The never-ending dispute over whether the National Football League’s Washington Redskins should change their name is heating up again. Early in May, D.C. City Councilman David Grosso introduced a resolution asking the team to change its “racist and derogatory” name, an effort that even drew the attention of the team’s star quarterback, Robert Griffin III, who posted a cryptic tweet about the “tyranny of political correctness” that, it turned out, was in reference to efforts to change the title of the franchise he represents.

But Grosso’s non-binding resolution is the least of the Redskins’ worries. The big threat to the team and its owner, Dan Snyder, is the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which in February heard a case petitioning it to classify the word “Redskin” as a derogatory slur: as such, it wouldn’t be eligible for trademark protection. But even if it loses that case, the team will “NEVER” change its name, Snyder told the USA Today on Thursday:

“We will never change the name of the team,” Snyder told USA TODAY Sports this week. “As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means, so we feel pretty fortunate to be just working on next season.”

What if his football team loses an ongoing federal trademark lawsuit? Would he consider changing it then?

“We’ll never change the name,” he said. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

The trademark case won’t be resolved anytime soon — probably not until next year, and it will likely see appeals after that. The board stripped the Redskins of their trademark in 1999, only to have the decision overturned on a technicality (that petitioners waited too long to file their claim) in 2003. But the basic case is pretty strong: “Redskins” is plainly derogatory, a racial marker that various dictionaries define as “offensive” and a “term of disparagement,” and petitioners have this time structured the case in a manner that should avoid the timing technicality. Native Americans and activists have fought its use for years, with one, Clem Iron Wing, reportedly telling a school board in Wichita, Kansas — where a high school uses the nickname — that the “only way ‘redskin’ was ever used towards my people and myself was in a derogatory manner.” Pay close enough attention to the debate, and you’ll notice that no one — not even Snyder — defends the term on the grounds that it isn’t racist or derogatory. Instead, they argue that the team should keep it because it’s “tradition” and because 79 percent of Americans support it.

Losing the trademark wouldn’t force the Redskins to change the name. What it would do, however, is make it impossible to stop other people from using it. In short, Snyder wouldn’t be able to stop anyone else from making merchandise with the team name and undercutting official Redskins gear, or to charge anyone for using the name, changes that would cost Snyder considerable financial damage — “every imaginable loss you can think of,” according to attorneys in the 1999 case — and activists hope that would be enough to change his mind. Snyder, though, is a man of immense pride, and my suspicion is that he would try to eat his losses and keep the name out of spite, at least for the time being.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell isn’t likely to feel the same way. Goodell has thus far expressed a startling level of indifference toward the controversy, but if the Redskins lose the trademark — and the NFL’s ability to make money off their licensed and trademarked merchandise — that indifference will assuredly fade. Goodell might “understand the affinity for that name” among fans, but he won’t understand — or tolerate — big financial losses. Ideally, Snyder and Goodell would change the name because it’s plainly derogatory. Getting rid of it because using racist terminology is expensive, though, may have to suffice.

My friend Willa Paskin, Salon’s TV critic, has a very interesting profile of Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal, a show in which “America is run by an African-American spin expert, a scheming first lady and a mercenary gay guy who also happens to be in one of the sexiest homosexual marriages on television,” in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. There’s a lot to chew over here, including how Rhimes built a hit factor by writing shows about ambitious women, and by embracing soap opera tropes and insisting on diverse casts, or the fact that she wants to make a spy show. But I wanted to pull out this section of the piece on writing race in television, since it’s obviously a subject that’s been on my mind a great deal lately:

While race on Rhimes’s shows is omnipresent, it is not often discussed explicitly. This has led to a second-order critique of her shows: that they are colorblind, diverse in a superficial way, with the characters’ races rarely informing their choices or conversations. Rhimes, obviously, disagrees. “When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as ‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah,’ ” she says. “That’s not how the world works. I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.”

This is a framework for handling race on television that sounds absolutely terrible, narratively and otherwise. Any writer, of any color, who writes for a character of color and can only come up with things to say about that characters’ race hasn’t done the work of thinking through who this character is as a full person. Race matters, but gender, class, geography, faith, sexual orientation, and cultural affiliations do too. A well-designed character should have idiosyncrasies because actual humans do, and multiple interests, because ditto, and be precise in their perspectives because we’re not handed talking points at birth but develop them over time and filter them through our personal experiences.

