Where Are the Black Girls in New YA Shows & Movies?

Ayan Artan
·9 min read

Everett Collection/HBO/Netflix

In this reported op-ed, writer Ayan Artan argues that young adult shows and movies aren’t doing enough to share the stories of Black girls and talks to social media creators about young Black women representation in Hollywood.

On August 26, news broke that actresses Maddie Ziegler and Mean Girls star Avantika had been cast in Ballerina Overdrive, a young adult action film that follows a troupe of ballerinas attempting to escape a remote inn after their bus breaks down en route to a competition.

The announcement attracted controversy after X user Kay (@jasimisinclair) created a viral thread reacting to the lack of diversity — and more specifically, the apparent erasure of Black actresses — in upcoming YA titles, including in Ballerina Overdrive (the cast of which also includes Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, and Millicent Simmonds).

When Deadline first reported on the development of Ballerina Overdrive, Yara Shahidi (along with Isabela Merced and Lena Headey) were also attached to star. Since, Shahidi, Merced, and Headey have all left the project. It seems as though Ziegler and Avantika were brought on to replace Shahidi and Merced.

Tagged with the hashtag #wherearetheblackgirls, Kay’s thread dug into the recent casting announcements for many films and TV series geared towards a young adult audience. The thread includes shows with series orders from streaming giants like Prime Video — such as The Runarounds, made by the creators of Netflix hit Outer Banks — as well as Sony Pictures’ reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The documentation revealed a dozen more upcoming titles set to release within the next two years without a single Black actress to count among their main cast.

Kay’s #wherearetheblackgirls post came specifically because she’s a lover of all things Young Adult. “When I’m promoting projects, I’m also actively looking up who is being cast…and I often found myself not finding many projects with [Black actresses] included in the cast,” she says.

Though had been advocating for the work of Black talent beforehand, it was the 2023 industry wide strike that inspired her to dedicate her @jasminsinclair account to uplifting their work.

“It was very important to me to get people to watch Black led projects during a time when actors couldn’t promote their work,” Kay says. “Black projects already get the short end of the stick in terms of marketing and I thought I could help by raising awareness.” She hosted Spaces on X (including one to talk about the release of Apple TV series Swagger with Reggie R. Bythewood, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Matthew A. Cherry and more), made threads, and posted about the young Black talent that we should be paying more attention to.

TV and film have both been going through a very obvious crisis; many shows are no longer afforded time to gain an audience and are often cancelled after only a season by streamers who seem more interested in protecting their bottom line than they do in nurturing good stories. (Notable cancellations in the past few months include My Lady Jane, Schmigadoon!, and of course The Acolyte — a cancellation that has rightly triggered mass condemnation from not only fans of the series but many notable publications and critics as well). Films with movie stars that we’d all flock to the cinemas to see are now relegated to home viewings Video on Demand or limited releases.

When shows do get more than a single season, audiences are often forced to wait months on end for a meager eight or nine episodes haphazardly dumped on some streaming site all at once. (Yes, this is absolutely Bridgerton shade because how long could it possibly take to gather some hot people in gowns and get them to dance to an Ariana Grande cover, because it can’t possibly be two years?!)

And now we see a common, recurring issue cropping back up: representation. In the 2020, BLM, post-George Floyd haze of empty allyship and steep promises, the expectation was that things would be different. As @jasimisinclair and other accounts like @chaoticblkgirl have shown us however, very little seems to have changed — and it’s a problem that seems to be affecting YA media very blatantly.

YA, of course, reaches a primary audience that is often growing up alongside the characters they watch; whether it is healthy or not, young people are especially vulnerable to having their self-image molded by the art they consume. If you are repeatedly erased from the shows, films and books you see around you, you are further alienated, further othered, far more likely to move around the world feeling “odd” — and nobody benefits from that more than the racist systems built to never let us reach or see our potential and humanity. It’s an odd predicament: a study conducted by Nielsen showed that Black audiences consume more media than any other demographic in the United States, and yet the industry seems intent on alienating us.

