Casting and Caste-Ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms

Imagine the prototypical young starving artist working on a novel that he hopes will flower into his masterpiece. Scraping by with a mundane day job, he uses his evenings and every spare moment plotting the storyline, crafting the language and sculpting his characters with great care and deliberation. Suppose he sets the story in a Civil War battlefield, a contemporary corporate boardroom or a police force, and all of the primary characters are white males. If the government attempted to apply an antidiscrimination law to force the artist to include female characters and people of color, it would strike most people as bizarre. The state's interest in infusing an abstract and personal piece of fiction with more diverse representations appears rather weak, if not wholly antithetical to the First Amendment,' and the intrusion on artistic integrity appears extreme.