I don’t watch The Walking Dead, for several reasons, so thankfully someone else was able to tackle the apparent racefail in The Walking Dead. Many thanks to Chesya Burke.
As someone who writes genre fiction myself, I understand the difficulty in writing fully actualize minority characters and the fear of doing it wrong. I understand that it’s just easier to ignore race all together or succumb to the idea that minorities don’t watch genre shows anyway, so choose not to bother. This attitude, though, leads to problems as evidenced by the big fat racial disaster in the Walking Dead.
She goes over some eyebrow-raising problematic elements, like the lack of black people despite the actual population of Atlanta, to some pretty aggravating shit, like how a white woman is worth saving while a black woman is completely ignored and left behind to die, or the part where a black character dare point out racism, only to not be in the show after that point.
So, like, wow. I mean, damn.
Like I said, I haven’t seen the show (I’m really over zombies and it doesn’t interest me at all) and now I actually kind of want to avoid it. Bleh.