The Disposable Black Love Interest - A Tokenistic Cliché

i won't let you turn me into the woman who says pick me not her we can spot the disposable black love interest character almost instantly they're the fleeting guest star presented as great in theory yet we know the main character's not actually going to end up with them the disposable black love interest functions as an obstacle along the way to the protagonist's real white love you need to get that i'll call her back later fundamentally the trope is a form of tokenism an attempt to check the boxes of diversity without actually casting people of color in the main roles audiences are encouraged to identify with and care about because the disposable black love interest is a stepping stone love interest a pit stop along the way to true love the very story structure persuades the audience to root against this character even to resent or load them thus potentially feeding on or even worsening existing real world racism and anti-blackness and although many stories have white disposable love interests too when the disposable love interest is a rare person of color amongst a mostly white cast the fact that they're inevitably not chosen can create the problematic impression that this person is less desirable due to their race reaffirming our already very white-centric beauty standards and received ideas about who is worthy of love these days we're seeing progress in the form of an increasing number of centered main black love interests whose romances we're rooting for i did not want miss bridges to only be my friend i wanted her to be my wife and even more importantly in black protagonists and creators of stories so in spite of that why does the disposable black love interest still keep showing up all over the place here's our take on the disposable black love interest and why it's time to finally retire this lazy tokenistic cliche i spent a lot of time with you thinking i was second best but you know what i am good [Music] if you're new here be sure to subscribe and click the bell to be notified about all of our new videos [Music] in her essay the rise and fall of the disposable black girlfriend yomiya degokay describes the disposable black love interest as a race-bent gender-specific version of the disposable fiance or romantic false lead tropes no i used to like her but but you still do and i don't want to be your backup plan from as early as the 1960s up to the present day the fleeting black love interest has been a conspicuously persistent on-screen motif this sidelined character functions as a plot device in service of the central figure story whether by making them realize their deeper feelings for their white love interest or by acting as their rebound hot fling or even cultural experiment i'd like to get me some of that that wasn't black talk that was sex talk the disposable black love interest character is frequently set up as a foil or contrast to the white protagonist's main white love interest so when i signed up for dino week nobody said anything about it being monsoon season actually the wet season is june to december it's not the time charlie in friends accomplished and beautiful paleontology professor charlie wheeler their series only recurring black character played by aisha tyler is there to start a love triangle by dating joey and then ross but this in turn is really just set up for a love triangle between joey ross and rachel charlie ends up being ross's last real relationship before he reunites with rachel and by appearing to be a better on paper match for ross sharing his interests profession and intellect we have so much in common charlie's role as a late in the game runner-up is really to reinforce that ross doesn't care about any of that and just wants rachel ross actor david schwimmer told the guardian i was well aware of the lack of diversity and i campaigned for years to have ross date women of color to a degree schwimmer had a point that even the overwhelming majority of love interests in hit shows at the time were white aisha tyler's casting was a news headline centered on her race reality phenomenon the bachelorette only featured its first african american star rachel lindsay in the 13th season in 2017 and it took the bachelor a whopping 25 seasons before it finally started a black man matt james who is biracial in 2021 if people weren't open to biracial relationships i wouldn't be here hopefully throughout this experience for me it becomes something that people are more open to even in 2019 the first season of modern love based on the new york times column completely left out women of color as love interests following a long history of new york singles based shows that confusingly erase the city's actual diversity like sex in the city girls and how i met your mother still even when a show like friends did cast women of color as ross's love interests it was very much set up against them the show's second season underlined that in theory ross's asian american love interest julie was awesome she is just the nicest person on the planet and i think that the writers meant to have her that way so that the joke would play more that rachel thinks she's no matter what but this only made fans on behalf of rachel resent her more for stealing ross and seeming like a lovely person so smart julie's so special the live audience booed the actress lauren tom during filming i wasn't prepared for the amount of venom i was about to receive in a live audience where they actually booed my character gabrielle union also briefly appears on the show's seventh season in a blink and you miss her role as kristin another black woman joey and ross fight over who has little to do but facilitate the guy's competition sometimes disposable black love interests are intentionally written to be unlikable making the main love interest look more appealing by comparison just so you know joey only liked you for one reason he's gonna nail you tonight especially after they're discarded they might suddenly show an uncharacteristic petty or mean-spirited