Introduction
In 1994 an ad went out in a UK newspaper called The Stage asking young girls aged 18-23
to audition for a new pop girl group. Hundreds of girls auditioned and in an American Idol-esque
fashion, girls were placed into groups of 10, were all asked to perform the same song, “Stay” by
eternal and then successful contestants were allowed to do a solo audition with a song of their
choice. After about two more rounds of auditions, it was narrowed down to five girls, Melanie
Brown, Victoria Beckham, Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm. The group was
officially formed and they were to be known as the pop girl group Touch. The name wouldn’t stick
though and after two years and multiple changes in management and representation the group landed
on the name Spice Girls. In 1996 the group put out what would be their most popular song ever,
“wannabe”, the song was massively successful, was number one for multiple weeks in many
different countries and launched the group into international superstardom, cementing their
place as one of the best selling girl groups of all time. A couple months after the release of
their smash hit, a journalist from the magazine Top of the pop, a british gossip magazine,
did an interview with the group where he gave each of the girl’s different nicknames, it’s
rumoured that the journalist, Peter Lorraine, did this because he could not be bothered to
remember their actual names. In the story he ran for the magazine he dubbed Victoria Beckham
‘Posh Spice”, Melanie Chishom “Sporty Spice”, Emma Bunton “Baby Spice”, Geri Halliwell “Ginger
Spice” and Melanie Brown “Scary Spice”. The nicknames stuck and the group even embraced and
adopted them in future appearances, in fact these nicknames are still commonly how people refer to
each member of the group. When asked about why he chose those names Peter had this to say:
“Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest
were pretty easy really because the girls’ characters were already really strong,”
“The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer
Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had
tried to take over our whole photo shoot.”
The angry black woman stereotype dominates several
areas of popular culture, it’s an archetype that most of us are used to seeing even if we can’t
give it a name. In fact it is so pervasive that many black women at some point in their lives
have been deemed difficult or angry. It is characterised by depicting black women as being
loud, aggressive, irritable and angry.
Now this stereotype is something that immediately
stood out to me when working on Schnedierverse video last year., but at the time I didn’t want
to include it in that video because I felt like it would open a much larger conversation around
the problematic nature of Dan Schneider shows and that wasn’t what that video was supposed
to be about. But I think I’m finally ready to have this conversation. So a couple months ago I
embarked on a huge journey of rewatching all the Dan Schneider sitcoms for a larger video about
the inconsistencies in the universe. During that journey I noticed a lot of different stuff that
made me uncomfortable to say the least, you know one time is weird, two times is a coincidence,
three times there’s a pattern. So I wanted to highlight what I felt were problematic depictions
of non-white and non-american characters in the schneider universe, particularly the depiction of
black women. Now the reason I’m calling it the Dan Schneider Universe is because besides these shows
being created and produced by the same person, they also have very similar tones, jokes and
writers and are largely believed to take place in a shared universe. So you end up finding
one problematic element duplicated in different shows in the universe. And the depiction of black
women particularly stood out to me honestly even as a kid. I grew up in the 2000s and 2010s so my
Nickelodeon experience was mostly Drake and Josh, iCarly and Victorious and when watching those
shows I knew that if a black woman character was on those shows, specifically a dark skinned black
woman, she’s probably gonna be depicted in a very stereotypical way. Now there’s been renewed
reexamining of the Nickelodeon shows produced by Dan Schneider and I just want to make it clear
that this video is not going to be an examination on the character Dan Schneider, nor is it going to
be an evaluation on the experience of actors who worked on his show, there’s a lot of other sources
out there for that. This video is really just one topic that I honestly hesitated a lot to talk
about, but is something ultimately I felt could offer new insight in how we engage with these
bodies of work. And I already know that some of this might be controversial, but let’s talk about.
Let’s finally have the race conversation.
Helen Dubois
Helen was a recurring character on the tv show Drake and Josh. She
ran the movie theatre that Josh worked at and was played by Yvette Nicole Brown, funnily enough
there was one episode where she was played by a different actress, Frances Callier and that was
only because Yvette was busy filming a different tv show. Helen’s characterization in Drake and
Josh was kind of the archetypal angry black woman trope that we see in pretty much all the other
black women characters. She was a no nonsense, take charge kind of lady. And honestly I really
liked Helen as a character. I thought she was very funny and I never really thought twice
about the way she was depicted throughout the series. I particularly like her interaction
with Josh. I always thought it was funny how she favoured Drake and couldn’t stand Josh, even
forgetting who he was most of the time.