But I’d also have been curious for the story to spend more time on Rhimes’ argument that “I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.” Does she mean that being equal means that her race can be treated as a neutral default, much like whiteness? Does she think that the only narratives African-Americans are given on television are drawn from disadvantage, and she doesn’t want to write those? I wouldn’t blame her for that, but it seems like a oddly limited perspective on what people get from their racial or ethnic heritage that can be portrayed on screen, which is why I’d find that interpretation somewhat confusing. Or does she mean that she doesn’t want to have to stand in for black women everywhere, and doesn’t want her characters to have to either? Again, I wouldn’t disagree with her at all for wanting to avoid that fate. But I’m not sure not talking about race in text (her argument that her characters don’t have to talk explicitly about race because “The discussion is right in front of your face,” in their actions is more convincing) is the only writerly solution to the problem she’s putting forward. In any case, I recognize the irritation of wanting to parse a subject Rhimes thinks is overplayed. But I’d be curious what writing lessons she has to offer to those white writers she complains about.

Over the past several days, we’ve heard a great deal, about the happy (if you can call the tend of ten years of torment straightforwardly happy) ending to a horrific triple—or maybe quadruple—kidnapping in Cleveland, and the man who brought it about. Charles Ramsey, who lived near the house in which Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were held, raped, and tortured for a decade, became a hero when he responded to Berry’s calls for help, thinking he was intervening in a simple domestic violence incident. And he has become an internet celebrity thanks to an interview he gave about the case afterwards. The speed with which the latter status has eclipsed the former has been striking, and raised interesting and important questions about our willingness to turn people of color into memes rather than heroes.

At NPR, Gene Demby points out that the ways in which men like Ramsey become memes, and the grounds on which they’re treated as if they’re likable, are reductive rather than respectful, cute rather than heroic—and when those images crumble, the credit we extend to them and the rewards that follow tend to disappear:

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That’s still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

And at Slate, Aisha Harris breaks down the ways in which the “memorable soundbites” uttered by people like Ramsey or Antoine Dodson becomes the most memorable thing about them, rather than the acts that brought them to public attention in the first place. She writes:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

I think both Harris and Demby are correct, and that it’s worth sorting out both a conscious and unconscious set of impulses that are at work in meme-ifying people in these particular circumstances.
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When Sloane Stephens and Serena Williams met in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open this January, the tennis media rushed to compare the two — one a 20-year-old budding star, the other perhaps the most dominant player the game has ever seen — and develop the idea that they had a relationship in which Williams was mentoring Stephens to follow in the 15-time Grand Slam champion’s footsteps.

Before the match, in which Stephens became the first American woman younger than Williams to defeat her, espnW said the two “quickly became friends” upon meeting the summer before, while Britain’s Daily Mail said they “get along well off of the court” because of their “obvious similarities.” The media quickly built up the mentor-protege storyline, even though Williams dismissed it, telling a reporter who asked about it directly that “it’s hard to be a real mentor when you’re still in competition.”

The idea of a special relationship between the two players blew up today, when it became clear that it “wasn’t the fairy tale the media made it out to be.” Stephens, it turns out, doesn’t consider the most dominant player of this generation a friend or a mentor, and she isn’t particularly interested in the “next Serena” label that has been tacked on her back in the weeks since her victory in Melbourne, as Marin Cogan detailed in her excellent piece examining the expectations facing the young tennis star in ESPN The Magazine’s upcoming issue:

“For the first 16 years of my life, she said one word to me and was never involved in my tennis whatsoever,” says Stephens. “I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal that she’s not involved now. If you mentor someone, that means you speak to them, that means you help them, that means you know about their life, that means you care about them. Are any of those things true at this moment? No, so therefore … ”

I offer: “They want the next great American player.”

Stephens says: “They want another Serena.”