personality as if to confirm that the main character was right to cast them off i hope you understand when you get my bill your bill for services rendered you know my stud fee but often just the existence of the disposable black love interest as a threat to the one true pairing twists even their good qualities to become sources of unlikability it's a common trope that a protagonist will choose their true love over an option who seems like a better match on paper but with the black romantic interest this is taken to an extreme because the character is often painted as incredibly impressive if not flawless she's just cool you know and funny man i don't know if you've noticed but she's a hottie blair underwood as dr robert leads on sex in the city was a charming attentive sexy and successful doctor to the new york knicks yet he was ultimately discarded for the mediocre white guy steve i don't get it miranda could have had blair underwood but she settled for steve oh but you do get it sir and we're still seeing this pattern of the impressive disposable black love interest losing out to an objectively less impressive white person in a lot of contemporary examples on you rai self-assured karen minty is objectively more together than beck and joe even points out that she's good for him but i'm in a new place a better place i'm with karen mindy i'm happy she's happy we're good for each other yet he's still drawn to the complicated white girl and karen becomes another disposable black rebound you're amazing i'm amazing but you kind of don't want to do me anymore in panic heather decides she just views considerate academically successful bishop moore as a friend after she falls for bad boy rey sidelining the perfect black character and elevating an imperfect white one who's cast in a more charismatic light in the first episode of how i met your father sophie's gushing over how her tinder day inn is her dream guy and thus began the best first date i'd ever been on but he's quickly shipped off to australia while more down to earth white guy jesse is implied to be sophie's long-term love interest these examples illustrate how tokenistic portrayals today focus on presenting black characters as near perfect as if good representation means giving us black characters essentially without flaws i am no good for you but karen mendes but this doesn't actually serve those characters because flaws make characters relatable three-dimensional and interesting and when the disposable black love interest is shown to be amazing in every way yet still discarded for the far more average white person this sends a disconcerting message that as olivia pope's father puts it in scandal you have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have sometimes the disposable black love interest if they're not rejected is even killed off to get them out of the way take toby's fiance yvonne in pretty little liars while she's beautiful successful smart and kind you're an impressive woman yourself top of your class double matrix smith wow toby keeps putting her second to main character spencer played by troy and belisario who has mixed race ancestry but the character is coded as white it's a favor for a friend would her name be spencer and as soon as he seemingly does choose yvonne at last she dies after a quick tragic bedside wedding at the hospital leaving toby free to fall back into spencer's comforting arms here at the take we want to use our limited time to make you more videos that's why i use stamps.com it saves me endless amounts of time and stress stamps.com allows me to access all the post office and ups shipping services i need from the comfort of my home now when i need to mail a letter or package i don't even have to think about what time the post office closes make the trek there and then wait my turn to pay for postage i can do anything i need to do from my laptop instead and as long as you have a computer and standard printer you can do the same and print official postage for any letter any package anywhere you want to send on top of how easy stamps.com is to use it also offers incredible discounts like up to 40 off usps rates and 76 off ups stop overpaying for shipping with stamps.com today you can sign up with promo code the take for a special offer that includes a four week trial free postage and a digital scale no long-term commitments or contracts just go to stamps.com click the microphone at the top of the page and enter code the take [Music] what makes the disposable black love interest so pernicious is that it feeds damaging cultural messages that whiteness is inherently more beautiful desirable or worthy denzel washington once said explaining why he didn't want his character in the pelican brief to have a romantic relationship with julia roberts character black women are not often seen as objects of desire on film it's a bias that for decades was reinforced by stories on screen you didn't see girls that look like me heavy side and a dark-skinned woman if you did see them and they won the lead role they won the love interest in the 90s saved by the bell's lisa turtle was a groundbreaking character for being part of the main cast still the other two women in the central group got to be in featured relationships while lisa had only fleeting romantic plots and was mainly paired up with the unwanted attentions of cartoonish nerd screech i will be your everything and i will be gone on gossip girl starting in 2007 vanessa pines for her best friend and sometimes boyfriend dan i have feelings for you but he was hung up on the rich white blonde girl serena vander woodson through serena dan was seeking a form of acceptance into the moneyed manhattan elite so we can see how serena's blonde beauty is really a stand-in for a form of exclusive whiteness yet the show supports the feeling that this beauty is appealing by constantly framing serena in a glamorous almost irresistible light these on-screen relationships impact people's real-world dating biases in 2014 okcupid president christian rutter revealed that black