David Cole writes:
The unfortunate irony of David Mills’ life is that he had his Hollywood career handed to him because David Milch had claimed that black writers aren’t very good at writing outside their own limited perspective, and in the end, Milch turned out to be right, at least in the case of the man who was specifically hired to prove him wrong. Mills was at his best writing “black” episodes for “black” shows. On the other hand, many of Mills’ white colleagues, most notably David Simon (creator of The Corner, The Wire, and Homicide: Life on the Streets), are racially ambidextrous to an extraordinary degree (I doubt there’s ever been a TV show with more realistic and richly detailed black characters than The Wire). So when today’s SJWs ask if white writers can write accurately and empathetically about blacks, the answer is yes, absolutely. It’s a proven fact. White writers are more likely to be able to effectively voice nonwhite characters than black writers are able to voice nonblack ones. Why? Because in this country, whites are constantly encouraged to learn about and think about the experiences of other races and ethnicities, whereas blacks are encouraged to self-indulgently obsess about being black.
On average, black writers are more likely to have a limited worldview. I hope that changes in the future, but for now, I’d sooner trust a white writer to be in charge of a movie or TV show about slavery than I would a black writer to craft a movie or TV show about, say, the Irish potato famine.
