Too Black for Everybody: Reflections After Watching Ginny and Georgia

 
ginny_und_georgia_staffel_2.jpeg

“It’s exhausting to live in a world that isn’t designed for you.” (S1E10)

While getting my hair braided, I was on the hunt for something new to watch. I had seen Ginny and Georgia flash before me multiple times, but after seeing the infamous clip on Twitter where one mixed-race person tells another mixed person “Oppression Olympics: let’s go!” I was already fed up. 

But, alas, I was tired of scrolling and decided to give Ginny and Georgia a chance. I had all night to watch it — a sneaky touch to the back of my head told me I had another six hours before my hair would be finished.

The story follows young mother Georgia who's been on the run since she was fifteen after escaping an abusive childhood home. It isn’t until her own daughter Ginny is fifteen (and her new husband mysteriously dies) that she decides it’s finally time to settle down in the wealthy, predominantly white New England town of Wellsbury. 

Ginny is a piece of work. She’s angsty, an avid reader, a good sister to her little brother, and is half Black and half white. If her being visibly different from her mom and brother isn’t enough, in the first fifteen minutes she’s shown being racially profiled by a Wellsbury cop for simply pumping gas into her own car to remind us of how different she is. Georgia, youthful and white, has to intervene for the cop to let up. 

“Guess we’re not leaving that bullshit in the South,” Ginny muttered. So far, nothing too odd.

After moving into their new home, Ginny has her first day of school and comes face to face with her next oppressor — her AP English teacher. This teacher insists that the class is more rigorous than whatever she had at her last school and encourages her to drop down to a regular course as soon as possible if she finds it overwhelming. Once everyone is seated, the teacher tells all the students to prepare for a pop quiz on the summer reading. He makes a side note to Ginny saying that he doesn’t expect her to have read the book, and Ginny takes this opportunity to dunk on his lackluster, whitewashed syllabus and make an impression on the rest of the class. To really drive it home, she tells him that she has done the reading and will be taking the pop quiz. 

This instantly earns her respect from her non-Black peers, particularly a white girl named Maxine, who defends her outburst. It was at this moment where I just knew that this show was written by a white person (it is, her name is Debra J. Fisher). This is the start of all the problems with the show. No Black student would put their grades or their safety at risk by telling off an openly racist white teacher for the entertainment of other white people. For a white person to write this with Ginny not facing severe consequences for it is like saying Black kids should stand up for themselves more. It’s badass and totally not traumatizing. 

Maxine takes her under her wing after this and introduces her to the rest of her friends — several white people and only two East Asian people. One of them is Hunter Chen (who is also half white) and the show makes it obvious that he is not going to be more desirable than the stoner white boy who happens to be Maxine’s brother, who can’t commit to either of the girls of color he’s manipulating. Hunter is handsome and sweet: he respects Ginny, dedicates a song to her at his band competition, and does a tap dance number for her in the school hallways for her birthday. But he also sends cringey Snapchat filters, doesn’t kiss Ginny a lot, and isn’t concerned enough when it comes to defending Ginny from his douchey friends’ racist remarks. It’s almost like the writers sabotaged his potential because, of course, the romantic interest had to be an average white dude.

The two other girls of Max’s clique are named Abby and Norah — all three of them forming MAN. Abby expresses early on to Max that she doesn’t want Ginny messing up their name. If her energy wasn’t already obviously off, she and Norah later forget to invite Ginny to go shopping with them after school. Accepting their pity offer, Ginny tags along. But when she gets there, Abby coerces her to shoplift a pair of earrings for the first time. The shop owner then only accuses Ginny of stealing, even though Abby stole a t-shirt as well. Norah is allegiant to Abby and says nothing (as the only other East Asian character in the show, she is not given much screen time). 

In fact, after Georgia is called and has to utilize her white privilege to help Ginny, Abby quickly turns on Ginny again by telling Georgia it was her idea to shoplift. This gives me whiplash, but perhaps not as much as Ginny quickly forgiving them after one measly apology trip to her house with drugstore makeup. She is wooed by their thought in taking the time to find the perfect shade of foundation. This confuses me. Ginny is very light-skinned. It couldn’t have possibly taken that much time to find her match. 