Lyvie Scott — esteemed culture critic and entertainment journalist — thinks that the need to exclude Black actresses from these kinds of projects goes back to the belief that whiteness is “normal” and everything else is “other.”

“On some level I want to think it just doesn’t occur to most people to decenter whiteness in their adaptations,” Scott says. “The white experience has become the default across the board — and audiences have come to expect that too — to the point where any deviation feels like a betrayal. There’s also a question of whether white audiences can “relate” to characters that don’t share their lived experience — but that is just a result of years of catering to one demographic. Now we’re stuck in a cycle that may take years, decades, even, to overwrite.”

An added layer to all of this is the utter lack of dark-skinned women specifically being presented with opportunities to lead their own YA projects. Where racism is present, colorism is often not too far behind, and it is here in particular that Nay, or @chaoticblkgirl on X, focuses most of her discussions online.

“I started noticing back in 2020 that a lot of girls on TV and in movies had a certain look (in that they were usually either light skin or biracial),” she says. “I ignored it at first because it honestly didn’t seem that bad until it became too noticeable for it to be ignored anymore.” She started picking up on little things, like the fact that even in the rare case where a dark skin actor had been cast in these YA projects, “a dark skin Black girl (was) missing most of the time.”

We seem to be caught in a frustrating cycle where any and all attempts to diversify casts are met with backlash and rampant racism online by alt-right bigots and trolls. Meanwhile, most production teams are doing very little to shield their Black talent from racism because they don’t want to alienate part of their “base” — even if that fanbase is actively abusing the talent their entire production hinges on. It’s what makes The Rings of Power cast’s 2022 statement condemning fandom racism such a seminal moment; here was a cast and crew that refused to in any way ignore or tolerate the abuse their black colleagues were exposed to.

It feels like every time we think we’ve taken a step forward, we’re forced to take another ten backwards: but is that objectively true, or is it just our recency bias at play?

“I’m a cynic, so some days it does feel like a regression,” Scott says. “But then I think about what we were getting even 10 years ago — in the mainstream, there was like The Vampire Diaries and then almost nothing — and I have to admit there’s been progress. We’ve come so far, particularly in the genre space. The problem now I think is allowing nuanced, authentic portrayals to breathe without getting shut down by vocal minorities.”

It's why what fans are doing online is so important.

Though there has been some (boringly expected) backlash to the #wherearetheblackgirls thread, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s a reaction that has bolstered Kay. “I have learned that word of mouth is so powerful,” she says. “That I have to continue to spread awareness and make noise. There are people that disagree with me, but there are a lot more people that agree.”

Contrary to what those TikTok editors who seem intent on excluding us from their “womanhood” and “girlhood” posts believe (no seriously, look up any popular TikTok meant to commemorate young women’s lives as seen in film or TV and try to spot a Black girl), the female experience is not binary or limited to a single race.

We are interesting enough to helm our own projects, to see our existences codified in film and TV. It’s a matter of self-respect as much as it is an advocacy for more nuanced, interesting, original work to be produced. As exhausting as it is to keep having to advocate for ourselves, it is necessary if we want to pressure these studious and streamers to take us seriously.

By refusing to go gently into the night as Black girls and young Black women are systematically robbed of seeing themselves and their lives explored onscreen, we make it abundantly clear that we the audience — the people whose money these entertainment companies are ultimately fiending for — simply won’t stay silent until we get what we deserve.

It's a sentiment echoed wholeheartedly by Scott: “I think both fans and critics have a responsibility to hold studios accountable whenever possible. If we’re not vocal in our distaste or disappointment, the industry will take that as a sign that nothing is wrong; that they can keep operating as they have. Risks do need to be taken and actors need to be protected. I know that raising hell about the disparities we see can inspired change because I’ve seen it happen.”

Hollywood now has a choice to make: it can either keep alienating and erasing young Black women and lose a vital section of its audience, or it can adapt, capitalizing on our attention.

The choice is up to the powers that be but for the meantime, thanks to the @jasimisinclair’s of the internet, we’re not going anywhere.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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