‘This Is Great, We’re Like Slave Buddies!’: Cross-Racial Appropriation in ‘Post-Racial’ TV Comedies

Abstract

This chapter analyzes single-camera comedies depicting acts of cross-racial appropriation by white male characters who consider themselves post-racial, yet who strongly align themselves with imagined non-white ethnicities. Shows like Arrested Development, Trailer Park Boys and Party Down expose their white protagonists’ hypocrisy in imagining themselves to be post-racial, playing their assumed post-racialness for dark-comic, squirmy laughs. While these shows deconstruct the act of white cross-racial appropriation and sporadically offer a multi-ethnic point of view, they nevertheless deploy narrow, stereotypical depictions of non-white characters, failing to shake loose the limited perception of people of colour in the white cultural imaginary. Seemingly intelligent and progressive, these shows critique but do not refute the notion that our society is post-racial.