On Biracial Representation

This is an essay I wrote for school in 2023 on how Black families and Black children are often represented in contemporary American TV. I start by engaging with Urvashi Chakravarty, who is looking at the representation of biracial children in Shakespeare, and then I think about how her argument might apply today.

Two disclaimers I made when I presented on this essay:

I love all these shows! Even though I’m (gently) critiquing them here, I loved watching them.

This essay is thinking about how biracial children and Black families are represented on TV. It’s not about biracial children and interracial families in real life. Fictional representations of people groups are often very different from the people themselves, so the arguments I make here are only for these representations, not for real biracial children, White mothers, Black families (whose experiences vary much more than their TV equivalents).

Lastly, there are a number of photos on these slides that I didn’t take. They’re mostly from Googling things like Big Mouth and Ginny & Georgia and Paris is Burning. You can find the sources there (and I’ll try to circle back and add the sources here too).

Okay, all that said, here’s the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QBc4de-R6xr862pwlSGTn27Q7BiOpWWY/view?usp=sharing.