American Standard: Did Ya Hear About The Actress' Tweet About How The Cast Of Chernobyl Wasn't Diverse Enough?

by Benn Ray

It started pretty simply. I was going through my Google newsfeed, and I came across this story: "Should HBO's 'Chernobyl' have had more actors of color?"

 

Upon seeing the headline, I immediately felt annoyed. It was that kind of annoyance that wells up inside you and forces you to click on something you know you should ignore just to see how annoyed you are going to get. It's a pure, clean-burning, righteous annoyance that feels kinda good.

 

The story was about a British "actress" named Karla Marie Sweet tweeting:
"i dunno... there are so many great actors of colour in this country that would've been amazing in #chernobyl, i guess i'm just disappointed to see yet another hit show with a massive cast that makes it look like Poc don't exist."

 

Like many of you may feel now, I felt the immediate outrage at the entitlement and stupidity in such a tweet. Obviously, there were not many PoC in the Ukraine or Chernobyl in the 1980s. This tweet immediately made me feel a twinge of anger at the left - the side of the political sphere where I consider myself generally residing. Tweets like this don't help. They make people sound stupid. They make it easy to marginalize valid criticisms. What the actual fuck?!!

 

But then I took a look at the source. The story was from RT (which used to stand for Russia Today). It's interesting, no matter how many right wing, and propagandistic news sources I keep telling Google to keep out of my feed, it always seems to find new ones to try out on me. I find it curious as to why Google is so insistent on keeping these kinds of sources in my feed, but that's the subject of a different column.

 

For those unaware, RT is Russia's government-funded media organ. It is not considered a reliable source by any stretch. I'm still confused by Chris Hedges who was once a leftist writer I had respected quite a bit but who now has a show on RT.

Anyway - so here was this story from RT filling me with outrage toward people on the left of the spectrum - which is exactly what it was designed to do.

 

The "actress" who posted the tweet quickly turned off her Twitter account after the tweet seemingly to shield herself from the inevitable public outrage - most of it likely racist in nature because this also has the added bonus of not just triggering rational lefties like me, but also "those" kind of people. Y'know, Trump's America.

 

So I then decided to check IMDB to see who this "actress" is, and her IMDB page has fewer credits than mine (1 as miscellaneous crew for a 2013 tv documentary none of us ever heard of).

 

I had been played - albeit for just a minute or two. If I hadn't double-checked the source, if I hadn't looked up the actress, I'd be going around telling the story of the stupid "actress" on Twitter who complained that the mini-series Chernobyl had the audacity to have a cast that reflected its history. And that's how Russian interference in our lives works. It plays us.

 

And instead of telling that story, I'm telling a different story - one of how Russia is clearly trying to play sides against themselves in our culture.

 

Sure, I can understand Russia's interest in Chernobyl given that the USSR was responsible for the disaster. I can even understand Russia's continued interest in things in the Ukraine given they have already illegally annexed part of that country with a clear design on the rest of it.

 

But this is also a clear example of Russian shenanigans in our cultural conversations.