While I loved The West Wing and Aaron Sorkin will always have a special place in my heart for that series, I acknowledge that the series had issues and that the series’ issues were reflective of Aaron Sorkin’s issues. I don’t think Sorkin is a misogynist or a racist, but I think he has a lot of difficulty writing interesting female characters consistently, just as he has profound difficulties with writing anything beyond “brilliant white dudes whitesplain and mansplain everything to everyone.” That’s Sorkin’s thing. That’s his raison d’etre, to write those stories. As it turns out, Sorkin has gone this far in his life – he’s 55 years old – without ever realizing that as a cisgendered white heterosexual man who writes heroic tales about other white cisgendered heterosexual men, he operates with a lot of privilege in the industry and he has it much easier in Hollywood than writers who don’t tick off all of those boxes. Sorkin revealed his ignorance at a Writer’s Guild Festival over the weekend:

Aaron Sorkin had some burning questions about the lack of diversity in writers’ rooms — an issue that he apparently didn’t know much about until he visited the Writers Guild Festival on Saturday inside the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood.

“Are you saying that women and minorities have a more difficult time getting their stuff read than white men and you’re also saying that [white men] get to make mediocre movies and can continue on?” he asked the audience.

Sorkin, Academy-Award winning screenwriter and executive producer (“The West Wing,” “The Newsroom,” “A Few Good Men”) was in disbelief at the event during a discussion moderated by KCRW host and film critic Elvis Mitchell. Sorkin asserted that Hollywood is a genuine meritocracy and that he was unaware of Hollywood’s existing diversity problem.

“You may be confusing meritocracy with meretricious, happens all the time,” Mitchell teased.

Sorkin tried his best to focus on other unrelated questions from audience members, but was itching to learn more about the challenges many female and minorities face in regard to accessibility and opportunities.

“You’re saying that if you are a woman or a person of color, you have to hit it out of the park in order to get another chance?” Sorkin posed. Upon listing women and minority writers who are actively shifting this paradigm, Sorkin pointed to a handful of those who had produced work in recent years, including Lena Dunham, Ava Duvernay, and Jordan Peele. Genuinely troubled by his lack of awareness, he continued to ask away and ultimately offered assistance.

“What can I do [to help]?” Sorkin said. “I do want to understand what someone like me can do … but my thing has always been: ‘If you write it, they will come.’ “

[From Variety]

Part of this reads as Sorkin doing a Socratic method with the audience, asking questions to stimulate the conversation. But Variety insists – as did the other outlets covering this event – that Sorkin really was astonished to learn that minorities and women might not get the same kind of opportunities he’s gotten through his life. I would also argue that Sorkin never realized that he was given the opportunity to “come back” from a huge personal crisis in a way that a minority writer or female writer would have been able to. Sorkin had a cocaine-and-crack problem throughout the 1990s and he was even arrested in 2001. Would a woman be “allowed” to have a career after that? Would an African-American writer be allowed to have a career after that? Probably not.

As for Sorkin’s newly formed wokeness, or at least an acknowledgement of his privilege… I don’t even know. I’m not going to say he’s harmless, because I think his astonishment was representative of the insidious nature of powerful white dudes putting their heads in the sand when it comes to diversity issues in Hollywood. But I also don’t think Sorkin is the enemy. We’ll see.

Photos courtesy of WENN.