According to Gossip Girls, there are exactly two minorities on the Upper East Side.
So I know everyone loves Gossip Girls and everything but has it occurred to anyone else that this is just another in a long line of television shows about White high schoolers with their fabulous/dramatic White American lives? There was 90210, then The O.C., and now there’s Gossip Girl. And unlike the other two shows, there are at least stock minority characters on Gossip Girl but um, they don’t actually speak. Ever. Instead, they run around alongside their Queen Bee and let the pretty White girl do the talking for them. Maybe I’m making a big fuss out of everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure but what bothers me is that the guiltiest part of this pleasure is something no one seems to have picked up on: Blair Waldorf’s reign over her two minority minions stinks of colonialism.
(Apparently, though, there’s a new Asian girl on the block and she occupies the incredibly stereotype-busting role of a … geek. Revolutionary.)
So here’s the thing: yeah, the OMFG posters are totally hard to decipher and everyone on this show does look alike, because White women are the only ones who get roles of any significance and degrees of paleness get pretty hard to differentiate. Thank Josh Schwartz (the same man who brought you the impressively homogenous cast of The O.C.) who apparently decided that he couldn’t even find a Black or Asian chick who was funny enough to deliver zingers. So a major character role? That’s out of the question for chicks with melanin.
Sure, television is escapist and everyone knows that there are minorities in New York even if they’re not on Gossip Girl New York, but this is the kind of shit that leads to minority girls growing up wishing they looked white. This is what perpetuates the idea that all Black people are thugs and all Asian people are nerds, because those are the only roles they ever occupy in popular entertainment. And Gossip Girl is the most insidious kind of messaging because it seems harmless and it’s high school and therearecuteboysomg! But just ask yourself, how fucking weird would it be if Blair were Black or if Serena were Asian? Put the face of a Black woman on that OMFG poster. Would that jolt you in the least? Would the show be less popular? Would you find it harder to relate or get invested in these characters? Because I can relate to White actresses better than I can Black actresses and that doesn’t make sense because I’m ASIAN. And as much as one loathes to admit it, as much as I don’t want to admit it, there’s something about a pretty White face that sells.
This is why I don’t watch television.