“You did this for me?” Ginny asks the two backstabbing girls, hand over her blessed heart. 

This is one example of how limited the perspective of white writers is when imagining Black people. They think we walk around hating ourselves, thinking of our Blackness as a burden that we are grateful other white and non-Black people can accommodate. Ginny constantly repeats throughout the show that she’s “too Black for the white kids and too white for the Black kids,” but where are these Black kids who simply just won’t accept her?

Bracia is an unmistakably Black girl who approaches Ginny in the second episode. Unprompted and totally cool, she steps into the middle of the hallway to greet Ginny and introduce herself. She then invites Ginny to come to tryouts for field hockey, where no experience is necessary. Ginny turns down this offer, to which Bracia then suggests she comes to a leadership meeting one day. Seeing Ginny tight-lipped and clearly uninterested, Bracia lets Ginny know that she is welcome to hang with her and her group of (Black) friends anytime. Seeing this scene alone and nothing else from the show, you would never know Ginny was begging for Black acceptance.

As a medium-toned Black girl with two Black parents, full Black facial features, and who is midsized, I have never had the ability to abandon my Blackness in search of popularity. Ginny’s internal conflict in the show is her misfit identity, but when characters like Bracia and her friends are welcoming her to their lunch table and she’s denying all of their offers, it seems like the real issue is that Ginny simply doesn’t want to be Black. Blackness is a bunch of different pieces that never come together to form personhood. 

In the Halloween episode of the show, Ginny’s popularity is solidified thanks to Hunter’s heartfelt performance for her at a band contest that went viral on YouTube, his birthday tap dance for her in the hallway, and her association with MANG. Ginny decides to do some charity work and invite Bracia to a big Halloween party she’s attending with the gang. Bracia agrees readily, despite Ginny blowing off her leadership meeting. 

At this party, Ginny and the girls dress up as different iconic Britney Spears looks. The girls are enjoying themselves and twerking for laughs when Bracia enters in her mermaid costume. Ginny notices her and stops twerking, awkwardly stumbling over and calling her Halle Bailey. Bracia gives Ginny a questioning look and asks what she’s supposed to be. Embarrassed and feeling judged in her Blonde wig, Ginny lies and says it wasn’t her idea, and walks away. When she goes into the bathroom, she sees some comments under her boyfriend’s performance video calling her “the whitest Black girl ever seen” and an “ugly half breed.” This is all too much for her, and she begins to cry. 

These are nasty, racist things to say and I understand why they would hurt Ginny, but there is something insidious and misleading to place this scene directly behind Bracia’s interaction with Ginny as if Bracia’s genuine question was as harmful as a (likely) white person using a slur. The white gaze will find any way to demonize Black people and wring Blackness out for the twerking, the hip hop, the hairstyles — while wearing our skin as a monstrous costume. I think for this reason, including these scenes in the Halloween episode was quite appropriate.

What makes the fact that this show centers whiteness even more apparent is that Ginny is continuously mistreated by her white friends and she readily forgives them each time. In the eighth episode, Abby sits the girls down at Ginny’s place of work and tells them that they have not been there for her enough while her parents were in the process of getting divorced. Ginny explains patiently that she herself has had family issues and everybody can’t drop their obligations at any given moment to tend to her. Despite even Max chiming in to agree, Abby tells only Ginny to shut up. When Ginny speaks again and calls her behavior bitchy, Abby rises and slaps her. 

No one is angry enough for me — including Ginny. Instead of the girls reprimanding Abby, they all just slap themselves and laugh and act like nothing happened. To a rational person, this scene does not make sense, especially given the context of Abby’s track record of abuse of Ginny. How is it that Ginny can laugh this off but can’t get past Bracia asking her a question at the Halloween party? How is Ginny able to overlook being the only Black person in her friend group and call them family, but can’t give Bracia and her crew the time of day? Even before Ginny reached maximum popularity, she was determined to fit in with MANG. Bracia was just as eager to befriend Ginny as Max was, except with more boundaries — backing away when she realized Ginny wasn’t interested. 

