Representation

I like sappy holiday movies. I like the Hallmark movies with romance and happy endings and joyfulness. Especially given things in the world right now. I happened to notice that the Lifetime channel is showing holiday movies and so I’ve checked some of them out. I don’t usually watch the station because the movies are often really angsty/overdramatic. Anyhow, I noticed a huge difference between the Lifetime movies and the Hallmark movies, and that was the color of the cast. The Lifetime movies has entire main casts who are black, with the white cast members being incidental. And the people are portrayed as real, rather than stereotypical. I’m really happy to see this.

It’s almost shocking to see this. Why? Because it’s so atypical and it shouldn’t be. Casts in general should be more reflective of diversity. I watch lot of varied shows and don’t pay much attention to the fact that there are POC in key roles because that’s normal to me. But when it comes to holiday movies, frequently the non-white characters are singular (I hate to say token, but . . . ). The ‘white Christmas’ refers to skin color as much as snow.

There are also precious few gay characters (and never in starring roles). And overweight and disabled people largely don’t exist.

Representation matters. We need to see people like ourselves. We need to see other people and know we aren’t the only people n the world, or the only culture. We need to see that there are other ways of doing things, other ways of knowing things, and more importantly, everybody is equally valuable. We need to idealize our world as colorful and varied, rather than white, skinny, and enabled.

So I’m very pleased about the Lifetime holiday movies and have been watching them.

*on an entirely other note: Pointsettias can’t handle cold. As in, when you take an unprotected plant from the store to your car in below freezing weather, the leaves will quickly curl and drop. So all these movies (especially the one about a poinsettia farm in the heart of snow country) are portraying pointsettias wrong and it kills me every time I see them.

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