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Hmm, probably not. Not really a podcast kinda person, except for How Did This Get Made and of course The Flonko Show, hosted by my friend. I’m just not much for serialized fiction in this form? I can’t even listen to audiobooks.
Orphan Black: The Next Chapter for those interested.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
Orphan Black is racist.
So, yeah, Cosima’s dreads are racist, we all know that. But that is not the (only) reason Orphan Black is racist! Since there is no day like today and all that, I’m gonna talk about Orphan Black’s racism.
The [Orphan Black Wikia] and [IMDB] are going to be my main sources, JSYK. Anyways, what I was going to say…
Fact: Almost everyone in the show is white.
We’re talking about a show that is based in Toronto, a city were Chinese, Indian/South Asian and Filipino people make 27% of the population, and Black people are a good 9%. Latinxs and other racial minorities add to make it so 50% of Toronto isn’t white
[Wiki], and yet almost everyone we see in the show, both characters and extras, are white.
And, yeah, the LEDA and CASTOR clones are white, so we can assume most of the main characters are going to be white clones. Cool, all racism is forgiven, right? Wrong. Out of the totality of named non-clones we have:
- 36 white characters (6 main, 11 recurring).
- 9 characters of color (1 main, 1 recurring and Allison’s two adopted kids).
And the numbers become even more abysmal if we include the clones, with 14 LEDA clones (6 of them with prominent storylines) and 7 CASTOR clones (3 of them with prominent storylines).
The only regular/recurring characters of color are:
- Art, an “angry black cop” whose entire storyline is helping Sarah.
- Vic, a brown drugdealer who is abusive, always portrayed as stupid and always being physically hurt, manipulated or threatened (usually by white characters).
- Gemma and Oscar, Allison’s adoptive children, who are never granted the same level of agency and screentime as Kira (Sarah’s white child) is.
We have dead characters of color:
- Amelia, whose only role in the narrative is being the womb were Sarah and Helena were gestated and dies violently (at a white clone’s hand) during her only episode.
- Maggie Chen, who was dead from the very beginning, killed by another white clone, and her only purpose is to be a dead villain.
And vanishing characters of color, too:
- Janis, a coroner who shows up in three episodes and has no story.
- Meera, Allison’s neighbor with no storyline besides being a vaguely antagonistic figure, shows up in four episodes.
- Raj, an IT guy in Beth’s precinct who has no personality besides being kind to Beth/Sarah and only shows up in three episodes.
BONUS: Ramon, a white character with an Hispanic-sounding name who deals drugs and guns!So, no, it’s not Cosima’s shitty, culturally-appropriative dreads that make the show racist. It’s the show’s racism. Y’all are surprised that [the show is lesbophobic/sapphobic as fuck], but you never cared to discuss its racism (and shut down every attempt at criticism in the past couple years) so now the fact that they don’t actually care for respectful writing and healthy representation has blindsided all y’all.
Opinion: The show ruined itself by being racist.
I mean, in my opinion, all-white casts automatically doom a show. I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to watch mainly-white shows because I just cannot stop noticing the lack of realism, I can’t stop realizing just how many people of all races I see everyday when I look at a shot of a busy street and I see only white people. It looks unnatural. It throws me off. And yet, at the beginning, I was willing to push through the overwhelming whiteness of it all because the story being told made it worth my while.
But the show ruined its own narrative when they created CASTOR but refused to cast actors of color in a bunch of recurring roles. CASTOR only made sense within Orphan Black’s narrative about autonomy, oppression and the possession of the body if the “male” clones were actors of color.
The show worked in S1/S2 because each clone represented a way in which different institutions owned the female-perceived body: Helena belonged to a religious institution, Allison was ruled by the boundaries and obligations of the suburban family life, Beth was part of the police and so belonged to the State, Rachel was owned by the corporate world and, along with Cosima, was both a scientific subject and a scientist, owned and ruled by scientists. Sarah, even as she was presented as “the only outside player”, was weighed by her motherhood first and her romantic relationships second. I can’t find these posts now, but many people wrote great analysis on this theme and I loved this about OB.
It worked because it was a story about women, about how the Powers That Be want to own women. And what’s a clearer ownership than creating them, patenting them, tagging them as a corporation’s property; imposing romantic partners on them as a way to manipulate them, gaslight them and control them; invading their bodies and controlling their every physical change, deciding whether they can procreate or not? Orphan Black was called [TV’s Most Important Debate On Reproductive Rights At The Moment], and (despite its racism) i think it really deserved that title.
And yet, when they could have extended their narrative to a discussion about how the brown/black male-perceived body is also owned, exploited and invaded by institutions, about how State and corporate interests kill brown men when they are not useful to them, about how the Powers That Be don’t want brown men to reproduce. Damn, I know I read an excellent post about Art-clones like two years ago.
But they chose to cast a white dude for the next batch of clones, because apparently whiteness wins over good storytelling, and the whole metaphor fucking fell apart.
PS: if anyone has the posts I’m talking about, I would greatly appreciate being linked to them! I cleaned up my blog a few months back and deleted a lot of good meta that I haven’t been able to find again.
EDIT: not all, but [here is one] of the Clone!Art posts I was talking about.
Even if y’all don’t agree with me on the second part, the purposeful and unrealistic whiteness of the show is undeniable and undeniably racist. Cosima’s dreads are racist. Its treatment of Amelia was racist. The myriad of stereotypes and the constant violence thrown at Vic are racist. The sidelining of Arthur Bell is racist. So, as I was saying….
Orphan Black is racist.
I’ve been thinking about this post since yesterday and the thing is…it’s not new information, right. It was pointed out. And it’s not that we all didn’t care, it’s just, like everyone knows, there’s no perfect media, you have to switch some part of your sensibilities off and ultimately it’s up to you how much you can tolerate. When it comes to representation, a lot of media will get some things right, some things not so much. There’ve been a ton of examples lately, they’ll have strong white women, or they’ll have LGBT content, or they’ll have strong PoC representation, but aside from a very few shows (yay, Shonda), most don’t even manage to do two of those well.
And we’re all so desperate for anything that represents us. We’ll watch PoC-led shows that aren’t great on LGBT, and as with OB and The 100, we’ll watch LGBT shows that are pretty darn racist. And we’ll think so what if it isn’t great in that respect, it’s good enough in this.
But it’s not?? As OP points out, how were we surprised that OB’d turn out to be this tonedeaf and cringeworthy about LGBT issues when they were so ignorant when it came to race? Multiplied by a thousand for The 100. If they can misunderstand and mistreat one marginalized group, why did we think they’d be different when it came to another? Especially when they were part of neither.
I think this is proof that we can’t just let some things go and praise them for others. Praise, sure, when due, but definitely call out problems. We must demand better in every way.
