Race + The Walking Dead: Why Michonne Matters

We’ve already mentioned T-Dog replacing Tyrese. T-Dog has no role in the show. He may as well be called Token Black Inclusion No.1. He hangs around in the crowd scenes, basically serving only to make them less white. Contrast that with Tyrese, who was as much of a leader and fighter for the group as Rick. His role was divided between Shane and Daryl (A character who, to add insult to injury, is painted as a redneck racist). Shane had a relatively brief role in the comics before dying, and Daryl didn’t exist in the comics at all. Both are white men.

Similarly, Andrea, a white woman, suffered some severe changes from the comics to the TV series. In the comics, she is the best shot of the group. She is the sniper–the one who would give you covering fire in even the most dangerous situation. When it came to front-line warriors at the beginning of the comics, it was Andrea, Tyrese, and Rick, without question. She is deeply involved in the group, connected emotionally to the other characters and a major asset to all of their survival.

Then look at Andrea of the TV series. She’s a passable shot at best. She’s a partial outsider and, while she does argue against the men getting the guns while the women clean, she manages to shoot one of her group by mistake, which almost seems like a cautionary tale: “See what happens when women get guns? Get her back in the kitchen before she kills someone!” Again, Daryl and Shane (two white men) replace Andrea as the group’s warriors.

In the cases of the Andrea and Tyrese characters, the traits that made them linchpins of the group were stripped off and given to a brand new white male character or white male characters with expanded roles, while the black man and the white woman took a lesser, background position. We fear the same will happen to Michonne. How much of the powerful character we have come to know from the comics is going to stay with her and how much will be passed on to an unnecessary white male stand-in?

If they do have to change things from the comics, there are certainly some events we would prefer to see gone, as Michonne’s story line can be problematic.

First and foremost, we do not need her brutal and graphic rape at the hands of the Governor, a local dictator setting up his own brutal kingdom in the zombie-filled world. Even with her revenge, it’s still a graphic and unnecessary scene that seems to exist only to establish the evil of a character whose evil is already beyond doubt. And we cannot ignore the racial dynamics there, with Michonne being the only black woman and the only woman without someone looking out for her and caring about her. Michonne is kept in chains by a white man from the deep South and repeatedly raped and abused. That’s not a subtext that can be ignored, nor is it something that adds anything to the plot or character development.

We always support when a woman can be sexual and not slut-shamed in pop culture and this is indeed the case with Michonne; however, who the character partners with and how the partnering occurs raises questions. Every time Michonne meets a black man, it’s not long before she decides that she has feelings for him and hops into bed. It is such a regular occurrence that one cannot help but wonder, whenever a new black male character is introduced, how long it will be before Michonne declares him her property.

It’s interesting that even in the dystopian world, a black woman still chooses not to date interracially. In this case, because the story has been written by two white men, one must wonder if their failure to widen the dating pool for Michonne has anything to do with the belief that black women are less attractive or are all committed to intraracial dating. Somehow the writers had no problem putting Andrea together in a romantic relationship with Dale, an elderly white man several years her senior, but a black woman dating interracially and being seen as desirable by any man she happens to run across who is not black is just unrealistic, even if society is crumbling and the dead are walking the Earth.

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