Watch enough young adult media, and you’ll soon start to see a formula emerge. There’s typically a teenage girl, wading her way through the period between adolescence and adulthood. There’s often a picturesque setting, somewhere coastal or rarefied (or both). And there’s always, always romance – even better if it’s of the love triangle variety. As a 24-year-old who, yes, still regularly consumes YA media, I can admit I’m pretty familiar with the genre. That’s why, last week, I wasted no time in starting Sterling Point, the new Amazon Prime series that’s set in Muskoka, Canada and had been taking over my TikTok For You Page. A few episodes in, though, I was reminded of another apparent feature of the modern YA formula: there are rarely any Black girls. 

For the uninitiated, Sterling Point follows Annie Jacobson, a New York City teen who sets off for Canada after her estranged grandfather dies and, in his wake, bequeaths her both an island and a bundle of mysterious letters that leave her with questions about her mother’s death. On the fictional remote island, she encounters year-round locals, rich summer tourists, a long-lost sister and, of course, young love. Since the show’s release, it’s been praised for writing and acting that transcend the often-cheesy quality of YA, which, after bingeing it myself, I have to say is true; Sterling Point is very good. Still, the show does bear some of the genre‘s hallmarks, including the tendency not to cast Black people, and more specifically, dark-skinned Black women.

Coming off the heels of the massively successful Heated Rivalry, Off Campus, and The Summer I Turn Pretty, Sterling Point feels like the latest example of our recent YA boom, where shows centring young people are becoming not just streaming hits but viral cultural moments. There is, as Netflix’s head of scripted series Jinny Howe told the LA Times earlier this year, a “voracious appetite” amongst YA audiences; on Netflix alone, YA media has generated more than 10 billion global views since 2023, which explains why the streamer recently launched a hub exclusively for YA content. 

These newer YA adaptations increasingly have diverse storylines, something that’s contributed to their current buzz. (Sterling Point, for example, features a queer love story, something that viewers have been rightfully excited about). It is, undoubtedly, a very good time to be a fan of watching teenagers fall in love. But amid the genre’s rising popularity, and its growing inclusion of other marginalised groups, one is forced to ask – why is it so difficult to find Black women represented in these shows?

It’s a question that, in recent weeks, plenty of Black Sterling Point fans have been asking online. One of those fans is Jill Ofodu, a 21-year-old college student based in Los Angeles. In a recent TikTok, Ofodu points out that Sterling Point’s adoption plot line – Annie and her twin brother are both adopted – gave its creators an easy opportunity for more diverse casting. “It feels deliberate at this point,” says Ofodu. “There’s always a contextual reason given for why people of colour – especially Black people – aren’t cast. But the context here seemed pretty open, and it was interesting that they didn’t take that opportunity to diversify the show or reach other audiences.”

Sterling Point may be the most recent YA show without any Black girls, but this issue is hardly new. In 2024, X user Jasmine Sinclair created a viral Twitter thread that tracked the number of upcoming YA projects that didn’t have a Black actress as a lead, revealing that over a dozen titles set to release within the next two years couldn’t count a single Black actress among their main cast. “It feels like Black women in particular are extinct from YA,” Ofodu says. While mid-to-late 2010s YA was often guilty of only casting Black woman in token roles, as the sidekick or best friend, Ofodu notes that we’ve now shifted back to a place where it’s normal for Black people to not exist in these worlds at all. 

When I think about this issue, it brings me back to my childhood, when reruns of shows like Girlfriends, Sister, Sister and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were constants in my household, even if those shows didn’t get their flowers in the way white sitcoms did. How is it that I saw more representation 10 years ago than I do today? Did I simply miss the golden era of Black TV? 

“It feels deliberate at this point. There’s always a contextual reason given for why people of colour – especially Black people – aren’t cast”

The answer, Cornell University’s Professor Samantha Noelle Sheppard suggests, is more nuanced than that. According to the cinema and media studies professor, there have been a number of “golden eras” for Black representation, and many of them trace back to the 1990s. It was then that media conglomerate Fox, in its attempts to compete with broadcast giants like ABC, NBC and CBS, created a deluge of Black programming, including shows like In Living Color, Martin and Living Single. Gaining market share by courting minority audiences was a strategy borrowed by other upstart networks, including UPN and the WB, which later became the CW. “Often, once those networks became financially solvent, they abandoned their Black media content for the idea of [perceived] ‘prestige’ and ‘legitimacy’,” says Sheppard. 

Then came the 2010s and the explosion of streaming services, which were supposedly a way to democratise the industry. While there were some success stories around this time, such as Insecure and Grown-ish, the emphasis on inclusion we saw after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 was short-lived. “From 2020 to now, I think there has been a noticeable shift in public commitments to telling Black stories and putting them at the forefront,” says writer Elizabeth Ese, whose upcoming YA novel A Drop of Color explores Black girlhood and identity. According to Ese, even if Black stories are optioned by TV studios, they’re rarely made and left to “die in development hell”. Coupled with the country’s current anti-DEI landscape, we now find ourselves in a situation where these shows aren’t being made at all. 

For Black creators, this struggle is felt both on and off-screen. According to UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report, Black women held approximately 3.7 per cent of lead roles in the top theatrical films of 2025, and Black people are greatly underrepresented in writers’ rooms and director roles. And though we’ve recently seen the rise of multicultural ensemble casts, such as in shows like Adults and Overcompensating, those ensembles somehow still exclude Black women, something that’s been noted by comedian and actor Amanda Gordon, who says open roles listed with “any ethnicity” in the casting call feel like a way to cover bases with diversity, but still feel written with a white person in mind.

“Industry gatekeepers continue to narrate a version of media that says only white people can stand in as a universal experience. Instead of thinking of cultural specificity as a way in which we get nuance and build critical empathy, we think of these things in divisive ways...”

Gordon's sentiments speak to a larger point, which is that we've gotten overly accustomed to whiteness being the on-screen default. It’s a problem that, as Professor Sheppard notes, suggests that non-white audiences can enjoy white content, but not vice-versa. “Industry gatekeepers continue to narrate a version of media that says only white people can stand in as a universal experience,” says Sheppard. “Instead of thinking of cultural specificity as a way in which we get nuance and build critical empathy, we think of these things in divisive ways - as in, ‘If the character has to go to sleep in a bonnet, what will Sally in Michigan think? She won't understand sleep!’”

As the annual UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report proves every year, diverse content is financially profitable. The rare Black coming of age stories we have gotten, like Mara Brock Akil’s Forever, have proven this commercial viability as well, with the series generating over 24 million views in 2025. Netflix’s upcoming A Different World reboot has also been generating excitement before the first episode has even dropped. 

Though coming-of-age and YA stories have often been written off as unserious forms of media, there’s an undeniable importance to this genre. It’s how young people come to see themselves and their struggles reflected on-screen, meaning that, when they’re not represented, it can lead to feelings of erasure and cause one to question what experiences they’re allowed to have. This is especially true for Black girls, who are already adultified at an early age, and rarely permitted to navigate growing up with the messiness and naivete of their non-Black peers. But Black girls deserve to find themselves, make mistakes in far-flung summer towns and find first loves just as much as anyone else. As Professor Sheppard puts it, “Black girls deserve to see themselves be cutely, complexly loved on screen, too.”