That the two don’t have the fairy tale relationship has now become a story itself, with outlets proclaiming that Stephens “ripped” Williams in the interview. But none of that answers why it was so important that such a relationship exist, or why such a relationship was expected. Williams, after all, doesn’t seem the mentoring type: she eschewed the tennis academy culture favored by many young players to be coached by her father — a fact that has earned both resentment and skepticism in the tennis world — leaving her without many of the traditional structures that surrounds other players. And in a game that is inherently individualistic, perhaps no recent player has displayed such a singular focus on dominating her opponents as Williams. The idea, then, that she would set that aside to aid a player who is coming after the very mantle she has set seems absurd on its face. The idea that Stephens, who matriculated through academies, never considered Williams her favorite player, and has a coach who was a former pro himself, would need such a mentor seems nearly as hard to believe.

So why did the myth of that relationship persist? It grew, as Cogan notes, in part because the players allowed it to, even as Williams downplayed it. But did it also endure because the semblances between Williams and Stephens — they are both African-Americans, they are both women, they both play somewhat similar styles of tennis — made for an interesting storyline in a tennis world that, frankly, needs them? The same media accounts that outlined the mentor-protege relationship referred to “obvious similarities” between the two, the fact that it would be a “a mirror image in some ways” when they stared across the net at each other, and that Serena originally was fond of seeing “another black girl” in the lockerroom.

Williams, though, has never been considered a mentor to other young Americans, like Melanie Oudin, who arose as Next Big Things during her career, and we’ve never expected male athletes, like Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, who shared her focus and drive to mentor younger players who followed them. Did we need the sport’s biggest African-American star to mentor the first major African-American player to come after her? Do we expect that a young woman in a sport where so many Next Big Things failed before needed a big sister on the court to succeed? Do we hold our top women to a separate standard, asking them to ease their desires to beat each other so that they can be friends too? We never asked Federer to mentor a young Rafael Nadal; we’ve never questioned why Tiger Woods wasn’t helping someone else win The Masters.

Of course it’s desirable for the two players to get along and treat each other with respect. But the expectation that Williams should be a mentor to Stephens, and that Stephens needed Williams to mentor her, is unfair to both of them. Why should we expect Williams to welcome a competitor and set aside the quality we’ve admired most about her — her ability to focus on her goal of dominating opponents the way no one has before? And why should Stephens want to be “another Serena” instead of just “the next great American player,” a role she could define for herself? And instead of enjoying their greatness, why do we need them to be friends, too?

This post discusses episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

“I thought being a private eye was about shooting dudes and making out with sexy widows,” Wallace teases Veronica in “Lord of the Bling,” the thirteenth episode of the first season of Veronica Mars. “The widows come later,” Veronica promises him, but these two episodes of the show are about what happens when people refuse to conform to the tropes that they’ve been assigned to. First, there’s Bryce Hamilton, the son of Percy “Bone” Hamilton, a hip-hop producer, who sets up an elaborate scheme to prove to his father that being good at science doesn’t mean he’s “soft.” And in the second, there’s Carrie, “the gossip queen of Neptune High,” who uses her acute understanding of the high school rumor mill to take the brunt of a student-teacher relationship scandal for the girl who really got pregnant, an act of courage that demonstrates how Veronica, who normally keeps her detective’s toolkit sharp and clean, succumbs to bias when her own social milieu is the subject of an investigation that rubs up against her own sore spots.

“Lord of the Bling” traffics fairly heavily in stereotypes, but it gets away with its cliches with some deft attention to the extent to which stereotypes are useful to the people that embody them and to code-switching, and by making those stereotypes the subjects of the case itself. “You know that boy could stand to get hit in the head with a dodge ball or two. Toughen him up,” sighs Percy when we first meet him, signing a waiver that will let Bryce get out of physical education so he can pursue an independent study in science. “How did a man like me end up with National Black Velvet and Urkel?” Percy’s identity, as we’ll learn throughout the episode, is a creation rather than a natural outgrowth of his personality. “He didn’t advertise the fact that much of his success was due to his comfortably upper-middle-class Jewish attorney,” Mr. Bloom tells Keith Mars. Later, Yolanda, Percy’s daughter, whose disappearance is what prompts Percy to seek Keith out to look for her, explains that she’s disgusted by the way her father treated the drive-by shooting that left Mr. Bloom using a wheelchair. “You let everyone believe you ordered it because it gave you cred,” she tells him, after running off with Mr. Bloom’s son. His wife even teases him in the opening about his insistence that Bryce isn’t tough enough. “And the street was tough and you lost a lot of homies. But this is Neptune,” she tells her husband, suggesting that Percy is clinging to a trope that may have outlived its usefulness for his family.

