Netflix has a nagging problem with its biracial characters

In a viral clip of netflix Gilmore Girls Depp Guinea and Georgia, High-school hostess Ginni (Antonia Gentry) gets involved in a fight with her lover Hunter (Mason Temple). The clip originally aired on Twitter as a very awkward, awkward dialogue between the two, with the two trades insulting each other about their race.

In the context of the show, the characters are arguing about the different ways that they are struggling to be ambivalent. Ginni accuses Hunter of half-Taiwan benefiting from the model minority stereotype, while Hunter tells him that he is in touch with his own blackness. They go back and forth, experiencing more racism, until Hunter finally forgives, “Protest Olympics: Let’s go!”

The scene has now been dissected for the origin of racial stereotypes and especially unfairness. But it stands out to me specifically for the reason how it emphasizes the characters around a strangely persistent trope that keeps on Netflix. Both characters are ambivalent, but Hunter lives with both parents, Ginny’s black father is largely out of the picture, and she lives with her white mother. He makes her another mixed-race Netflix hero who is reared by the same white parents.

It seems that more stories are now centered around mixed-breed people than ever before, and certainly more so when I was growing up. I am not the only one to notice the trend. As a person, I absolutely struggle with Imposter Syndrome regarding my identity. Also not white and not Asian enough – according to my own internal struggles and the voices of those people, both people I have met and strangers on the internet who decide that I have no claim to any identity – I Often withholding demographics surveys that have no alternative to multi-racial or even “other”. In most conversations about race, the narrow view of ethnicity leaves me wondering which part of myself I would have to deny in any setting. Netflix’s interest in mixed-race characters felt legitimated, until I paid attention to the pattern they were falling into.

Netflix continues to create stories with Birla the protagonist, but with a constant warning. More than one Netflix original, such as all boys movies, Guinea and Georgia, Main event, And The Baby-Sitters Club, Single white parents produce children of mixed race. Parents of color either die before the beginning of the story, or are initially absent from the protagonist’s life.

The “grow up, I rarely saw people like me on screen” narrative may seem old at this point, but this was especially true in this case. It was not just that I did not see myself in films and on TV. I’ve never seen The families Like myself, stories from people of different backgrounds come together. Among more and more media, mixed-race characters are sometimes around, but without much discussion of their family. Typically, they are either biriyal because the actors portraying them are mixed-race, such as Rashida Jones in parks and Recreation, Or their identity is used as a “gotcha” plot twist. (Hello Spider-Man: Homecoming And Detective Pikachu.)

Stories about mixed-breed characters rarely occur around families. The lack of representation in general makes recurring Netflix-specific tropes to completely remove all of the more jerking-colored parents. The race to view these films and shows through a very white lens winds up the experience of being a mixed-race person with only one, limited aspect.

Some of these Netflix original races are more integrated than others, although they certainly do not all do so with the same finesse. To all the boys And its sequel features a slightly more thoughtful interrogation of the hopeless romantic Lara Jean (Lana Condor), who is trying to connect to her culture without her Korean mother in the picture, though she is not a central part of the subplot story. Lara Jean wears a hembock to a family in the second film, and she roams around Korea for the third start, for example. Sometimes she thinks how much she misses her mother. But his search for his background is never too deep.

A drunken rom-com trilogy need not be included in the inquiry into racial identity. Lara Jean has warm feelings towards her mother and her Korean side. Her fat attempts to keep her in touch with her mother’s family and traditions. This never becomes a point of controversy in Lara Jean’s life, but it makes sense because the story is not about her identity, it is about her love life. Lara Jean’s virtue of being a mixed-breed hero at the center of a romantic comedy is already notable. To all the boys

And its sequels are probably the least examples of this trope, helped by the fact that the book series came from Korean author Jenny Han. The films can certainly do better (for one, Lana Condor is not ambivalent or Korean), but they are largely incompetent, and they give some character depth to Lara Jean.

opposite of this, Guinea and Georgia Focuses on the relationship between a mother and her daughter, so Guinea’s conflicting feelings about her race are more thematic. She navigates her heavily white, upper-middle-class city as one of the few students of color in her high school. Her father eventually appears later in the show to send her into another existential spiral, but she is absent for the majority of the series. And that entire plot was cut off from the Zumba Tower of the Zumba Minar of all the other plot Guinea and Georgia, And from the now-infamous episode where Ginny and Hunter go head-to-head, mainly because the author can break them, and she can reunite with his other love.

