Offensive trope, IMO, seeking others' opinions: You Have To Have Jews

Hm, so Cast The Locals is wrong, but I think Cast Who You Know might still work.

Cast Who You Know sounds like a trope about directors always choosing the same cast for projects. Or using people they worked with before. Like Joss Whedon used Summer Glau in both Firefly and Dollhouse.

edited 13th Apr '11 8:00:15 PM by shimaspawn

Fair enough.

Hollywood Demographics

Basically a trope about how Hollywood can get demographics wrong, and why. Jews should be mentioned as a prominent example in the description.

No need for a subtrope specifically about Jews, Blacks, whites, or any other minority.

Hollywood Demographics works for me, kinda. I'm not sure what other examples there are of this, other than the common presence of (South) Asians in British works, and even that doesn't really have the same impact given that the UK isn't the cultural juggernaut the US is.

I always thought this had more to do with the fact that New York and California do have higher Jewish populations than other parts of the country and the media assumes that 10% of the population everywhere is Jewish. I know I fell victim to this when I was visiting my grand parents in Northern Michigan and we were planing Sunday Brunch. Since we were right on Lake Michigan we were able to get really good whitefish salad and really good smoked salmon. I suggested getting some bagels to go with them, as bagels and smoked salomon go really well with each other, only to be informed that unless I wanted frozen bagels, the nearest place that made them was a day's drive away. Unlike back home, where I can get quality bagels at the grocery store. Until that point I wasn't aware that one had to have a sizable Jewish population to get good bagels or rye bread, I assumed there would be a high enough demand for them anywhere in the country, despite knowing they were traditionally Jewish foods.

I like the Hollywood Demographics idea.

"the media assumes that 10% of the population everywhere is Jewish"

Well, yeah. That's, like, the entire point.

If it's to be Hollywood Demographics - what else is there?

"Asian" means what a British person would call "Oriental" (i.e. pale skin, epicanthic folds), you never hear anyone called "Oriental" because it's offensive, and brown-skinned, round-eyed Asians are specifically "South Asians", to distinguish them from the "normal" Asians.

After that, if the title is to be generalised in that way, I'm struggling for examples. Anyone?

Other examples

• The American Midwest has no sizable minority populations (except blacks, and they only live in the larger metropolitan areas).
• Minorities in large cities only live in sharply demarked communities or enclaves; these area are usually called "Little <Country name>" or "<Ethnicity>town".
• All teenaged boys who aren't weedy little nerds play either basketball, football or both.

Those aren't tropes related to incongruous demography, though, they're just observations of real-world demography.

The trope, on the other hand, is the incongruous (to every other place in the world except NYC and LA) demography on show in mainstream media produced in those towns (i.e. most mainstream media).

But that's the thing. You set a town in the midwest, and there will be the Token Minorities, even if it doesn't make sense for the demographics of the region. If we went by Hollywood, then 1 in 5 people are non-white no matter where you are in America.

And that's different from Token Minority as that would also include the only black/Hispanic/gay/disabled/etc. guy in town happening to be the main character's best friend. While coincidental, that's getting the demographics right.

Son Of Roj Blake, all three of those are the way demographics are depicted, and all three are wrong. In reality, the Midwest is not lily-white except in large cities. There are all sorts of ethnic minorities who don't live in insular little enclaves, and not every teen-aged boy is interested in football or basketball.

Doh, sorry.

Thought you were observing reality. Reality in the UK is that ethnic minorities ARE concentrated in urban areas and the countryside (not reallly equivalent to the mid-west, but then what is?) is indeed pretty much lilywhite in comparison.

I'm up for Hollywood Demographics.

Given that this trope, even under the proposed title "Hollywood Demographics" is basically about the undeniable fact of the disproportionately high representation of one, single minority, isn't anyone taking offence still going to take offence?

I mean, if it's offensive to NOTICE, what difference does the title make? The current title is clearly a joke, and not a mean one. You're in danger of lowering the common denominator here in deference to people whose offence threshold is ludicrously low.

It's no longer about the LCD; it's about broadening the scope of the trope.

It's not about being offensive. It's about being a needlessly specific subtrope of the proposed Hollywood Demographics that focuses entirely on jews, when it could just as easily be about a much broader subject without losing anything valuable.

My point was: is the subject really that broad?

I mean, if you can think of another ethnic group who are so massively disproportionately portrayed in American media, by all means, give an example.

For instance - there are almost half as many Native Americans in the US as there are Jews. OTHER THAN IN WESTERNS, can you name *any* Native American characters in mainstream movies, TV dramas, sitcoms etc.? I've got One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... and... er... There's over four MILLION of those guys in the US, they were there first, and yet you'd think they don't exist other than in period dramas where they're wearing warpaint and feathers.

For comparison, imagine if media from the UK disproportionately features Sikhs, frequently were written or directed or produced by Sikhs, but hardly ever featured Scotsmen. That would be WEIRD. Wouldn't it?

There was the chick in Terminator Salvation.

"I can't think of any examples outside of jews" is no reason to restrict it to jews any more than "I can't think of any examples outside of Anime" is to restrict a trope to Anime and Manga.

Twilight had Native American characters, though only a few were played by native actors.

I'm not suggesting restricting it to jews. I'm suggesting that since there really are hardly any other examples, to have Jews in the title doesn't seem unreasonable. It's simply the best and most common illustration.

I'm also not looking here for a list of Native American characters or actors. The point was - are there HALF AS MANY Native Americans in those positions as there are Jews? No? Then this trope is a statement of a mildly interesting fact with calmly expressed and perfectly sensible reasons, not a racist opinion.

We've had tropes about general minorities with jews in the name wind up collecting almost all jew examples: Space Jews for one. And the reason Hollywood Demographics was suggested is that it's a pre-existing family of tropes, combined with the fact that You Have to Have Jews implies nothing about A)demographics that are B)inaccurate or C)related to the local population. You Have to Have Jews is just a generally bad name all around, regardless of whether or not people are offended.

"We've had tropes about general minorities with jews in the name wind up collecting almost all jew examples"

Some observations on that: 1. the trope pretty explicitly states that it doesn't lend itself to a simple list of examples anyway, and clearly and specifically requests only lampshadings, subversions, inversions or particularly egregious examples 2. if you can think of any OTHER minorities that are *massively* disproportionately represented in mainstream (US) media, go to it and mention them. 3. if examples with Jews are, in fact, the commonest, why is it a problem that most of the examples supplied are about Jews? And if not - same question. This is a wiki - you can solve the problem instantly, yourself, by simply adding as many examples as you can think of which are not about Jews - problem solved, no? Unless... unless you're simply uncomfortable for your own reasons with the preponderance of Jews as examples, but cannot think of enough other examples to prove this very trope wrong. See point 2.

Personally I think "You Have to Have Jews" pretty pithily sums up what the trope is about - the impression it's possible to get that there is indeed such a rule, a rule regularly lampshaded in the very media to which it applies. See the entry, particularly the bit about Jon Stewart.