Blueheron is pleased by Gunn’s interracial one-night stand on Angel:
In contrast, Commander Sisko on DS:9 or Dr. Franklin on Babylon 5 (the only other two black characters on the sort of geeky adventure shows that I’ve watched in the past 5 years), both had appropriate color lovers, even if the lover was only on for one episode.
Yes, it’s 2003 and inter-racial kisses are still considered mildly daring on TV.
As one of Blueheron’s readers points out in comments, Blueheron isn’t very aware of TV outside of fantasy and science fiction, or he’d know that interracial romances are now relatively common. In fact, there’s even been at least one instance of backlash: Eriq LaSalle, who played Dr. Benton on E.R., demanded that the show write a positive romance with a black woman for Dr. Benton. As LaSalle told Ebony:
I agree with Blueheron that it’s screwed up for Star Trek to insist on intra-racial couplings; in a universe where it’s seemingly common for humans to date Vulcans, Klingons, Changlings, and all the other races with funny ears and forehead ridges, it seems odd that the characters are so fussy about skin color. But I’m not so thrilled with Gunn’s multiple inter-racial romances on Angel; I can’t help but suspect that the reason he only has romances with white folks is that Gunn’s the show’s one and only non-white character.
Of course, if they brought in a black actress just to be Gunn’s love interest, that would be problematic as well… since it would be clear that they hired her only to give Gunn a black love interest.
There is a way around this, of course, which is to create minority characters all the time, incorporated into the universe. What if there were multiple characters of color on Angel, who appeared on the show in every single episode? What if, instead of being a show about a white guy, his five white assistants (one in green makeup), and his one black assistant, it was a show with seven lead actors, and several of them weren’t white?
I know, I know… that’s just crazy talk.
I know this is a v old post, but I’ve been going through your archives and had to say–My name is Angel, and I’ve been in an interracial relationship for about 5 years now. When I scrolled down the page and saw the title of this post, it was a total ‘WTF?’ moment. For a second, I totally thought you were talking to me. That is all.
I, too, was always bothered by the lack of colored folks in the Buffyverse, but I think Joss Whedon did an excellent job remedying this with Firefly. Unfortunately, Fox cancelled it, but you can buy the one season that exists on DVD. Although the captain of the firefly ship is a white man, he has a black first mate (female) who is married to the white pilot, among other things. I wish that Joss had put as much racial diversity into Angel and Buffy as he did into Firefly.
I haven’t read any comments by Whedon on what happened in the background of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve read him complaining elsewhere about the bizarre limitations placed on his writing. He had more creative control on Firefly than he had on other productions with which he was involved, and I think it shows. That’s probably why Fox killed it, really.
Actually, even Firefly’s “diversity” bothered me a bit. The major countries that influenced space-travel & such were supposed to be the US and China, to such an extent that everyone spoke Chinese as a second (or shared primary?) language – but there was never a single Asian character with more than one line (I think there was one Asian character with a speaking part) on the show. It was kind of odd.
It wasn’t clear to me whether that was intentional, though, tikae. The show was cancelled so quickly that it was hard to know what was going on in the Firefly universe. I wondered if there was some kind of continuing geopolitical divide between the planets that were settled by the U.S. and those that were settled by China.
The only Asian character I can think of was one of the prostitutes in the unaired space-brothel episode. And that’s not saying much.
Sally, Tikae: I always thought that the Tams were supposed to be mixed-race Asian/Caucasian. And I thought the divide wasn’t between Asian and American parts of the galaxy, but between upper- and working-class, and the Asians were generally Upper-Class (there were loads of Asians, for example, at the posh ball in Shindig) so didn’t feature heavily in a show about working-class characters. And I’m aware this is SO FUCKING OLD, which is why no one’s mentioned that in the last series of Buffy, Joss Whedon finally got to introduce a main-cast black character (And just about passes the Johnson Test when he has conversations in flashback with his now-dead mother (although those flashbacks are all basically about his animosity to the white guy who killed his mother just after the events he was recalling in the flashback)).