Is MTV’s new TV series racist?
The production company Punched in the Head recently released a casting call looking for white victims of discrimination for a new reality series by MTV, The Untitled Whiteness Project.
The new TV series, which is advertised as a documentary for MTV about race, is looking for people who feel they have been given advantages because they are white.
Here is the their latest casting call:
When You’re White, it can be difficult to talk about race.
Casting for an MTV Documentary: Are you white? Do you have a story to tell? We want to hear from you.
Is race an issue in your family, community or school? Is something making you question possible advantages you’ve had as a white person? Are you being discriminated against for being white? Are you having a problem with race on social media? Is something happening in your life that’s making you think a lot about race, or what it means to be white?
If you go to the Punched to the Head website, they go into greater detail about what they are looking for:
MTV previously announced “Untitled Whiteness Project” and described it as “a documentary-style program that will explore how millennials navigate diversity and what it means to be a young white person in America in 2014.”
MTV executives explained the goal for the production was the following:
There’s an opportunity to open up and explore by putting the spotlight on the experiences of young white people as they’re navigating the college admissions process or they’re wondering how come there are diversity clubs for all these different groups, how come there isn’t a white club?… There will be instances in which we need to make clear that there are privileges that people have inherently — if that’s class, if that’s race, if that’s gender.
But, many people do not agree with MTV’s new TV show:
The documentary’s director, Jose Antonio Vargas, spoke with BuzzFeed News about the backlash against one of their casting calls and he responded by saying “This is not the only ad we’re going to put out there.”
“Whenever the words ‘whiteness’ or ‘white privilege’ gets uttered by nonwhite people, people’s reflexes go all the way up,” Vargas told BuzzFeed News when questioned about the casting call on Wednesday night. “I think that the fact that it’s about whiteness and that it’s about questioning whiteness as a racial identity in that construct is going to automatically attract all kinds of attention.”
“This is not the only ad we’re going to put out there,” he added. “We’re casting as wide a net as we possible can, so that we can get as many different people and many different perspectives as possible.”
What do you think of MTV’s Untitled Whiteness Project? Is the show racist? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
