Meet the contributor who will recap The Office, Degrassi, and Boondocks

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I’m excited to announce that Jasmine will be recapping three shows for us starting this week! Here’s a little bit about her, and her thoughts on the shows.

My name is Jasmine, and I’ll be recapping The Office, Degrassi: The Next Generation, and The Boondocks for Racialicious.

I watch The Office because its cringe-worthy plots often address racial, gender, and office politics in a manner both humorous and thoughtful. Degrassi: The Next Generation is the descendant of the original “Degrassi Junior High”, and like its predecessor pushes dialogue on critical issues that affect today’s youth as well as adult society: drugs, violence, discrimination, homophobia. The Boondocks is the animated version of Aaron McGruder’s seminal comic strip, an unabashedly sharp and cynical look at the challenges faced by a politically aware African-American boy trapped in predominantly White suburbia.

What attracts me to these shows are how their stories can be rooted in a question of racial discrimination or sexual harassment are given due attention, but without crossing over into “Very Special Episode” territory often found in other less adept shows.

A Philippine-born native New Yorker who has been living in Chicago for the last 13 years, I blog about myself (infrequently) and television (interminably). The question of race and how it is portrayed both the large and small screens has weighed on my mind ever since I first saw Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Butterfly McQueen in “Gone with the Wind”. Gedde Watanabe in “Sixteen Candles”.