(To anyone who might not take it with as many grains of salt as they should, the title of this post is a joke and we don't live in a post-racial society.)
ABC's Community is somewhat of a cult-favorite in the realm of TV and in my personal opinion, is highly overlooked. The show centers around seven main characters who all attend the same community college and have formed a study group. From the very beginning of the show, almost all of the main characters seems to play a stereotype in their own regard. There is the type-A, lawyer, sarcastic Jeff', an environmentally-concerned, vegan, socially-progressive woman named Britta, and the studious goody-two-shoes, Annie; just to name a few. There are two black characters in this group as well and the strange thing about Community is the dichotomy of black characters that these two actors represent.
The first to be noticed through a racial lens would be character Shirley Bennet, played by Yvette Nicole Brown. In many ways she is a very modern representation of the black "mammy" stereotype. She relatively large compared to the other two women in the group, Britta and Annie, she is highly religious, the only one out of the group who has kids, and is definitely a figure of power in this group dynamic. The more and more I think about the character of Shirley the harder and harder it becomes to find an aspect of her that is not congruent with the mammy stereotype, While she is one of the most well-spoken members of the group, which is a point against the stereotype, she is also the only character who has children. The mammy was often a character who would take care of the slave owner's children instead of the mistress on the plantation, and by making Shirley the only character with children it is hard to not see this as a parallel to the stereotype she already embodies.
On the opposite end of the stereotype spectrum is Troy, a character played by Donald Glover. I have always strongly connected with Donald Glover, both as a person and while playing the character of Troy because they are both very different from the stereotypical perception of what a black male is like. Troy's best friend is a strange and seemingly-neurotic Indian with whom he enjoys comics, plays pretend, and indulges in pop culture. In Troy's past he was a star football player and secretly a ballet dancer, which serves to even further counter any black stereotype that Troy may have fallen into. It is rare that such a person is represented on a major network show, and I believe that before Troy, many people did not even know that such a black person existed due to the system of racism that we live in. That means there were a number of people who did not know that I, and people like me, even existed and I appreciate this.
Yet I can't help but wonder if by distancing Troy so far from the stereotypes of black males and black males on television, Dan Harmon (the show's creator) has also distanced the character from his actual blackness. In no way is this to say that to be black is to fit the stereotypical definition of what a black person is because that is completely, utterly, and undeniably false. The fact of the matter is that media has such an effect on our perceptions of other people, that it has without a doubt shaped many people's idea of what the black male is. Troy is very few, if not none of these things. I worry that by making Troy so different, viewers may forget that Troy is incontestably a black male; and if this is forgotten, then any progress he may have made in destroying the stereotype is nullified.
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