It sure isn't prime time for minorities

Wouldn't it be great if we could require television producers to undergo some diversity training? Reality show mastermind Mark Burnett would be forced to attend some kind of fantasy camp where he's forced to populate his entire ``Apprentice'' cast with African-American women. He might realize that they come in flavors other than ``crazy lying bitch'' (season one villain Omarosa), ``just plain crazy'' (season two scapegoat Stacie J) and ``crazy and lazy'' (season three quitter Verna). Producers of dramas and comedies set in large cities could get some behavioral training - they could practice opening and closing their eyes and rotating their necks - to help them see that people of different races, religions and sexual orientations are often the stars of their own lives. They're not just funny sidekicks, terrorists and stylists to the good-looking, straight white people sharing the city streets. If you watch prime-time television searching only for characters of different races, religions and sexual orientations, it's easy to understand why some political groups are so upset. In 1999, the NAACP blasted the scarcity of black faces in prime time, except as pimps and perps. In 2003, Hispanic groups bemoaned the Mexican drug lord series ``Kingpin.'' Recently the Council on American-Islamic Relations took aim at ``24'' for employing a Turkish Muslim family as a sleeper terrorist cell. The problem isn't that the television landscape is dotted with Islamic terrorists, Mexican drug dealers and maids, African-American criminals and flamboyant homosexuals. What's troubling is that the stereotypes are often the only time you see minorities on the tube. [more]

• Multiracial ads gloss over ethnic realities.About 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods in which more than 95 percent of their neighbors also are white, and data show that most Americans have few close friends of another race, Gallagher said. [more]