The (not-so) Proud Family

A couple days ago in class, Mr. Bolos brought up the idea that says, "If you don't know your history, it's like you were born yesterday." When he said this, it reminded me of the time I heard that exact same phrase when I was in about 4th grade, watching a show called The Proud Family on the Disney Channel. Here's the theme song for the show...

While reminiscing about this show I used to love and watch all the time, I realized that it is the perfect example of racial tokenism on TV. I would say that The Proud Family was the Disney Channel's token show for the time it was around. Almost every character on the show is African American or Hispanic (except for the one white, red-headed friend and the ambiguously colored purple girls...), so it was probably used to make the Disney Channel to seem racially diverse while still keeping the rest of their TV shows that have almost exclusively white characters. Do you think it is a problem that Disney used The Proud Family as a token program, or do you think the reasons don't matter as long as the diversity is shown?

The Secret Life of Racial Tokenism

This week in class, we talked a lot about slavery and race. One of the ideas that came up quite a few times was 'racial tokenism'. Racial tokenism is basically when someone chooses to include people of another race just to make whatever they are including them in look diverse. I think the main place this shows up is in the media, and specifically on many TV shows. One of the programs where I have noticed this the most is called "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" on ABC Family. This is show is basically trying to capture exactly what the "real life" of a teenager is, but does so in an incredibly cheesy way. Since they are on ABC Family (which obviously has an emphasis on family programing) they have a very diverse cast. At first, this seems very nice and refreshing, but when I looked deeper than just the inclusion of different races, I noticed that they put all of the people of one race together and are very stereotypical in doing so. Even though all of the characters (no matter what their races are) are friends, they all date people of their same races. For example, the two Asian characters on the show are going out, while the two African American characters are also dating. I think it's almost worse to do this than not including diversity at all. It just seems like they are trying to send the message that all people should hang out with other people very similar to themselves. I definitely don't have a problem with a person dating another person with their same skin color, but it just annoys me that the creators of this show have put a huge effort in grouping races together. Now that I started thinking about racial tokenism in the media, I notice it everywhere and I'm sure you will too.