Helen would be seen in other shows in the
Dan Schneider universe as well; she appeared in Victorious and Game Shakers. And one of the
more notable depictions of Helen was that people around her were scared of her. Even though in her
characterization, she was for the most part sweet albeit a bit strict, other characters respond to
her with fear. And that’s kind of a running theme we see with different black woman characters in
the schneider verse, people are scared of them, they’re seen as loud and aggressive. And despite
the fact that Helen is depicted in this way, my feelings towards her are decidedly mixed.
Because on one hand I really enjoy this character and I don’t necessarily think the depiction of
this character alone is a harmful representation of a black woman. Helen is confident, she finds
love, she’s fierce, she’s a manager, she becomes a principal and then the host of her own talk
show. There’s just an air of self assurance when it comes to her and I find that really compelling.
Not to mention she’s genuinely really funny and lights up almost every scene she’s in. Those are
not exactly what I would categorise as harmful depictions of Black women. But because the other
characters around her respond to her as this very difficult and scary person, even if Helen has all
those great attributes it’s immediately overlooked and she’s pushed into this box, where’s
know only seen as just another angry black woman. She’s loud, aggressive and scary.
And it’s really sad that that is distinctly how so many characters respond to her and act towards
her because there were so many bright spots of her characterization especially in Drake and Josh,
where she’s depicted as being really sweet and really funny. But that’s why stereotypes are so
powerful. Once we make the association in our minds about where this character belongs and
who they are, they kind of always stay there, even if there’s new information to challenge
that idea. It doesn’t matter what else Helen has done or how she actually acts, or whether
she has moments of vulnerability because if everyone around her sees her as an angry
black woman, then that’s all she is.
Jocelyn
Let’s talk about Jocelyn. So Jocelyn was a bully that only appeared in one episode of iCarly,
episode iMake Sam Girlier. In this episode Sam has a crush on a guy and when he’s invited to Sam’s
birthday party everyone talks about how strong she is and how she’s just like one of the guys. This
rubs Sam the wrong way, because she thinks this guy won’t like her if she isn’t girly enough.
Anyways in this episode there’s a new student, a bully called Jocelyn and just look at this. So
again we see Jocelyn fall into this angry black woman stereotype, but even more so, because
Jocelyn is a lot bigger and muscular than the other kids, which is no coincidence seeing as the
actress was a grown woman when this aired and was also a professional basketball player. So there
is kind of this dehumanisation thing going on with this character where she’s really just a monster.
Nothing like a typical bully, she’s super strong, towers over all the kids including the
teacher and is very very aggressive.
Now like I said the depiction of a character like
this in vacuum wouldn’t ring any alarm bells in my head. And I doubt that the casting directors
were actively seeking out a black actress to play this role. But when it’s compounded with all of
the other examples of depictions of black women, being overly aggressive does start to feel
like a pattern of behaviour. I also think it’s interesting to note that this character is
a lighter skin black woman exhibiting stereotypes mostly associated with darker skinned black women
and I really think the only reason this character fell into that was because of how they looked,
because she’s super tall and muscular.
Andre’s Grandmother
Now Andre’s grandmother has always been a very confusing character. She’s
always been depicted as being mentally unwell, but I think the most interesting thing
is that its seems like Andre is solely responsible for her well-being. He’s completely
out of his depth and his grandmother is clearly struggling with something but it’s always played
for laughs. Within the depictions of insanity and spontaneity of the character, she’s also very
aggressive, very loud and always confused.
I never really found Andre’s grandmother to be
funny, honestly sometimes I was annoyed when they had her in episodes because she didn’t really
add much, and the joke was just always to laugh at the fact that she’s mentally unwell. Andre’s
grandmother made very sparse appearances in the show and her only role functionally in
the sitcom was to be laughed at. She would pop in very confused and disoriented and that
was the joke, we were to laugh that this woman didn’t know who or where she was.