female users get around 25 percent fewer first messages than women of other races and ethnicities i did read somewhere that the people that do worst on the apps are asian men and black women well it's great why people finally have an advantage somewhere colorism in film and tv compounds this problem even further to this day the vast majority of black women we see on screen are played by lighter skinned often biracial women of color and that's especially true of roles cast in a romantic or desirable light limited representation like the disposable black love interest can easily lead viewers to feel that beauty and worth are measured by one's proximity to whiteness and validated by the admiration of a white love interest even when the main character of a story is a person of color often they will pine after an idealized white partner or have disposable love interests of their own played by actors of color medicine asked me to marry him he gave me a ring don't say you're marrying edison as we can see in examples like the big sick master of none and the mindy project into all the boys p.s i still love you lara jean an asian american woman herself is briefly drawn to john ambrose who's cultured musical and shares a lot more of her interests but he's still turned down in favor of the prized jockey love interest peter sometimes you have to kiss the wrong man to know what's right while noah centineo does say he has some native american and possibly puerto rican ancestry peter seems to be coded as white and perceived that way by a lot of viewers moreover to this day black actors cast in interracial love interest roles can face backlash and harassment in 2017 riverdale fans who bughead sent vanessa morgan death threats before her character even appeared on screen because her character tony topaz was sort of set up to be in a love triangle with betty and jughead and your northside friends your girlfriend you're gonna look up one day and they're all gonna be gone tony and jughead only kissed but in typical disposable black love interest fashion this interaction was there to serve as a confirmation that he still had feelings for betty which tony encouraged him to pursue you're not over betty and i'm not interested in being anybody's rebound then tony becomes cheryl's love interest but after their breakup she's featured less and less over the seasons apart from in service to other characters morgan took to twitter to call out the misrepresentation of black characters and the treatment of black actors on the show and in the media in general fellow riverdale actress bernadette beck also spoke out about how poorly her character of peaches and cream was written set up to be unlikable one-dimensional and always in the background the tokenism of using black characters to market narratives as inclusive but then sidelining them in the story is exactly what john boyega criticized about how his character finn was treated in star wars finn ended up feeling like a disposable black love interest himself given how the story initially positioned him as rey's focus before revealing it was more interested in rey and kylo ren the same marginalization was reflected in how game of thrones only two featured black characters missandei and grey worm played by light-skinned biracial actors were discarded and pushed to the side in the end and we're still seeing examples where featured black characters don't get to experience the same fleshed-out love stories the white main characters do like in the vampire diaries where bonnie bennett who sometimes plays into the magical negro caricature doesn't get a lasting love story in all eight seasons will we ever see bonnie with someone who's decent that isn't going to die and is at one point when elena is put under a sleeping curse which can't break unless bonnie dies positioned as a literal obstacle standing between elena and damon you could just walk away she dies of collapsed lung no blood in your hands and you and elena get to live the life you always dreamed sleepy hollow teased essential romance between ichabod and abby that failed to materialize over three seasons instead vulture's nicole perkins wrote that abby became a desexed caretaker in the vein of the mammy caricature and was killed off in season three while ichabod had consummated on-screen romantic relationships with three white women instead one key sign of progress on screen today is that in some notable examples the disposable black love interest is giving way to the central or endgame black love interest crucially stories with the centered black love interest counter the long-standing cultural message that only the white character is the desirable prize for you they're part of a broader shift to re-evaluate their racial bias in so many of our received beauty standards just as importantly the primary black love interest invests the audience in caring about admiring and wanting the happiness of the character as we can see in examples like mj and spider-man homecoming evie and lovesick simon on bridgerton and chidi on the good place often this character isn't simply a love interest either because even if we enter the story more through a white character they become a central character whose interior life feelings and motivations are explored in significant screen time on bridgerton the duke of hastings simon is presented as both the most ideal standard of masculine beauty on the show and a subject of in-depth emotional exploration just because something is not perfect does not make it any less worthy of love your father made you believe otherwise richardson also makes the clear choice to center a black love interest consciously breaking with the once reigning justification that period pieces had to cast white leads for accuracy and the character who probably would have been the focus once prince friedrich becomes the disposable one presented as pretty much perfect but not the one daphne wants prince fiedrich is kind and adoring and he knows what he wants and so you truly believe him the best man for you in today's