Fucking lol, Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad were not made for biker gangs and meth dealers.
So? If television shows are about agendas then it's about normalizing a behavior through the medium of TV. Those shows aren't made for biker gangs and meth dealers - they're made to push that behavior on the rest of us by normalizing it...right?
Or are the messages in those shows somehow less propaganda than others? Because I've never had a gay relationship or joined a biker gang, yet I've seen tv shows about both things. One can't be an agenda while the other is simply entertainment. That's way too arbitrary to be defensible.
Except I actually quite like the Indian kid in Mean Girls, in fact he is one of my favorite token Indians. But he is still a token Indian nonetheless. In a cast full of Indians it is less likely that being Indian will be boiled down to being good at math and eating spicy food.
But that isn't what you said - you said he is "written to embody his race in some capacity" as if there is something wrong with the Indian kid being acceptable as an Indian kid.
. As for tokenism - I wholly reject that argument. When I walk into a legal conference, I'm often the only black lawyer in the room. My wife is often the only Indian in her profession. Outside of select few professions, minorities are often a very minor presence in many spaces. My dad was frequently the only black doctor. Eminem was the only white kid in his rap group (D12).
Just one or a few of an outsider in a group is not "tokenism". It's the reality as more and more people cross barriers into spaces they previously weren't welcome.
No that is not what I said, or at least not what I meant. I do not prefer those kinds of roles in ethnically homogeneous casts, its just that in my experience they are more likely to be written in an ethnically homogeneous cast because the characters have to be distinguished from each other on some basis other than ethnicity so such casts are more likely to explore the different kinds of people within an ethnicity and the relationship between them. That is my impression at least.
And my point is that writing them into ethnically homogeneous casts simply reinforces the stereotypical perception of those groups and contradicts reality.
Using the black doctor since it's more common than the Arabic priest: The truth is that there are black doctors and they make up 4% of the physician population. They are often operating in very non-homogeneous neighborhoods. Casting them in heterogeneous spaces where they are the only one of their ethnicity in that space is much closer to their reality than casting them in some space where they're primarily interacting with others of their own ethnicity. That wouldn't make sense - a black doctor makes a doctor's income and is going to largely know other doctors, live in neighborhoods that align with his income, etc. And those spaces are primarily non-black.
Writing the black doctor into a largely black cast is less true than writing him into a largely white cast. The same for any minority cast into a non-stereotypical position and even for some of the stereotypical ones.
But that's not my argument. And in fact
@Gregolian produced a good example of a black character in a diverse cast being boiled down to a stereotype, a criminal, and I would say that's also an example of what I am talking about though to be fair I have not watched House.
And my point was that no one complains about black character being cast as a criminal. No one is starting threads or writing op-eds about Hollywood's agenda when they cast a Muslim as a terrorist or a black person as a criminal or a woman as choosing her home life over worklife.
They make a comment if they were to cast the Muslim as President or the black person as en engineering genius. And they only make those comments when the Muslim or the Black person shows up in mainstream viewing. No one gives a shit about the black doctor on BET because they don't watch that anyway. But you put him next to a mainstream actor on a mainstream channel where he/she cannot be ignore then they complain.
Relegating minority actors (including sexuality) to homogeneous casts is far worse than tokenism. Tokenism at least reflects reality.