to the complaint, filed Thursday in US District Court of Central California.

Beneker, who became the script coordinator in 2017 on the pilot episode of “SEAL Team,” a drama about the pressure on a group of Navy SEALs, soon was offered to write an episode script as a freelancer for the show’s second season.

To continue as a scriptwriter, Beneker was told, he had to quit his job as a coordinator, the suit said, noting that he was replaced by “a woman without any experience as a script coordinator” who “struggled to do the job” and “quit approximately two weeks into training.”

Beneker’s lawyers from America First Legal Foundation and JW Howard Attorneys cited a widely reported mandate from CBS chief executive George Cheeks to “set a goal that all writers’ rooms on the network’s primetime series be staffed 40% [with] BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of color] in the 2021-2022 season.”

Now with this in mind, I suggest you listen to the video conversation.

 

Richey and Juan Villasmil’s discussion mostly ranges around the issues of whether this policy is in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the issue of using immutable traits such as race and sex in hiring vs “Merit.”

I’ll get back to “Merit” later.

The CRA discussion is valuable — but people like Villasmil tend to look at it entirely in a vacuum.  They look at hiring entirely as if we are starting from zero with all other factors and that simply isn’t the case.

Race and Crime

As they go on Richey brings up the fact that there is racism baked into the cake in many systems. He cites “Stop and Frisk” statistics from New York which point out that over 80 of their stops were Black and Latinos, and that over 70% of the time they were found to have done nothing wrong. Only 10% of those stopped were White.

He leaves out a stat here: When people were found to have committed a crime or to be in possession of guns or drugs — they were far more often White.

White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood of finding one on a white person.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.

This begs the question: if they are only finding guns and drugs on black and Latino men at ½ and 1/3 the rate — why are they really stopping them so often?

The answer to that question is obvious: Racism (and Poverty).

if Richey had brought this up it might have prevented Juan’s next, predictable, argument.

Black people commit more crime.

Richey responds to this by pointing out that FBI stats indicate that while White-on-White Crimes is 88%, Black-on-Black crimes is at 91% which is hardly different.  This chart is often the first source used to argue that “Black people commit more crime” but most people don’t also look at the White-on-White figure as Richey does.

[Technically this data comes from the FBI chart on Murder by Race and Gender which is highly flawed. It only includes cases with a Single offender and a Single Victim — which excludes over half the actual cases.  When you include the remainder of cases for multiple victims and offenders via the Supplemental Homicide Report, the percentages change to 58.9% Black-on-Black and 60.6% White-on-White murders.

So in reality, based on the best data we have, the rate of White murders is slightly higher than the rate of Black murders.

And the chart Richey is referring to also only includes those cases that have been “Cleared” where a suspect has been positively identified. So it doesn’t include how many were charged or the disposition of that charge be it, conviction or acquittal — this is merely a chart of those who are Accused of Murder, not those who have been proven to have done it.

Juan then falls back to…

“they commit more crime in proportion” .

Which by the way is exactly a QUOTA argument.  He saying here that, in total, White people commit more crime — which is true — but that’s only because there are more White people.  But when you look at things in proportion where White people are 60% of the public, Black people are overperforming in crime above their quota of 13%.

He, of course, doesn’t have stats for this.  But I do.

The FBI Uniform Crime Report states that of 7 Million people arrested in 2018, 5.1 Million (66%) were  White people and 2.1 Million (27%) were Black people.  If you were expecting black people to stay within their quota of 13% that would be rather high. [The people who are underrepresented are Asians (11%) and Latinos(14%)]

But then again, black people are stopped, searched and arrested twice as often for crimes — even when they’re less likely to be guilty.

Black people in California were stopped by police officers much more frequently than other racial groups in 2018, and police were more likely to use force against them, new statistics from eight large law enforcement agencies in the state reveal.

Twenty eight per cent of all persons stopped by Los Angeles police officers during the last six months of 2018 were black, while black people account for just 9% of the city’s population, the data shows. In San Francisco, the black population has shrunk over several decades to just 5% of the city’s total population, but 26% of all stops carried out by the SFPD from July through December of 2018 were of black people – marking the widest racial disparity in police stops of the eight reporting agencies.

So it’s not true that they commit more crimes even proportionally — they are stopped and accused of crimes more often, but that doesn’t mean they’re guilty. This is consistent all over the country, in blue states and red states.

Eventually, they get to the issue of poverty — and in that area the charts of crimes and violence by income is very clearly linked, but it is not linked to race.