But clearly, Percy’s attachment to that stereotype has done real damage to Percy’s family. Bryce—though he turns out to be the architect of the ransom demand for Yolanda—is bitter that his father is resorting to a private detective, rather than calling the police, a gesture he believes is meant to protect Percy’s reputation as not cooperating with the cops, rather than to expedite the search for Yolanda. “He’s been in jail a third of my life, but I’m the embarrassment? State science fair winner three years in a row but I’m the one that’s soft,” he tells Veronica, in what turns out to be the motivation for his hoax. When Veronica and Keith catch Bryce and march him back to his father to explain, Bryce tells Percy, “You can be mad, Dad. But you can’t call me soft.”
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Last week, the news broke that Downton Abbey, the British drama about the titled residents of a major country estate and the people who work for them, will be adding its first black character: the London-born actor Gary Carr, who has a long British television resume, will play a jazz singer named Jack Ross. This is a notable development for Downton Abbey, which through three seasons has remained resolutely—if appropriate to its time period and setting—monochromatic. But the show’s decision is also part of a larger trend of overwhelmingly white shows that have made the decision to try to broaden their casting and their subject matter. And Downton Abbey can learn from Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls, which responded to a firestorm of criticism over its whiteness by adding a character named Sandy (Donald Glover), a black Republican love interest for the main character, and AMC’s Mad Men, which in its sixth season has added two African-American characters and expanded its treatment of its characters reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Downton Abbey, Girls, and Mad Men all differ in the extent to which their settings made the absence of black characters conspicuous or uncomfortable. A relatively secluded English country estate, close to a small town rather than London, would be less likely to have black British or immigrant residents than the capital itself, particularly in 1912. Mad Men has somewhat less excuse than Downton Abbey does, and a number of analysts have suggested that the version of Madison Avenue series creator Matthew Weiner and his collaborators have presented on the show actually suggests that women and African-Americans had made less progress in the advertising industry than they really had, particularly at the firm BBDO. And Girls, which was maligned as racist for having four white main characters, did better than its harshest critics suggested and worse than might have been realistic. The show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, did give its main character Hannah Horvath (Dunham) an Asian coworker at the publishing house where she was a long-time intern, but also relied on stereotyped portrayals of non-white secretaries and nannies, and gave its privileged characters a small, monochromatic social circle. Whether or not that was realistic, or whether or not that was a wise choice on Dunham’s part was a matter of how alienating an individual viewer found the decision, and how much one believed that relatively privileged Oberlin graduates might only have close friends of their same race.

Whether or not Weiner or Dunham felt obligated to have their shows respond to their critics on race, they both did so in ways that made black characters on-screen critics of the white main characters. Dawn (Teyonah Parris), Don Draper’s secretary, who became Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first black employee in the first episode of the fifth season of Mad Men, told a friend she met for dinner this season of her white employers that “Everyone’s scared. Women crying in the ladies’ room. Men crying in the elevator. It’s like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage there. There’s so many bottles.” She spoke not just as an outsider to the office but for critics of Mad Men who have found the show alienating and offputting. And Sandy, after failing to finish one of Hannah’s essays on Girls, told her “It wasn’t for me.” When Hannah protested of the essay that “It’s for everyone,” the show was cleverly flipping the script. Sandy, the black character, was saying that a piece of art didn’t have to speak to everyone’s sensibilities, unlike critics of color of the show who were upset that it didn’t address their experiences, while it was Hannah, the white character, who was suggesting that Girls ought to be for everyone, contra many white critics’ defenses that the show’s strength lay in its particularity, and that it couldn’t possibly be reasonable to demand that it serve a universal function.
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It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.