As Television Diversity Increases, So Do Its Interracial Romances
In many ways television is a conservative medium. Despite one notable example (real-life married couple Mary Kay and Johnny on their eponymous 1940s sitcom), it wasn’t until the late ’60s that married couples were shown sleeping in the same bed. When Lucille Ball's impending motherhood was written into I Love Lucy in 1952, she couldn't even say the word “pregnant” (just “expecting”). And after advertisers threatened a boycott of Melrose Place for showing what would have been TV’s first same-sex kiss between men, we had to wait another six years—until the dawning of a new millennium—to break that taboo on American screens with an episode of Dawson’s Creek. But interracial couples on television have surprisingly been around almost since the birth of the medium.
Though CBS initially didn't want to hire Ball’s real-life spouse to be her on-screen husband in I Love Lucy because of his Cuban heritage and accent, Ball dug in and Desi Arnaz was eventually hired (and beloved). The show would go on to do wonderfully well in the ratings; usually more than 50 percent of all people watching television during Lucy’s airing were watching her show. That means that in 1951, when anti-miscegenation laws were still in place in roughly half of the states, people were tuning in in droves to watch the nutty exploits of a white woman and her exasperated-yet-loving Latino husband.
That doesn't mean that television was always receptive to diversity, though. The first kiss between an African American and a Caucasian didn’t come until 1968, just a year after the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, the landmark civil rights case that invalidated the remaining anti-interracial marriage laws in America. The lip-lock was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek, and it was met with anger from Southern affiliates who refused to air the episode. There wasn’t a prominent interracial couple on TV until Tom and Helen Willis on The Jeffersons, which began its 10-year run in 1975, and their relationship was so noteworthy and unusual to audiences of the time that George Jefferson constantly commented on it, calling them “chocolate and vanilla” and referring to their children as “zebras.”
But according to the 2010 census, one out of every 10 marriages is now between people of different races. This represents a 28 percent jump from just 10 years prior. And if you look at couples who haven’t made it legal, 18 percent of heterosexual relationships and 21 percent of homosexual ones are interracial. So it only makes sense that television would finally start to better represent these couples on screen.
Leading the pack, as she always does when it comes to network diversity, is Shonda Rhimes. All of her shows, from Grey’s Anatomy to Scandal to Private Practice and How To Get Away With Murder have always featured multicolored romantic pairings. On a Shondaland show those couples aren’t simply illustrated with chaste cheek pecks and hand holding; her writers create steamy sex scenes that let you know that How To Get Away With Murder’s Laurel and Khan or Connor and Oliver are hot for each other—which is, exactly, what has historically made people so uncomfortable with interracial relationships: their sexual nature. Rhimes has even gone beyond depicting just interracial couples to writing whole multiethnic families, like Grey’s Anatomy’s Meredith and Derek, who have one biological (and white) child and an adopted African one.
Of course network sitcoms are still largely made up same-race, different-sex couples—it’s either the white parents of The Goldbergs or The Middle or the African American ones on Blackish. But small inroads are being made. On The Mindy Project, Indian-American Mindy Lahiri has dated a string of white guys—so many that some writers began to wonder where her suitors of color were—and is now happily ensconced in a relationship with a white doctor at her practice. And New Girl’s roommates’ diversity is finally starting to be reflected in their dating choices. Not only has Indian-American CeCe dated Schmidt, who is Caucasian, but the two African American roommates, Coach and Winston, have had their share of white girlfriends, including Coach’s school nurse and Winston’s bus driver.
While those relationships never last for long and serve as mostly B-plots for Zooey Deschanel’s character’s main storylines, it is at least noteworthy on a sitcom to see, without comment, men of color with white women, which still seems to be taboo, even as mixed couples become de rigueur on shows. To wit, on TV white men can have all kinds of girlfriends and wives without needing to discuss their racial differences: both Jay and Gloria on Modern Family and Jane and Michael on Jane The Virgin feature white male/Latina female couples, while Scandal’s Olivia Pope is in a love triangle with two Caucasians (one of whom is the President of the United States). Meanwhile viewers of Sleepy Hollow are rooting for “Ichabbie,” the hopefully forthcoming pairing of the white Ichabod Crane and the African American Abbie Mills. But unless you’re Taye Diggs, who over the course of his career has romanced everyone from Will & Grace’s Will Truman to Private Practice’s Addison Montgomery, beautiful black men are mostly paired up with their African American female counterparts.
Asian-American men fare even worse, which is why it was so exciting to see John Cho as a romantic sitcom lead this fall, even if Selfie was terrible and deservedly canceled. I’m pulling for commitment-phobe Connor, who is white, to finally win back Asian-American Oliver on How To Get Away With Murder. But maybe the real problem isn’t that Asian-Americans aren’t paired up with characters of different races on TV, but that they barely appear on screen at all.
Perhaps the real way to improve the number of interracial couples on television is to simply improve the number of actors of color on television, period, and not to ghettoize them on shows made entirely for and with people of color. There's no reason that the string of rom-com sitcoms that debuted this fall (A To Z, Manhattan Love Story, Marry Me) had to star such lily-white casts. Maybe more people would have tuned in if those love stories had looked more like the real-life love stories we see every day.
Related stories on TakePart:
• When Casting Diversity Transforms a Show From Compulsively Watchable to Game-Changing
• Amazon Takes On Netflix With an Original Series Focused on Transgender Issues
• It’s Television Gold When Feminism Gets a Subversive and Seriously Funny Twist
• The Digital Revolution Will Not Be Televised: 10 Shows Breaking the Hollywood Mold
Original article from TakePart