biggest blockbusters we're seeing examples like both zendaya and laura harrier being cast as love interests for peter parker in spider-man homecoming zoe saldana is the romantic lead and guardians of the galaxy and lupita nyong'o as the love interest for the black hero of black panther if you are not so stubborn you would make a great queen i would make a great queen because i am so stubborn mainstream examples like these do reflect an important change when you consider how few featured black love interests there are even in recent film history but it's also important that we continue going further to shift the fundamental point of view of more of our stories for so long the underlying problem has come from thinking diversity can be achieved simply by casting one or two people of color usually in sidekick or love interest roles in stories that remain predominantly white in their cast creative team and perspective it's worth noting that if you step outside of a white centric story's perspective objectively speaking the main white character might not always be such a prize in you joe discarding karen is a very good thing for her considering he could have and likely would have killed her charlie actually leaves ross on friends for the guy who's her real one true pairing there's so much history between us you know i'm sorry too today we're at last seeing more and more stories centered on multiple black or poc love interests black couples or couples that don't include a white person it's important that many of these stories are coming from black creators like issa rae who show insecure follows a black woman dating and being loved you make me happy me too surrounded by multiple black women and men of all shades going through the modern messiness of dating michaela cole made chewing gum in part because as she told rolling stone in terms of women of color especially in british tv there's not often a dark-skinned character who is vulnerable who has a naivete about her who is lovable and is not just a sexual vixen a crackhead or a criminal misha green's lovecraft country features three black women who are main love interests and it wasn't until a black showrunner joined the flash that iris's blackness was finally explored what took me into my adulthood to start wearing braids or wearing my hair naturally curly more often and fighting for that on my show saying i want to see iris with her naturally curly hair some recent stories with a centered black love interest also do a better job of investigating the nuanced sometimes contentious interracial dynamics at play in little fires everywhere lexi is head over heels for brian but their relationship unravels in part due to brian getting upset after lexi engages in exploitative behavior and a racist attitude toward a black girl in their school pearl when you get into yale they don't think it's because you stole a black girl's story in jordan peels get out a white woman treating her black love interest as disposable is taken to a horrific extreme when it turns out her family is literally stealing black bodies for white hosts you'll be able to see and hear what your body is doing but your existence will be as a passenger in white lotus paula who has insinuated sexual tension with the rich white friend who brought her on a hawaii trip olivia processes her resentments that the white tourists have so much which was historically stolen from indigenous people but paula's ill-thought-out attempt to write this injustice by encouraging the hawaiian employee she's dating kai to carry out a burglary only ends up hurting kai rather than the rich white guests even representation and otherwise limiting tropes like the damsel in distress can also be important to increase the variety of ways black women are represented on screen carrie washington said that her character broomhilda in django and chained isn't the most feminist idea to be a woman in a tower wanting to be rescued but for a woman of color in this country we've never been afforded that fairy tale because of how the black family was ripped apart during slavery and that she saw the value of having a story that empowers the african-american man to do something chivalrous for the african-american woman it's something we've never been allowed to dream about she is what he is questing for actor candace patton who like vanessa morgan and others received threats after she was cast as the flash's main love interest iris west a character that is canonically white with red hair has also spoken about the responsibility that productions have to protect their actors and create a safe working environment it's not enough to just place a black actor on a show and say look we checked the box we have a black female need we have to ensure that she is safe in the workplace that she is protected online nicole buhari who played abby mills on sleepy hollow said her abrupt exit from that show was connected to unfair behind-the-scenes treatment like being forced to work through serious illness and she was stuck with a problematic label that damaged her career what we see on screen shapes what we see as normal and aspirational in real life that's why young people of color especially women need to see themselves represented on screen as the heroes and beloveds of our culture's dominant love stories i love all of you this is the take on your favorite movie shows and culture subscribe so you can watch all of our videos [Music] you

Channel: The Take

Views: 247,065

Keywords: friends, charlie, karen, you, robert, sex and the city, john ambrose, yvonne, pretty little liars, toni, riverdale, girls, how i met your father, panic, bishop, edison, scandal, helen, normal people, the office, heather, crazy ex-girlfriend, meggy, how to get away with murder, raina, gossip girl, martha, doctor who, sara, master of none, valerie, bonnie bennett, the vampire diaries, abbie, sleepy hollow, riz ahmed, cho chang, harry potter, knives chau, scott pilgra, luisa, the affiar, chidi, evie

Id: n7216h2soXk

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022