Andre’s Girlfriend (Dark Skin)
Now let’s talk about Andre’s very brief
girlfriend. So Andre started dating a new girl in the episode aptly titled Andre’s horrible
girlfriend. In this episode Andre starts dating a new girl called Hope. He kept this a secret from
his friends, that is until she visited him one day at school and met his friends. Immediately we
noticed that Hope was very controlling of Andre even dressing him and very rude and mean to his
friends. The group are very confused about why Andre would even date someone so horrible,
until he reveals that Hope is the daughter of a famous music producer and that Andre is
just using her so that he can meet her father and hopefully get signed to make music. So in
the episode pretty much everyone hates Hope, even her own father. She’s controlling,
short tempered and at the end of the episode there’s an earthquake, Hope gets hit
in the head and everyone’s happy about it.
Now the interesting thing about this is that
Andre is very rarely given love interests in fact I think he only ever dates two girls in the show.
And the other girl he dated was characterized very differently. She was obsessed with kissing him,
which like kind of reminded me of the jezebel stereotype. Where black women are depicted as
hypersexual, she never had any characterization at all pretty much her whole characterization was
that she was super horned up and couldn’t control herself and all she wanted to do was makeout with
Andre. Interestingly enough her depiction is a deviation from the angry black woman stereotype,
you know they took a break to adapt a different stereotype. But the angry black woman stereotype
is normally associated with dark skinned black woman so I really do think the only reason she
didn’t play into that stereotype was because she was light skinned. And the exception was made
with Jocelyn because while she is lightskinned she is also really tall and athletic so that
kind of cancelled out the skin color.
Andre’s Cousin
So now we have Andre’s cousin. You know I just realized that a lot of
these characters have some ties to the only black main character in the cast. So in this episode the
gang are tasked with directing a short film with famed director Dale Squires. However it becomes
abundantly clear that Dale has no interest in working on the project. So the gang had to finish
the short film themselves, however despite not having contributed anything to the project
Dale took complete credit over the success of the film. The gang decides that they need to
take revenge, so they contact Andre’s cousin and pay her to disrupt an interview Dale has on a
talk show. During the interview Dale, overcome with guilt gives credit to the cast but it was too
late to stop Andre’s cousin and this happens.
Now the interesting thing to me about really all
of these depictions but especially this one is that this character didn’t need to be a black
woman. It would functionally work the same way if this character wasn’t related to Andre, they
just found some random person to do this and the events unfolded the same. That is unless the joke
is seeing a black woman behave this way. Cause when you think about it, they could’ve gotten
Sikowitz to disrupt this or literally anyone, why specifically Andre’s cousin, right?
And it’s because the joke is Andre’s cousin is perfect for this, because she would
be loud and aggressive and angry.
Andre
Okay so I want to talk about Andre for a little bit, because while this
video isn’t just about the explicit racism in the schneider verse that would be a longer video. I do
think it’s interesting that so many of the black women we talk about are connected to Andre in one
way or another. And when it comes to Andre he had very little to do in Victorious as the seasons
went on I actually felt that way about a lot of the very sparse black characters in the schneid
verse. I also felt like Michael from Zoey 101 at a point didn’t really have much to do either and
that also happened with Andre. The thing about Andre is that throughout the show he gets very
few love interests, the show really plays into shipping culture at some point the cast members
are all shipped with each other, but not really Andre. The few times he does get a love interest
it’s with a character that we only see for one episode very briefly and they never show up
again. The show never really commits to the idea of putting Andre with another girl in the main
cast which is crazy. There was one episode where Andre had a crush on Jade, but it was one-sided
and as quickly as they introduced that idea they dropped it, so Andre is never paired with another
girl from the cast. Especially when the obvious answer would be to have him date Tori.
Now I’m not saying I’m eager to see interracial relationships or that I prefer that idea over
Andre being with a black girl. But there is this trend I’ve noticed in shows at the time
where in cases where they do not have a black woman character on the main cast, they will just
introduce a guest appearing one, even though the entire cast at one point was dating each other.
It’s like it never at all crossed their minds, that Andre could be with Tori or actually date
Jade or even Cat. If Andre is to have any love interest they only feel comfortable pairing
him with another black character and that character only ever appears once. So I don’t
know I just thought that was interesting.
