The Walking Dead and “Forced” Diversity

I gave up on The Walking Dead TV show about a year ago. While I used to love the show for its post-apocalyptic plot, (some of the) performances and the zombie action, I lost interest once the show became bogged down with filler. Once Mad Men and Breaking Bad finished it seemed like AMC became more desperate to keep one guaranteed cash cow in live syndication. Plot lines from the comics were introduced and dragged out far longer than necessary, whether it was through the addition of unnecessary characters or entire episodes that focused on minor characters and exploits that could have been condensed to half the time. I was in denial about the filler until Negan’s introduction, when his dragged out intro was used for the sake of “suspense”.

Now, I am over the show but still continue to read the comic, which is currently on issue #178. This post will have spoilers for the comic so stop reading if you want to avoid those.

By this point, the comic is far beyond the Negan storyline. Rick is the leader of Alexandria and the latest arc, The New World Order, involves his people finding a new community, The Commonwealth. This discovery is mainly the result of Eugene’s radio conversations with Stephanie, a resident of the Commonwealth. Although it is against Commonwealth procedure she begins talking to Eugene and the two both speak to their respective communities to organize a meeting.

Eugene and a small group of Alexandria residents head to a designated meeting point, where they meet with The Commonwealth’s party and head back to the new community. Once in The Commonwealth, we see Stephanie for the first time, who almost looks like Velma from Scooby-Doo.

We see Stephanie again two issues later, and she is now a black woman. As expected, when I scrolled down to the comments ( I was reading this online) I came across one comment after another complaining about the usual, “political correctness” and of course, “forced diversity”.

Firstly, The Walking Dead does not have many black characters, especially main ones. Michonne and her newly introduced daughter are the main ones at the moment. The Commonwealth has one other member we’ve met so far, Father Gabriel is dead, we haven’t seen Heath in a while in the comics…

So to start, it’s not like minorities are already over-represented or “forced” on the reader. So, black characters are already underrepresented.

Next, if a white character got switched to a black one, would people complain about “forced whiteness”? I don’t think so. For many people, white is viewed as natural, universal, or a default. They then become more sensitive to any mention or inclusion of minorities e.g. this guy who complained about “heavy handed” homosexuality in Batman: Bad Blood. The heavyhanded homosexuality he complained about is a five minute scene of a female character (who is lesbian in the comics) flirting with another female. For some people, any minority inclusion becomes too much or “heavy handed”. Don’t let semantic maneuvers like “I only mind diversity when it’s forced” make you think they are being reasonable.

Next thing, the white Stephanie we saw first could possibly have been an artist mistake. That happens in comics.

Edit: Kirkman confirms it was an artist mistake (read page 25).

If not, maybe Kirkman decided that another black character couldn’t hurt. If we continue to take the mentality that consciously thinking of diversity is forcing it, we will continue to get artistic works that are mostly white. Most white creators write mostly white main characters. Also, white characters are still considered more marketable (although Black Panther is helping to combat that) so properties with white characters are more favourable to studios when they want to adapt something. So if there is no conscious effort to create characters of colour, we will continue to end up with characters who are mostly white, at a rate that far outstrips the percentage of whiteness in America. Like I mentioned in another article, this is the reason you might assume a character is white when you read a book, unless you get some explicit indication that they are not (e.g. nationality, description of skin colour) or if you know that the author typically writes about minorities. If you think that mostly white characters are fine as long as the story’s good, then you shouldn’t have an issue with one character being switched to black, as long as the story is good.

Stephanie’s race change does not impact the story in any negative way, or create any plot holes or inconsistencies. It doesn’t impact the story, and people with the “colour-blind” approach view this as an affront since the colour-blind approach just leads to white being viewed as a default.

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