With white writers, the happy ending is always when white characters come out on top in the end. It’s worth noting that despite Ginny’s dad being handsome, charming, and madly in love with Georgia since they were both teenagers, their relationship doesn’t work out because he sees how happy she is in Wellsbury and with her people, dating a power-hungry white male mayor. Not only does this relationship get discarded, but so does Georgia’s relationship with Joe, the handsome South Asian shop owner who she uses for opportunities to get in with the mayor, but who she also shares an intimate childhood memory with that was so sweet of a plot point, one would have thought they certainly would date. Every character who is a person of color in this show is used for diversity points, some type of emotional labor for white characters, and then swiftly swept aside. The final example of this comes in the last episode.

Max finds out that Marcus and Ginny have slept together by going through Marcus’ phone when he isn’t around. She gives Ginny the cold shoulder at school, and even allows a racist offhand comment her English teacher directed at Ginny in front of the class pass — a stark contrast from the first episode where she defended Ginny. One of the most accurate things portrayed in this show is how white people will revoke their allyship to Black people when they no longer feel like doing it. White allyship is all about the white person, not Black people.

Distressed by this incident, Ginny exits class and runs to the bathroom, where, lo and behold, Bracia comes to save the day. She shares her own gripes about this particular teacher and how he treated her the year prior, and Ginny is glad she finally has someone to relate to. Bracia says she knows how hard it can be (i.e. racism) and she never wanted her to believe that she was at Wellsbury going through it alone. Ginny tells Bracia that she felt as though Bracia didn’t like her after the Halloween party, to which Bracia responds that she doesn’t care what Ginny does. She knows how it can be and doesn’t have the ability to put on a blonde wig and fit in for a night. It was supposed to be a heartwarming, Full House moment, but Bracia did not benefit from it.

Despite this conversation, when MAN rejects Ginny from their usual lunch table and Bracia invites her over, Ginny still decides she is an outcast when Bracia’s friends start talking about applying to a few HBCUs. She’s spent her entire life not knowing Blackness (much like the white creators of this show) and how dare these Black people not be accommodating enough to her lack of experience? They’re nothing but nice to her and don’t pressure her to talk about school, yet Ginny is still longing for her old table. Again, whiteness is idealized — being in proximity to whiteness gives half-Black girl her sense of completion. We do not see Bracia again after this scene, and it’s unclear if we’ll ever see her again in the upcoming second season considering how she was treated and the fact that she’s a senior. 

Watching Bracia get kicked to the curb every time is completely representative of how monoracial brown and dark-skinned Black girls’ and women’s stories are severely underrepresented and underfunded in the film industry, especially Netflix. White creators will never fully commit to diversity, so they do Diversity Lite— only hiring the most light-skinned, racially ambiguous characters they can because they can work with that. Girls who are unmistakably Black cannot be written in as main characters by white people, because then you get Black trauma porn like in the Amazon original series Them or a cast that is majority white. Every show that seems like it’s making progress on Netflix is pushed aside by the algorithm or canceled, like Grand Army (the only teen show I’ve seen in years to show two Black characters in a romantic relationship, let alone one of them being a Haitian immigrant) or Blood and Water. We are segregated to the Black Stories section, and removed from the pool of shows and movies people actually choose from. 

This intentional erasure sends overt messages to brown and dark-skinned Black girls and non-men observing. It tells them that light skin is the standard for Blackness and systemically makes opportunities inaccessible to them. These are not conversations to be had in a show with a 95% white cast and crew. Film schools, studios, and casting agencies need to actually start putting Black people on and addressing their colorism issues at home — with themselves. I don’t want a Black girl on screen being used as an emotional vacuum, whose entire identity is based on promoting awareness. Let’s stop using Black actors as mouthpieces for white writers’ “woke” social commentary. They do not know what they are talking about. 

In film and tv, I want an all-Black girlfriend group, an all-Black girl rock band, skater Black girls, bisexual Black girls, and I want them to look like me and my family on both sides. Like Georgia says, it’s exhausting living in a world that isn’t designed for you. Why is it so hard to create new ones? 

 
Nia Sampsonbatch 6