White Vamps, Black Witches: Race Politics and Vampire Pop Culture
By Guest Contributor Dr. Sayantani DasGupta, cross-posted from Stories Are Good Medicine
Ok, so I’m watching a Vampire Diaries marathon on the CW and…
Stop laughing. No, I mean it…stop.
I am a YA WRITER I was doing RESEARCH on, er, stuff that teens like. Like vampires, and high school drama, and, er, kissing, and stuff. RESEARCH, I tell you.
As I was SAYING (before I was so rudely interrupted), I’m watching the Vampire Diaries this week and the race politics finally hit me in the face. As a facebook group and several online discussion boards have actually noted, pretty much all the vampires in this show are white, while almost all the African American folks are witches/warlocks.
What’s this about?
Now, I’m a bit bored of the ‘skinny mainstream white heroine and her black/lesbian/fat/different/witchy BFF’ trope. But clearly, there is something of a theme here with this on vampire tv shows. For vampire lover/doppleganger Elena from Vampire Diaries is her witchy Black BFF Bonnie (pictured above, hazy). For vampire slayer/lover Buffy is her witchy lesbian BFF Willow (think Wicka, Womyn-ly energy, etc.). And then there’s vampire lover/waitress Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood and her Black BFF Tara, who’s not a witch but gets possessed by one. And Sookie’s other BFF/Tara’s cousin Lafayette who’s not just Black but also the most flamboyantly gay and fabulous thing to hit the tiny town of Bon Temps in, like, ever. But regardless, the trope remains.
So what’s the deal?
The ‘different’-BFF-as-foil thing isn’t new. It provides some nod to multiculturalism or inclusion while not challenging the notion that the main character(s) in most YA fiction/television must be, well, white, able bodied and heterosexual. Even a show like Glee, which makes such gestures to inclusivity in its cast in fact still reinforces white able bodied heteronormativity (check out this great article called “The Trans-Continental Disability Choir: Glee-Ful Appropriation”).
Similarly, in Vampire Diaries, the central pouty-lipped triumverate of Stephan (good cop), Elena (oh no! which brother shall I choose?), and Damon (bad cop. bad, bad, so bad he’s…mmm… good cop) are all white. But then there’s the added twist of the supernatural stuff. Pretty much all the folks who are vamps on the show – old vamps, kinda old vamps, brand new vamps – are white. Any exceptions to the ‘vamps are white and toothsome’ motif (more on this later) get dispatched rather quickly.
For example, there was a cute mother-daughter Asian pair of vamps, Pearl and Anna, but they died unnecessarily the tail end of Season 1 (what, they couldn’t keep them on just to keep some Asian American actors working? For shame…). Then there was ONE Black vamp awakened from the tomb (long, unnecessarily complex story), but the show creators were clearly so uncomfortable with having a vamp of color that they insisted on making him weirdly NICE – not just nice, but a little too bow-y and scrap-y for my taste. They obviously didn’t know what to do with someone who was (probably) a slave being awakened in the modern age (someone who used the term “Miss Pearl” to refer to above Asian lady vamp)… so he got killed off too, right alongside her. (Great, take out all the people, er, vampires of color in one fell swoop, why don’t you.)
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