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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.

I claim a better model is that you aren't allowed to make minority characters embody (real-life) negative group-level traits.

There are more counterexamples to your theory than just Gus Fring:

  • In Brooklyn 99's "The Box" (S5E14) is an episode solely focused on Holt and Jake trying to break a cold-hearted bastard Black male murderer - but Davidson portrays an affable middle-class evil. He is a dentist who got addicted to pain pills, and most of the episode he is shown outsmarting the interrogators. This is fine by my model, since he is technically a Black criminal, but not a reflection of the typical Black underclass criminal.
  • Ditto for Gus Fring. No white guy behind Pollos Hermanos pulling the strings - he is the ultra-competent mastermind pulling the strings (how many times throughout the show did characters remark how evil, but clever, Gus was?). And of course, after his fall, the next business partners for Walt is a savage gang of (White) Nazis covered in swastika tattoos. Ignoring the moral valence of the characters, this is clearly an inversion of the real-world analogue (e.g. South Africa) where actually the White group is pulled down and replaced by a less intelligent Black one.
  • In a sillier setting, there is the Black Dean of the other non-Greendale community college (like White Dean, he is an effete queer weirdo)
  • In the Good Place, lots of the demons were minorities (Vicky, an Indian female, was the only non-side-character example iirc) But in the humourous self-aware way.
  • Brooklyn 99 literally had a recurring character that was a Black male serial carjacker (Doug Judy), but he was again portrayed as an intelligent gentleman villain (sort of like a Black Neal Caffrey), he might make unreciprocated romantic overtures at Rosa, but he's not going to actually grab someone's ass or catcall.

I think my explanation makes more sense: you are allowed to show members of protected groups being villains (this is not contrary to standard progressive ideology), but you cannot show them being villanous in a way that reinforces pre-existing "stereotypes" (according to progressive ideology, the stereotypes are totally socially constructed without basis in reality, so they only exist due to media)

And actually I think it has nothing to do with villainy at all. You also cannot show them fulfilling stereotypes as good guys. In the good place, the main 4 were essentially inversions of their respective stereotypes:

  • Jason is a good-looking dumb, borderline retarded, East Asian (technically Fillipino iirc, but he is obviously presented as an East Asian, and looks close enough) - that is fine, because East Asians have a high IQ (but he would not be allowed to be Black/brown)
  • Chidi is a Black professor of moral philosophy. He is neurotic, bookish, non-confrontational (except for that time he punches Brent Norwalk... but that was portrayed as a man pushed to the limit and defending himself) and completely out of touch with the real world living in an ivory tower of academia. This sometimes leads to him failing others because he is paralysed by indecision - but that is fine, because it's not the stereotype (I wonder if a Jewish Chidi would be allowed?)
  • Tahani is a beautiful dark-skinned upper-class British-(South Asian) socialite. She is bad because she is shallow, status-obsessed and effete. In particular, it is constantly stressed how beautiful (and tall, for some reason) she is, how many times does Eleanor (the older blonde woman) fawn over how hecking hot she is?
  • Eleanor is a (White) woman. Her flaws are being lecherous, loud, rude, and gluttonous. Generally she just acts as the oppposite of a woman, and embodies the worst traits of a man.
  • Janet is a (White) woman, and a literal robot. A perfectly rational calculating machine (other than that time she fell in love), at one point even consoling Michael as she assures him he has to kill her.

The usual Who? Whom? applies when it comes to minority stereotypes and Hollywood depictions. South or East Asian American men can be depicted as dorky and effete with little fear of blowback, in contrast to depicting blacks or latinos as low-IQ high-crime net-tax consumers.

The introduction of a second axis can indeed be value-add here. That is, we can imagine a graph and map characters onto a horizontal dimension, with increasingly dumb as you move farther toward the left side and increasingly intelligent toward the right side. The vertical dimension would be increasingly "good guy" as you move farther toward the top, increasingly "bad guy" farther toward the bottom.

There would be far more black characters (as a percentage of black characters) on the right than white characters (as a percentage of white characters) relative to what one would expect based upon the average IQs of blacks and whites (perhaps even in the absolute sense), and far fewer on the left. There also would be far more black characters (as a percentage of black characters) on the top than white characters (as a percentage of white characters) relative to say, their crime statistics (especially violent crime statistics, or perhaps even in the absolute sense), and far fewer on the bottom.

The most disproportionate quadrant in terms of blacks being overrepresented relative to whites would be the top right quadrant: intelligent good guy. However, I posit the second most disproportionate quadrant would be bottom right, intelligent bad guy—and not top left, dumb good guy (which would be third). The most disproportionate quadrant in terms of blacks being underrepresented relative to whites would be the bottom left quadrant: dumb bad guy (like the aforementioned Neo-Nazis from Breaking Bad).

That is, the black/white disproportionality is greater along the intelligence dimension than the good guy/bad guy dimension when it comes to media portrayals.

This makes sense since a staple of American culture is prioritizing the status, feelings, and well-being of blacks over that of whites. And for most people, being viewed as stupid feels worse than being viewed as bad. Ask someone to think of an intelligent bad guy and they probably think of some cool edgy intimidating badass like Lalo Salamanca (if we're sticking with the BB/BCS universe). Ask someone to think of a dumb good guy and they probably think of some lame goofy doofus like the TravelWire employee who Lalo nonchalantly murders.

Much has been said by many about the glorification of violence and criminality in US black culture, where many blacks celebrate blacks behaving badly in a "das rite" manner. In contrast, while things such as trying hard in school may be mocked as "acting white," stupidity per se is not celebrated. If anything, the opposite: variations of "u stupid" as an insult between blacks can be readily found in online exchanges or fightporn, WorldStarHipHop, or publicfreakout-type videos (with little sense of irony or self-awareness).

The Chidi stereotype isn't just a paint-it-black version of a Jewish stereotype, it's been around before as black stereotype, notably Steve Urkel, and to a lesser degree Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

And you're being a little unfair to Eleanor; she also had quite a few stereotypical female flaws, such as being vain and self-absorbed.

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