Also, to be completely fair, part of the reason police probably stop Black and Latino people at a higher rate is also related to poverty.  If you’re driving a broken down hooptie with expired tags, you’re gonna get pulled over.

Police know that someone in a car that needs repairs probably doesn’t have insurance or they can’t afford their premiums. And if they can’t afford that — they certainly can’t afford a lawyer who’s gonna ask them “what was your probable cause, Officer?”  “What was your articulable suspicion for this stop?”

Nobodies gonna stop somebody when they think they’re uncle might be a judge.  And Black and Latino people have a higher rate of poverty in America.

This gets us back to the original subject, who is granted those opportunities and why?

Legacy and Inertia

 

When it comes to hiring, even if super Liberal Hollywood, it’s far more often for people to hire and rehire people they know, than people they don’t know.  It can be a family connection or a friendship — but having a connection of some type will always give someone an advantage. It’s not just who you know — but who knows you that can help you get a leg up.

I know for a fact that every major job I’ve been hired for was because I had a connection who opened that door.  And I’ve seen what it’s like when those connections are gone.  During the short time that I pursued acting in LA, I was told directly by my manager that developing a relationship — particularly with a Director — was the key to getting acting gigs in Hollywood.

There’s a reason we repeatedly see Martin Scorsese working with Leonardo DiCaprio, and we see Quinten Tarantino working with Brad Pitt. Directors develop “pet” actors that they work with over and over again.

it doesn’t require active discrimination NOW for any of this to occur — it’s just the legacy and inertia of what has gone before going back decades.

We frankly live in a still grossly segregated country.  White people live and work among themselves, as do Black people, as do Latinos.  In our regular, nonwork, lives rarely are those lines crossed. Not in the schools, not in the pews.  Relationships across racial lines do happen — certainly, they happen in LA, I can attest to that — but it’s clearly not enough alone to significantly change things even in Hollywood.

The ongoing Legacy of Hollywood has been that those making the major decisions — the studio heads and the producers — have been Straight White Men.  The people they tend to hire as directors, writers and actors, have largely been Straight White Men.

This is what brings us to a situation where only 14% of the Hollywood writers in 2016-2016, were people of color. 90% of the shows on CBS had only 1 Black writer or none. Black writers were only 5% of the total in Hollywood.

This fact alone could be the basis of a Civil Rights suit against the industry that could have the government come in and FORCE the industry to improve their demographic mix using the provisions of the Civil Rights Act.

Now, I don’t think they need to have a hard and fast quota in place — they could have a flexible goal —  quotas and bonus points systems were banned in Affirmative Action by the SCOTUS in the 1978 Bakke v UC Davis decision.  But it could be argued this is the industry trying to self-correct from their prior and current bias and that should be allowed, or else it just won’t happen. Ever.

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

(b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

(c) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for a labor organization–

(1) to exclude or to expel from its membership, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify its membership, or to classify or fail or refuse to refer for employment any individual, in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities, or would limit such employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee or as an applicant for employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

(3) to cause or attempt to cause an employer to discriminate against an individual in violation of this section.

(d) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.

The issue isn’t “does this new policy violate the Civil Rights Act” — the issue is that the Movie industry is already in gross violation of that Act.

There can be some level of “self-selection” where men may prefer a certain career or women may prefer a different career, just like Black people choose to prefer Hip Hop and White people choose to prefer Country and Pop — but when 86% of your writers are Straight White Men, that’s not a natural phenomenon. Something caused that and that something needs to be fixed.

They are on their own attempting to voluntarily correct that violation.

Gaining Work Experience

 

So if you don’t have any Black, Female or Gay writers — how exactly are they going to gain any experience?  How do they get into the game if they don’t have any personal connections into the game?

IMDB indicates the Brian Beneker has 90 script coordinator credits for “Seal Team 6.”  He has 28 script coordinator credits for “Vegas” and 10 for “The Defenders.”

He only has 4 credits as a writer.  3 for “Seal Team 6” and 1 for “Resurrection Blvd.”

What he’s trying to do is write more scripts for the show and at the same time remain the script coordinator.  He’s trying to take two jobs at once.  They gave him the choice of doing one — or the other, but not both.

That’s actually the conflict here — he wants his cake, he wants to eat it and he wants some more take home for later.

Now, it’s clear he has more experience as a script coordinator, particularly on that show, than anyone else they might want to bring in.  But again, how did he get that experience back in 2017 when 86% of screenwriters in Hollywood were Straight White Men?

