Kipo and Craig: Bringing Back Black Wonder
In an episode of Cartoon Network’s Craig of the Creek called “Power Punchers,” Craig and his father sit down to play a 90’s style PVP fighting game. Craig chooses the coolest looking fighters while his dad chooses a small black skater kid named “Kid Jammer,” chosen because “he looks like me.” This soft affection for characters that look like you colors all of Craig of the Creek. The cartoon details the life of Craig and his friends as they have childhood adventures at the creek behind their house, running into various gangs such as the “ninja kids’ and the “horse girls” and taking harrowing journeys through patches of poison ivy. The entire show is a love letter to summertime nostalgia, when you’d make up games with whatever gang of kids lived in your neighborhood. You could be pirates or explorers (my own street gang liked to be time travelers.) and it didn’t have to end until the street lights came on.
The soft, affectionate feelings the show seems to exude is not the only thing that makes it special. Craig is a scrawny black kid, with an affection for maps and an aversion to change. His dad is big and smiling, his mother is a caring school counselor. His little sister has big natural hair, and his brother is very smart and very condescending. They are a normal family, and it’s this normalcy that strikes a chord. There hasn’t been an animated African American family on screen in nearly 20 years, since Disney Channel’s The Proud Family premiered in 2001. (Adult titles like The Boondocks and The Clevland Show not included.) At least for me, it has been a long time since I had seen a family on TV that mirrored my own. I remember being young and facing the same problems that Craig faces in “Power Punchers,” that his dad keeps beating him at video games. At the same time, the family is very clearly BlackThere are references to the Civil Rights Movement and historically black colleges. It is in no way colorblind, but the majority of the show is not about race, and that is what makes it so nice for me as a black woman to watch. So often it is the responsibility of black bodies on-screen to be a conduit for our entire struggle. If there is a black person on screen, the movie becomes a race movie. To have a little black boy just allowed to be black, without the struggle, without the “hood,” with no mention of police brutality or slavery? It’s a breath of fresh air. The show makes me feel like I’m taking a nice long walk in the woods.
The entire show is one in which diversity is effortless. Many of Craig’s friends are of color, there are a couple of episodes where a teen lesbian couple (who Craig and his friend mistake for witches) are prominent. And a host of different family dynamics and ways of living all appear in the living breathing world of Craig’s neighborhood.
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, at first glance, is a very different type of show. It’s a surprisingly musical Netflix original about a post-apocalyptic world where talking animals called “mutes” have taken over the Earth’s surface and humans are forced underground. However, it also features a diverse group of main characters. The main character is Kipo, who is of mixed race, and her best friends, who are both black. In fact, there is not a single white main character. (Which would be notable even in a live-action show). In the world of genre fiction, there is an even greater divide in who gets to be on screen than in regular fiction. Especially in cartoons, it’s very rare to see someone who looks like me as the spirited protagonist. But Kipo is here to fix that. She’s your classic cartoon hero: energetic, kind to a fault, and deeply caring for her friends — and she’s of color. Benson, one of the other main characters, is gay. And while the show isn’t about either of these things (it’s about Kipo trying not to get eaten by giant rabbits), watching it made me wish there had been a show like this when I was younger.
In the “Doll Test”, one of the studies on racial identity in children that helped win Brown vs The Board of Education, doctors Mamie and Kenneth Clark gave children baby dolls of different colors and asked a variety of questions like which was the pretty doll or the kind doll. The majority of children pointed to the white doll as being the “good doll,” even the children of color. This deeply ingrained prejudice has not gone away, and it begins with the role models we are given. My sister and I spent a large majority of our childhoods wishing we were white. And who could blame us? In all the shows we watched not only was the beautiful love interest white but so were the protagonists, the knights, the adventurers, the chosen ones. And so I thought that in order to dream, to wonder, I had to be white as well. Shows like Craig of the Creek and Kipo are here for all the black kids, the kids of color, the gay kids, to say that you can be the protagonist too. You can have adventures, dream big, fight monsters, and get the girl.
And you don’t have to be white to do it.
