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There Are No Average Black Men, According to Hollywood
We’re either the hottest or we don’t exist
L ast summer, a Twitter thread widely circulated after posing a question about Hollywood pop culture:
Scrolling through the replies, it wasn’t surprising that most responses were White actors. When I took it upon myself to call out the lack of diversity in the replies, the here’s-an-exception people arrived with fingers pointed in the air, ready to press them onto their keypads and provide one or two counterexamples against the hundreds already presented.
Most of their rebuttals fell flat because the men they referenced weren’t average at all, which they also acknowledged after naming them:
“Denzel, but he’s smokin hot, so he doesn’t qualify.”
“Well one of the first people that always comes to mind for me is Michael B Jordan but… she did specify not TOO pretty so he got disqualified.”
“Funny, the first two names that came to my mind were Jessie Williams and Idris Elba, but I think they both…