He’s experienced NOW — but he wasn’t then when a Straight White Man had a virtual LOCK on gaining that position. Now, that he’s benefited from that advantage and gained that experience he wants to complain that if he wants to be a screenwriter too, someone else has to be the script coordinator.  And that someone else has a 50/50 chance of being either a Straight White Guy — or Black, Female, Asian, Latino, Arab and/or LGBTQ.

He was gifted an advantage that put him in this “Meritorious” position and that’s the key element that people like Juan refuse to see.  We are not starting at zero — there are millions of people who have already been given a head start and for anyone else to break in, they have to be given that first chance too.

Then they can gain experience and “merit.” If we don’t allow someone diverse to gain an initial toehold, They. Never. Will.  It’s almost impossible to compete against those who are already miles and miles ahead of you. On a “Merit” basis, you will never be able to measure up.

Plus, he could have stayed the script coordinator or he could have written more scripts for the show. Or for another show.  He could have kept his job rather than trying to do two jobs.  It was his choice.

Life Experience

 

One of the other problems in Hollywood, particularly with writers, is that they can only write what they know.  And I’m sorry, even the most talented writer has problems accurately and honestly depicting the lives and perspectives of people who are different from them.  White writers have a terrible track record of trying to document the Black Experience in America — or elsewhere — accurately or fairly.  They have a hard time documenting the Female experience and they absolutely have problems documenting the LGBTQ experience.

Most people don’t know what they don’t know. They usually have no real idea of what’s happening in other people’s heads.

If Hollywood is going to portray ethnic characters without them turning into a modern Stepin Fetchit or Amos and Andy —it would help to have writers on staff with first-hand experience in that community.  And not just one. This is how you build authenticity. This is how you create honest and realistic characters and stories.

If we don’t want to only have stories about Straight White Men — along with Token Ethnic Stereotypes — forever, we need people with the necessary life experience in the writing room keeping things honest.

Also, there is the argument that a diverse workforce is more innovative, and that would be nice in Hollywood.

Diversity and inclusion is a strategic advantage that promotes innovation in organizations, better decision making and stronger workplace cultures. See the strategies for building a diverse and inclusive organization to achieve long-term business success.

The value of diversity and inclusion has become increasingly recognized in society and in business. Organizations that promote diversity and cultivate inclusive environments are reaping huge rewards in terms of innovation, better decision making and better performance overall. The positive impact of diversity and inclusion extends beyond social responsibility; it is a strategic imperative that drives success and positions companies for long-term sustainability.

Demographics

 

The complaint here is that it’s just “so unfair” that one white guy can’t do two people’s jobs because it just might mean that one BiPOC gets a chance to also have a career, after probably hundreds of BiPOC have been denied an opportunity for the last several decades. If we do anything to correct that problem, it’s doing too much. Every white guy’s (extra) job is sacred, so we’ll just keep screwing other people over today just like we screwed them over yesterday.

If you’ve been robbed repeatedly for decades and then finally someone goes and takes back a tiny piece of what was stolen — is that now somehow a crime?

According to Stephen Miller, it is.  Shocker.

The CBS rule is that 50% of their writing staff is to be BiPOC for 2023. Ok.  But here’s the thing, if we were to really look at an appropriate demographic [Quota] of how many Straight White Men should be on staff… it would be 26%.

White people are 58% of America.  [Juan tries to argue that White people are 60% and that’s true but White MEN aren’t 60%] Half of those white people are women so that takes us down to 29%.  About 7% of America is LGBTQ so removing about half of that takes us to 26%.

That means that this rule PROTECTS a special amount of 50% of the available slots for just 26% of the people.  Everyone else has to squeeze into the remainder. It means that White Straight Men will likely always be overrepresented among the writing staff compared to their actual population in general.

Apparently, that isn’t enough for some of people like Stephan Miller — they still want more.

They’re used to having more.  They’re used to having 86% of the jobs.  And they, sadly, think they’ve legitimately earned that position rather than having systematically stolen it. Making room for new people is difficult.  It means choices have to be made. But since 50% of the slots are being held for Straight White Men, couldn’t it be argued that he’s not being forced out because of a BiPOC, he’s forced out because one of the other protected white guys is in the way of his [extra] slot?

Couldn’t they drop a less experienced white guy off that staff to leave room for him so he can still technically take up two slots?  But then again, is there a less experienced writer on staff, he only has 4 scripts — maybe he simply isn’t qualified to be a staff writer yet.

Hmm.

Also, if this is such a big problem now in Hollywood and CBS — why is this guy the only one complaining?