The uncomfortable exchange that occurred between Matt Damon and movie producer Effie Brown on the season four premiere of HBO’s “Project Greenlight” is indicative of everything that is wrong with current cultural understandings of diversity. The incident went like so: When challenged about her preference for a directing team composed of a Vietnamese man and a white woman, Brown (a respected producer in her own right) defended her choice by asking her white colleagues to consider the optics of a room full of white people choosing a white male director to make a film about a Black female prostitute.

In a recent episode of the HBO show, Damon took an ignorant and disappointing stand for white privilege