BtVS tries to address race and FAILS over and over. And sadly, the more the creators try to demonstrate "diversity" and sensitivity in matters of race and ethnicity, the harder they stumble. In season 2, the two women of color on the show (Kendra and Jenny) are both killed, violently. Sunnydale, a California town, has zero hispanic population, which is absurd. They try again in S7 with multicultural Slayers, but they still fail. In fact, the core concept, that Buffy, white, blond, middle-class, is the BEST, the longest-lived Slayer, the only girl in thousands of years who can figure out how to unlock the "curse" of "one girl in all the world" is deeply problematic in and of itself. (The other Slayers we see die - Kendra, Nikki, and Xin Rong are all women of color and the narrative implies or says outright that they were somehow inferior to Buffy, not as smart, as intuitive, that they failed in ways where she succeeded.)
Get It Done is another egregious example. The First Slayer is glimpsed very briefly in Buffy's dream at the beginning, but when they do the ritual and relive the fact that she was chained up and given her power by demons in an act of mystical rape, we don't see the First Slayer herself, only the puppet shadow. Buffy who relives the trauma on her behalf and "solves" the initial problem. So the First Slayer is still silenced by the narrative and worse still, the scene with the Shadowmen plays out as a scene of black men gang-raping a white woman. Given the fact that within the last century black men in the United States as young as 15 (Everett Till) were lynched and beaten to death by whites for supposedly "whistling" or looking at a white woman, or accused of raping white women without a proper court hearing, that is a sensitive matter and someone should have been more aware and vetted that episode.
And I haven't even addressed the badness of "Spike's duster" being seen as a symbol for coolness and the power and style of a black woman, her very skin, stolen by a white man. It's back to Silver Linings playbook and countless films where white people steal some of their coolness, their hipness, from POC. The narrative had chances to address this - but then fails to. Spike beats Robin to a pulp in LMPTM and dares tell him that his mother, who he didn't know except as a warrior, didn't love him. (Again, given the history we have in the US of black men being beaten to death, disfigured and lynched by whites in the 20th century, someone SHOULD have paid more attention to that scene.)
I hope this helps? There are people who have addressed the issue far better than I can.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Part 2 - please read part 1 first!
Date: 2015-05-26 12:59 pm (UTC)BtVS tries to address race and FAILS over and over. And sadly, the more the creators try to demonstrate "diversity" and sensitivity in matters of race and ethnicity, the harder they stumble. In season 2, the two women of color on the show (Kendra and Jenny) are both killed, violently. Sunnydale, a California town, has zero hispanic population, which is absurd. They try again in S7 with multicultural Slayers, but they still fail. In fact, the core concept, that Buffy, white, blond, middle-class, is the BEST, the longest-lived Slayer, the only girl in thousands of years who can figure out how to unlock the "curse" of "one girl in all the world" is deeply problematic in and of itself. (The other Slayers we see die - Kendra, Nikki, and Xin Rong are all women of color and the narrative implies or says outright that they were somehow inferior to Buffy, not as smart, as intuitive, that they failed in ways where she succeeded.)
Get It Done is another egregious example. The First Slayer is glimpsed very briefly in Buffy's dream at the beginning, but when they do the ritual and relive the fact that she was chained up and given her power by demons in an act of mystical rape, we don't see the First Slayer herself, only the puppet shadow. Buffy who relives the trauma on her behalf and "solves" the initial problem. So the First Slayer is still silenced by the narrative and worse still, the scene with the Shadowmen plays out as a scene of black men gang-raping a white woman. Given the fact that within the last century black men in the United States as young as 15 (Everett Till) were lynched and beaten to death by whites for supposedly "whistling" or looking at a white woman, or accused of raping white women without a proper court hearing, that is a sensitive matter and someone should have been more aware and vetted that episode.
And I haven't even addressed the badness of "Spike's duster" being seen as a symbol for coolness and the power and style of a black woman, her very skin, stolen by a white man. It's back to Silver Linings playbook and countless films where white people steal some of their coolness, their hipness, from POC. The narrative had chances to address this - but then fails to. Spike beats Robin to a pulp in LMPTM and dares tell him that his mother, who he didn't know except as a warrior, didn't love him. (Again, given the history we have in the US of black men being beaten to death, disfigured and lynched by whites in the 20th century, someone SHOULD have paid more attention to that scene.)
I hope this helps? There are people who have addressed the issue far better than I can.