1) That post of mine has received over 50 likes, which leads me to believe that I'm speaking for more than just myself. Perhaps that's worth considering for a moment rather than just dismissing me and telling me to "speak for myself," as if I'm over here spouting crazy vaccine conspiracies or ranting about how squeaky clean Trump is being railroaded
2) Given the "fairly" qualifier in your rebuttal, I gather that your friend group is not the picture of diversity that's being sold to us by obnoxious commercials and terrible contemporary network TV. Even so, note the part in my post where I said "most people's inner circle lacks the type of silly diversity that today's sitcoms and commercials have decided to pretend is reality." First, the word "most" is important there, as it allows room for people like you. If you're a white guy and your inner circle of best friends isn't made up of three or five other white guys, then I'd say you're still the minority, even more so if you grew up anywhere that wasn't the heart of New York City. But as major cities get less segregated (which I say as someone born and raised and currently living in the Chicago suburbs, perhaps the most segregated of the major cities) and suburbs become more diverse (which is still a work in progress in my neck of the woods), the frequency of more diverse friend groups obviously increases, to where best friend groups today are undoubtedly more diverse than they were 10 years ago, and you can continue to compound this the further back through history you go. (And I'm talking just race here, though you can pick whatever diversity metric you want and the same logic still applies.) When I was growing up, the biggest population in my neighborhood besides white people was Mexican people, and I had a ton of Mexican friends. But even then, my
best friends were white kids. Extend the circle out from best friends to close friends - and from there to however far out beyond that you want to go, to acquaintances, teammates on sports teams who went to different schools, etc. - and I had Mexican friends, Korean friends, Indian friends, black friends...but they weren't in the inner circle, they weren't my
best friends. That's important when considering
Friends since a lot of times
that's what's targeted by woke goofballs. And, having said all of that, historical context is also important, because people who go back to an old sitcom like
Friends and expect a sitcom that started in 1994 and ended in 2004 to have been cast per the woke guidelines of 2020s TV are just ignorant.
3) To drive this point home one more time, there is a difference between shitting on
Friends because it contradicts the idea that when living in "a major metro area of the US" you "end up running into and befriending people who have roots from all over the world" and shitting on
Friends because the six
best friends are white. In the first instance, what you're talking about, that plainly
does happen in
Friends. Monica's fellow chef when she is working at the restaurant in Season 1 (from which she'd eventually get fired) is a black woman, Ross dates a Chinese woman he met in grad school, Chandler has gay coworkers he's close with, there are people of many races who attend parties at Monica and Rachel's and/or Chandler and Joey's, etc. That's not an issue---or, at least, it
shouldn't be an issue, because anyone who shits on
Friends on this basis is plainly wrong. They don't know the show well enough to have an informed opinion and so their opinion should be rejected as PC nonsense. This is something different than shitting on
Friends because the inner circle of
best friends is six
white best friends. If someone shits on
Friends from this perspective, as if the series should've been cast in 1994 with an eye toward today's cringy standard of diverse casting, then, speaking for myself, that person is an idiot who thinks that they're being part of the solution when they're actually part of the problem.
And then you get people like that woman from
Abbott Elementary taking shots at
Friends on SNL for not having black people and it's just ignorance being compounded and a complete falsehood being reified as truth because it's politically correct. It's really quite sad.
Friends deserves better, media from the past deserves better, and we should try to be better as media consumers.
