“The Bold Type” is considered an intersectional feminist show, but it still needs to do better for its female character(s) of color.
I started watching “The Bold Type” a while ago, encouraged by friends’ enthusiasm about a same-gender relationship between two women of color and an article that boldly declared it “TV’s most refreshing intersectional feminist series.” I’ve seen the first six episodes so far, and there’s definitely aspects of the show that I really appreciate, from the inclusion of a woman of color in the main cast to the emphasis on female friendship.
However, it was surprising that in a series that has been praised for its authentic portrayal of millenial women, the show writers failed to capture how women of color experience a world that is particularly racialized.
There’s a lot to be said about Kat Edison, played by Aisha Dee, who is the social media director for the fictional publication Scarlet. The show writers’ decision to center a woman of color and also have her explore her sexuality in a relationship with another woman of color is something that drew me to the show, but at the same time, there’s something about Kat’s character arcs that put me on edge.
Specifically, her seemingly race-free narratives imply that viewers can ignore race and that gender is “more important.”
The “colorblind” perspective of the show first really came to my attention during the third episode, where Kat becomes a victim of internet trolling, and eventually is doxxed.
The episode received some attention for showing how pervasive trolling is for the victim, and how harmful it is for the victim’s mental health. But the show fails to touch upon how women of color are the victims of not only sexist, but also racist threats when they are attacked online, or how sexist threats often contain racist elements.
Early in 2017 the Washington Post’s homepage editor Doris Truong was targeted by trolls who accused her of being a Chinese spy. These attacks stemmed from images that showed an Asian woman supposedly taking photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes during his Senate confirmation hearing. Although these trolls were quick to target Truong (out of an assumption that all Asian women look the same, apparently), Truong had not even left her home that day.
A quick look at the mentions of prominent women of color online — particularly those in the social justice sphere — similarly reveals that many of the threats that these women face often include racial slurs and racist attacks.
The trolls that Truong and other women face differ markedly from those that Kat dealt with. Kat’s threats, at least the ones shown on screen, contained gendered slurs and insults, but no racialized ones. I’m not arguing that we should see racial slurs depicted on screen, but for a show that doesn’t pull away from difficult topics like breast cancer and Islamophobia (at least a bit), the writers do Kat a disservice with their depiction of online harassment, however sensitive and authentic they try to write it.
The writing of Kat’s interaction with a police officer and her short time in jail also suffered from a lack of authenticity, or a lack of understanding of what women of color often experience.
Kat’s encounter with the police starts when she punches a white man in the face as retaliation for Islamophobic comments that he made towards Adena, a Muslim lesbian and artist that Kat has befriended (to say the least). The police quickly arrive on the scene and arrest her, while Adena disappears; the next time we see Kat, she has been bailed out by her editor in chief Jacqueline and is upset that Adena did not stay to defend her.
Yet women of color are not immune from police brutality. Black women in particular are extremely vulnerable to police violence, but are less recognized as victims and therefore less advocated for. Women of color, just like men of color, are often traumatized, if not killed, by police violence.
Which brings me back to Kat Edison: her interactions with the police are almost entirely sanitized. I don’t believe the show needs to depict police brutality, but I am reminded of a class exercise where a professor asked who was afraid of police. Almost every person of color in the class raised their hand.
People of color are scared of the police. For many, that’s simply the reality of being a person of color in the United States. To see Kat go up against a police officer, yelling (or at least speaking loudly) and arguing while looking for Adena was terrifying. I know that a show like “The Bold Type” won’t let anything happen to her, at least not with the level of violence that police brutality often has. But the writers’ decision to have Kat go so boldly against the police shows a misunderstanding at best of what people of color go through in their daily lives.
Of course, there’s something to be said about how relieving it is to see a show that doesn’t force its characters of color to have narratives that only focus on race. Seeing Kat as a mostly happy and carefree woman of color (and I say woman of color because her race has never been discussed, as far as I’ve seen) is soothing. She laughs, she has fun with her friends, and sometimes she cries and makes mistakes: in other words, she’s human. She’s complex but she’s not “defined” solely by her race, or her narratives aren’t used to fill some kind of imagined diversity quota (if only because her narratives don’t address race at all). It’s a joy to see a woman of color grow and learn, as opposed to exist in constant struggle, if they exist at all.
I am, to put it simply, not interested in seeing “The Bold Type” replicate the traumatic experiences that women of color go through and re-traumatize women of color.
But Kat is still a person of color. And just like how her gender and the complexities of her personality are acknowledged and highlighted, her ethnicity (or ethnicities) should be too. Her existence as a woman of color informs, or at least should inform, how people react to her, whether that be in negative or positive ways. While the showrunners can choose to ignore Kat’s race, real, “authentic” women of color who exist outside of the show don’t get that decision. To not acknowledge race tells me that the show runners didn’t think it was important enough to include, if they thought about race at all. To not acknowledge race can contribute to harmful effects on people who aren’t really represented in most forms of entertainment media.
The show writers have tackled every topic on the show with sensitivity and humor in a way that makes the show a delight to watch. It’s a shame that they haven’t included race as a topic that they deem worthy of the same sensitivity and humor.
With less than half of the season left to go, there are a few more opportunities for the show’s writers to show us that they’ve thought about how women of color act and exist in this world. I can only hope that the writers took these opportunities and acknowledge Kat not just as a complex woman, but as a complex woman of color.
