ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a series that incorporates intermittently shallow and relatively sophisticated critiques of racism and racists. American television does carry a better reputation for racial and ethnic inclusiveness than Hollywood. "The success of the domination of the Euro-American segment of the population has been in its ability to balkanize and racialize subaltern sites to which nonwhites have been assigned" explains Michel Laguerre in Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things. The racialized power dynamics played out in American geographies are constantly reinforced and repositioned in many ways, perhaps foremost in the representational spaces of popular media. The representational violence committed against black and brown bodies on the screen normalizes the systemic cultural and physical violence to which black and brown bodies are subjected in the United States. Ironically, black and brown characters are disproportionately represented as inherently violent.