Analysis
Okay so I have pretty complicated feelings when it comes to this topic and it’s
why I waited so long until I could really work through them to make this video. Because I want
to make it very clear that in a vacuum I don’t necessarily find characters like Helen, Jocelyn or
even Andre’s mean girlfriend problematic. I don’t think it’s inherently racist that black women may
be depicted as being flawed or loud, angry and aggressive. Black female characters should have
a variety of depictions throughout the media, because people are diverse. But oftentimes shows
fall back into only one type of depictions and those depictions often lack nuance. These
characters are funny, because they’re loud and scary. But why does that matter? This is all
fiction, no one’s really getting hurt here. But we know that depictions of groups of people in
the media often inform how people engage with them in real life. Peter Lorraine only had a very
brief encounter with the spice girls when he gave each of them a nickname. He didn’t really know
them, or who they were, or what they were like, he made a lot of assumptions about their character
in their very brief introduction. And the nickname that jumped out at him, that he thought was
really funny, to describe the only black girl in the group was scary, because she was loud.
I have no issues with black female characters being and being the bad guy. Nor do I believe
that black female characters cannot be flawed. But especially when we talk about the Dan Schneider
universe, if that’s the most popular depiction of black women across multiple shows, well then that
says a lot about what you think of that demography on a whole. And I do want to point out that there
are black female characters in the universe that deviate from this trend, particularly Charlotte
from Henry Danger. Charlotte is depicted as being very intuitive and intelligent, being one
of the few characters in the show to figure out that Henry was actually a superhero. But
Charlotte is an anomaly, she’s the exception to the rule. When overwhelming most of your
black female characters are depicted in one way, well that says a lot. I’ll also say that I reject
the idea that non-white writers and producers should not create non-white characters. I think
it’s fine for Dan to create black characters, but when you are creating characters about a
demographic you don’t belong to, there is a certain amount of care and responsibility that has
to go into it. And more often than not it seems like the easiest thing to do is just fall back on
established stereotypes. Now one interesting thing that I have been wanting to talk about forever, is
those situations where the black stereotypes are applied to non-black characters.
Sam and Rex are Black
Sam from iCarly and Rex from Victorious are
black. Now I know that sounds like a really insane thing to say, but just stay with me
you’ll see where I’m coming from eventually. Now it’s no new revelation that Nickelodeon shows,
especially the Dan Schneider shows, have a lot of problematic content in them in retrospect.
From the oversexualization of teenagers, to the weird feet fetishes, something that really
stood out to me in particular, was the treatment of black and brown people. They are oftentimes
the butt of the joke and play into very harmful stereotypes about their respective communities.
But what’s even more interesting to me is the way that the show kind of circumvents that by playing
into these stereotypes with non-black characters. So what do I mean by that? Sam is a white person,
she’s played by a white actress and the character has always been considered white in the show, well
Jewish. Sam is known for being very aggressive, loud and violent. A lot of Sam’s characterization
seems to stem from her troubled background, being raised by an abusive single mother, she
was abandoned by her father when she was younger, she loves hip-hop music and fried chicken and
she’s been having behavioural issues since she was a kid. Sam is known for having had
very frequent run-ins with law enforcement, she has a parole officer and throughout the show
we learn that pretty much her entire family is troubled and a lot of them are incarcerated.
Now look I’m not saying that black people have a monopoly on struggle and that any character that
is depicted as being from a broken family or loves rap music is trying to be a black. Nor am I saying
that those are the only ways to depict blackness. However, when you look into it our first ever
introduction to Sam was her beating up another kid. And I don’t think this was intentional on
the writers by any means, but my speculation as to what happened with Sam’s characters is that
because they wanted Sam to be an edgier kid than Carly and Freddie they gave her characteristics
that they believed were edgy. And to do that it was kind of just easier to fall back on the angry
black woman stereotype. And those gradually get introduced as the show goes on. In fact we only
ever find out about Sam’s absent father in season 4 of iCarly and it was just as a throw away joke.
No I don’t think these writers were trying to make Sam black, but I do think in their minds
what an edgy character looks like is black and so they kind of just piled on every single black
stereotype they could think of to make Sam, this super dangerous, violent aggressive character. I
really don’t think it’s just a coincidence that Sam loves fried chicken and rapping. And like I
said this was all very gradual, Sam’s character changes so much from that first episode. We find
out episodes and seasons later just how troubled she is, how often she gets involved with law
enforcement and the fact that there are states where Sam is legally not allowed to be in. So
I really do believe these were passive attempts to make Sam seem more dangerous, by closely
associating her with black stereotypes. Now you might think I’m reaching with this one but for
this next one it is very explicitly the case.
