I’m seeing tons of job postings for BIPOC writers’ assistants and script coordinators, which is great! But all of these posts are also requiring agency experience and/or prior experience in a room (one post even said “extensive” room experience). Here’s the issue with that (1/8)

These jobs are requiring experience that has been denied to many BIPOC either through discrimination (outright + implicit bias), lack of access, and prohibitively low pay. This attempt at fixing the problem in fact perpetuates it; it’s gatekeeping, plain and simple (2/8)

My agency experience did nothing to prep me for a writers room; it gave me ACCESS, a thing denied to many BIPOC. Funnily enough, the 1st time I was a WA/SC, I’d never done it before (duh)! I was trained& learned quickly. I was lucky for that chance but it should be the norm (3/8)

Are there BIPOC who have these required experiences? Of course! But only hiring BIPOC who have been vetted by other gatekeepers is playing into the same discriminatory system showrunners think they’re trying to fix by seeking diverse assistants. (4/8)

So what’s the solution? Remove those requirements from these jobs! Hire BIPOC based on their samples and whether they possess the tools needed for these jobs (organization, attention to detail, prior admin work in ANY field, sample notes etc.) and then TRAIN THEM. (5/8)

When I got hired as an SC on an Apple show last year, I had never worked in MMSW before. The showrunner hired another SC who knew the software to train me for a few days; super helpful. This is one of the only industries where “training” isn’t a given - which is dumb! (6/8)

Especially now, with tons of support staff out of work, you can easily hire someone to train great BIPOC candidates who have been denied access to the very privileged, very white pipeline you’re currently comfortable hiring from. That comfort is part of the problem. (7/8)

Of course, much of this applies to other underrepresented groups as well! Normalizing training and removing as much of this discriminatory gatekeeping as we can will help diversify our industry in so many ways. And the stories we tell will be so much better for it. (8/8)