Does HBO's Girls have a race problem?

The show about four spoiled white girls making their way in New York is earning buzz — but does it offer a whitewashed vision of the multiracial Big Apple?

HBO's "Girls"
(Image credit: HBO/Jojo Whilden)

Lena Dunham's buzzy new HBO series Girls — about four twentysomething friends living, loving, and learning in New York City — debuted to rhapsodic acclaim last weekend. And then the griping began: Some commentators seized on the fact that only two non-white characters appeared, briefly, in its premiere — an Asian coworker notable for her computer savvy and a black man who appeared to be homeless. For a show that's being packaged as "the twentysomething experience," says Phoebe Robinson at The Huffington Post, lily-white "Girls doesn't represent me nor the women I know who have matured in NYC." Does Girls have a race problem?

Yes. The show should be called White Girls: "Girls has a serious problem when it comes to race," says Dodai Stewart at Jezebel. To put it charitably, Dunham's "version of New York is a bit peculiar" to most bright young things finding their way in the hugely multiracial Big Apple. It isn't the first series to whitewash NYC, but this was supposed to be "a kind of more realistic Sex and The City." Instead, it reminds black people "that no one cares about us." Seriously, "even The Office (set in Scranton), and Parks and Recreation (set in Indiana) offer more diversity."

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