Rex’s introduction in the pilot episode
of Victorious was explicitly as a black character. The Rex we get in the series pilot
is very different in terms of appearance from the Rex we see in the rest of the show. Rex only
looks like this in the first episode and here, he has a much deeper skin tone, larger more
exaggerated features and his hair is textured. So whereas I felt that Sam was subtextually black,
Rex being black is not subtext. Even if we look past his appearance in the pilot where they did
make him black and even look past the fact that he speaks in AAVE, even in the show itself they said
that they wanted Rex to be an urban character. Now I’m sure I don’t have to explain this, but
whenever anyone in this universe says urban, they mean black. I am a bit confused why they changed
Rex’s appearance. I tried looking into the exact reasoning why they made this change but I couldn’t
find anything, my speculation is that they just thought that it would be funnier if Rex talked
and acted like this, but looked like this. That’s it. I think they just thought it would be funnier
if Rex acted black but did not look black. And I think that same reasoning applied to Sam.
So Sam and Rex play into black stereotypes, but what does that mean largely for us. Now
stereotypes are a neutral term, it essentially means flattening down abstract ideas into easier
concepts normally through overgeneralization. Now sometimes that can be beneficial when we’re
talking about larger harder to grasp concepts but it can also be extremely harmful if that
overgeneralization is being applied to an entire group of people. Because people are complex and
yeah stereotypes might tap into some larger truths but no two people are the same and we don’t all
go through the same things, so a generalisation that all black people love fried chicken not
only obscures the reality which is that’s not necessarily true, but also that those assumptions
cause real harm in the real world.
Sam and Rex’s characters both play into black
stereotypes whether that was intended by the writers or not. They are essentially allegories
for black people or at least the way the writers and creators think black people are supposed to
behave based on these stereotypes. So for the uninformed an allegory often uses stereotypes
and symbols to make references to a certain group of people. So for example in Avatar the
big blue aliens are aliens they’re not humans they don’t come from our planet but based on
how they look, how their culture is depicted to us and the different circumstances in the
film we are already making the connection in our mind that these 10 ft tall aliens are similar
to indigenous people. Now is that necessarily a good thing, are the depictions accurate, is there
a lot of care involved when making the connection to ensure audiences walk away with the right
idea about indigenous people? Not necessarily. But James Cameron didn’t have to have them looking
exactly like indigenous people for us to already make that connection in our minds, through the way
they speak, interact with each other and navigate situations we know who these people represent and
probably are making assumptions about how they can and will navigate situations based on stereotypes
of indigenous people. And that’s essentially what happened with Sam and Rex. Yes Sam is not actually
a black person, but the subtext is telling us something different and yeah Rex is just a puppet,
do puppets even have race? Doesn’t matter because based on how Rex looks and acts we can racialize
him meaning assign a race to him based on the stereotypes that he plays into. So that’s another
avenue of how black stereotypes manifest in the Dan Schneider Universe.
Conclusion
So that was a lot. And listen if you reject any
of what I said in this video I completely get it, these were just thoughts that I specifically
had after watching the show. I have to say that a large part of my conflict with this topic was
because I often find a lot of the conversations around the harmful material in the Dan Schneider
shows to be reductive. I feel like sometimes it boils down to people reactively going out
of their way to find things to have a kind of gotcha moment, and I felt like making a video
would kind of be playing it to that. But recently the quiet on set documentary was released and
we saw way more information come to light about the horrors a lot of these child actors dealt
with working on this show and this only further compounded my mixed feelings about this video
and topic because now it felt almost needlessly distractful to the conversation around the real
people who experienced harm. And then I started grappling with the idea of how problematic is it
to even keep engaging with these works and making videos about them when the people who worked on
them experienced so much harm. Is it wrong for us to continue watching shows like Victorious
and iCarly. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think that if we do choose to still
engage with it we should be mindful of the sacrifices of the kids that went into making these
shows. And maybe videos like these offer a more comprehensive perspective of what we’re consuming.
So that’s it the last round of schneider verse I did not touch on in my last schneider verse video.
Thanks so much for watching this video, let me know your thoughts below, be sure to like comment
and subscribe, I’ll see you guys next time!
