squintyoureyes:

falulatonks:

This week’s The Good Wife was fantastic, but yech, the way they treat race and people of colour on this show always frustrates me. If I were more awake and had less work to do maybe I could mount a better argument about this, but. I can think of three black characters who were given something to do in the last year (i.e. excluding Julius Cain, who’s still a partner at the firm, but flits by in an episode once every half-season to make a point about race, or something) - Derrick Bond, associate: fired! And I do feel like he was brought in and set up to fail as he did.

In this episode alone!: Wendy Scott-Carr, the person who led the case against Will, and when that case failed the show framed it as her failure! (And I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive about this, because even with Cary and Dana in the room with her at all times, every time someone from Lockhart-Gardner nailed it at the stand, and when we saw the case falter against the jury at the end, we saw her reaction: crushed and lost for words and caught completely off-guard.) Dana, who gets tricked by Kalinda (who’s shady but the audience does love her) and then slaps her. (And let’s not get into the “Cary likes dark-skinned women” thing, whatever that was.) It says more against them than not. :/

Plus this show likes to bring in weird science to justify racism? or something? I just. Dramatically this show is so good, and I enjoy these characters so much, and I love these ladies so much (Kalinda! textual bisexual who is badass!), but the way it handles race and other political ~issues~ is so sketchy.

Oh yeah. I mean The Good Wife is probably one of the only shows airing right now that I am still super-invested in, and there are many things it gets very very right (certain aspects of mainstream feminism, tacit rejection of ageism, the way it handles queer characters), but it is TERRIBLE with race issues, and the weirdest part is that I really get the feeling that it THINKS it’s great with them, if that makes sense? Like they’re really aggressively smug and proud about their liberal..ity (which is not a word but), particularly when it comes to racism. Because after all there’s Kalinda, and lots of diversity in casting for judges, lawyers, guest stars, heroes and villains alike, compared to other shows. And that’s true on the surface but let’s look at how the most visible PoCs are actually treated along a few different axes:

- Most of them don’t work for Lockhart-Gardner, who are positioned as the heroes even when they play in the grey areas. They are either—with the exception of Kalinda, Julian and a judge—opponents, outright villains, or clients on the receiving end of L&G’s aid. The clients are either downtrodden and magical (like the death row client in one of my admittedly favorite episodes, Nine Hours, or most of the show’s Asian clients who are shown from a third-world perspective or a “HE’S NOT REALLY A TERRORIST…IS HE???? no not rly but we had you going there for a minute haha” perspective), or they’re secretly guilty. Now, a lot of L&G’s clients of all races are secretly guilty, that makes things fun in a show about defense lawyers. But disproportionately, L&G’s black clients especially turn out to be guilty when the case is about racism. There’s a gross pattern of an episode (and I call a pattern if it’s at least one episode a season) being set up as a black man falsely accused of a crime, who turns out to be guilty—“ha ha ha! Racism is a lie! The white people are the real victims here! We jumped so fast to the ~race card~ that we missed this black person’s obvious guilt!” More episodes disprove racism than prove it. And you get the feeling that the writers think this is oh so subversive and liberal of them. Okay fine. let’s move on.

- Whenever a character of color becomes a major player they’ve been set up to fail in really over the top ways, and outright villainized. Villains exist and that’s cool, but flat villains are just disappointing. This happened once with Derek Bond and TWICE with Wendy Scott-Carr. Derek, who comes in squeaky clean but turns out to be in cahoots with a drug dealer out to take over Chicago. And sneaky Wendy, that snake, craftily trying to trade on her race and gender and use them as an unfair asset against two white men in an election (let’s all stop and L really OL at that bullshit). Then, THEN, she tries to go after Will but everyone knows she’s just bitter about losing the election, and makes stupid mistake after stupid mistake and crashes and burns so hard that the jury makes a mockery of her, Alicia stalks out in self-righteous glory leaving Wendy with a quivering bottom lip, her own coworker nobly disowns her (the white guy tho, not the black woman) and to top it all off Peter dresses her down, belittles and fires her in a particularly gross scene that I suppose we were supposed to feel triumphant about. I’m just thinking about all the times the heroes of the show have celebrated and how most of the time this happens after they’ve overcome INSURMOUNTABLE SEASON-LONG ODDS and bested a black person.

(never mind that Will Gardner is in fact quite shady and Wendy was just doing her job, i mean that’s supposed to be the fun part about this show, the way it plays with the grey, i’m sorry when was the point EVER that will was some blighted hero??)

Then there’s all the hipster cracks about race, about how Cary only dates “ethnic women” which I STILL don’t get (honestly I don’t know WHAT they’re trying to say with Dana half the time or even if they know). And it sucks because sometimes this works, like when Renee Goldsberry’s character Geneva mocked Cary for making a case about the N-word and they joked about it, or when Kalinda gets asked/goaded about her ethnic background and meets it with one of Those Looks of hers. But sometimes it really really doesn’t work. The writers are just really invested in acknowledging that sure, race matters, but not in this situation, or that one, or the one after that one or ANY OF THEM. We’re past worrying about that. And occasionally they just take it beyond sense.