Stories about individuals trying to connect with the race of absent parents are important: learning more about their identity is an inherent part of the coming narrative, and adding race nuances can bring compelling stories forward. But those stories are being explored with cultural distinctiveness and insight. So why is the current parent always a white?

Like many other mixed-race individuals, I often struggled with not being “good enough” of my racial background. But after coming from a high school with some Asian students, teachers, or administrators, it often appears because I didn’t feel Asian enough to differentiate myself from my white peers. Being white in appearance, many of my peers believe that I am white. Even some people would deny it when I explained it to them, telling me that I don’t “count” as someone of Asian heritage because of my physical appearance. It took me a long time to clarify that the whiteness around me was not necessarily the norm, and that I should not constantly look at myself from that comfort point.

These films and shows, however, repeatedly emphasize duality from a white point of view. If there were other stories to balance that perspective, it would not have been so exaggerated. But as it has been observed, along with a few other examples to counter the white-centric point of view, these films and shows end the idea that mixed-race identities can only be processed in relation to whitewashing . And that is not even touching the lack of stories about mixed-race families where there are no whites.

Caste-focused narratives are not the only ones where the author removes the father of color. In fact, this choice turns out to be a different kind of weird in cases where the character’s race doesn’t really matter. In the version of netflix The Baby-Sitters Club, The shy Mary Anne (Malia Baker), whose books were full courtesies as a wide-ranging widower father, is now a dualist. Her father is white, and her dead mother is black. In WWE and Netflix’s joint child flick Main event, Aspiring young wrestler Leo (Seth Karr) makes a deal with his black mother to abandon his family before the story begins, looking for the white father who follows him. None of those stories actually interrogate the race of their main characters, a separate mention that Mary Anne’s father has no idea how to do her hair. So why is it parents of color, who are out of the picture, when the story would just make sense as to whether the white parents had disappeared?

On their own, these films and shows do nothing particularly arrogant. Certainly, making these characters biased instead of white by default is a step forward in diversity. But it is strange how some shows and films actually show parents of both multinational children, and how often they remove what may be another character of color in the narrative.

One possible explanation is that white producers try to create stories without crossing any cultural boundaries: if the protagonists are half-white, then surely white exploiters and directors can also tell their own stories. But repeat the same trope too much, and Netflix as the whole irresponsible and non-absent-minded stereotype in play, which Stalvert leaves to the white parents, who are left behind for the sake of the child.

There is no universal description to fit every fraternal person’s relationship to their parents, but I would be at risk to say that an already difficult parent-child relationship if factors in different races Navigating becomes all the more complicated. My relationships with both my parents are special and unique, each colored by the fact that I experience the world differently from both of them. But both of these are important to me. They both represent parts of me. It is not just my relationship with my white father that makes me worth it, even if movies and TV otherwise.

Of course, not every mixed-race person should be outside, which has the luxury of being around both parents. So then, despite these stories what would you think, not every mixed-race person with a single parent is raised by a white parent, either. But in the current Netflix world, this is the norm and the expectation. Stories about mixed-caste people will continue to be told. They should continue to advance in romantic comedy, coming-of-age dramas, child fantasies, and all things. The creators of Netflix are not intentionally removing the parent of color from their parental narratives, but they can deliberately consider what happens, if anything, that is moving forward in their stories, and what kind of important stories they are Not telling when they are telling it is over once more.