Thanks! I am so glad to be here.

Absolutely. The tough thing is that it's kind of a self-perpetuating cycle - lack of representation is both a symptom and a cause of this viewing of non-white people as less human, less important, and the "other", and as you said is not as minor in its consequences as simply feeling left out. (Which still matters, because every child should be able to grow up seeing representations of people that look like him/her.) For example, Muslims are the number one most hated group in America right now according to various studies, and that is 100% a media-created condition, because people who actually know a Muslim in real life have no problem with them. And not only does this lead to discrimination, but it leads to hate crimes like the triple murder we had here in Raleigh, NC a few months ago, and the way the U.S. government can detain, torture and kill Muslims here and overseas with barely a blink from the general public. The media and Hollywood have dehumanized Muslims for so long, and to such a degree, that their lives are not seen as valuable.

Likewise the entrenched misrepresentations of young black males in the media, which have become so engrained in the collective American mindset that racial profiling, police brutality, and the rest of what we're seen happen nowadays (which was always happening, but is now finally getting media coverage) is allowed to go on with very little protest. Especially among white people. I may be wrong, but it's mostly minorities that I've seen speaking out about police murders of black men. Because we know what it's like to be dismissed/ignored in certain situations and targeted in others, in a way that white people never will.

Better roles, more human roles for all these minority groups can go some way towards humanizing people of colour and hopefully preventing some of this violence. One of the amazing things about movies and TV is their power to create an immersive empathic experience with someone who is completely different from you. Fully realized, complex and realistic diverse roles would not only be amazing for those of us who want to identify with the characters we see onscreen, they could go far toward educating white audiences about the lived experience of minorities in this country in a way that no amount of conversations over coffee could ever achieve.

(Oops, I wrote an essay, sorry!) Thanks so much for the reply :)