I’m not going to talk about the Oscars slapping drama, or “PKGate,” as I heard it referred to recently.
But I do want to talk about the movies.
I am surrounded by people who lost their minds for the second season of Bridgerton on Netflix recently.
If you haven’t seen it, join the club because neither have I.
But I do know that it is a 19th century period drama featuring a healthy dose of people of colour (PoC).
It is yet another example of how the momentum in media and movie representativity has been picking up since I last wrote about this.
It was starting to look promising then already, when the whole PoC community was feeling giddy about the phenomenal success of Black Panther.
The pace has been steadily picking up with strong black characters taking iconic roles in big budget movies like James Bond, where the 007 mantle temporarily belongs to a black female character.
It may seem insignificant, but it is a very big deal, as it shifts the world’s psychology about black excellence, one frame at a time.
For example, I grew up watching a TV show about the gentleman burglar Arsene Lupin, where every character was white.
In the modern Netflix version, the lead character is the very tall, very dark and very handsome Omar Sy.
The show is so popular that it is in its second season and Omar has won the French version of an Oscar.
More importantly, the change is having an effect on our kids. I used to love Spiderman as a kid, but in my household, the animation featuring the black Spiderman, Miles Morales, is wildly more popular than the live action.
The animations Soul, Coco and more recently Encanto have all had a huge impact on black kids across the world, with dark eyes, curly black hair and brown skin all being celebrated as both normal and even extraordinary.
I read a story of a mother saying that her little dreadlocked boy firmly believes he is Encanto’s Antonio, because the two look so much alike.
It is sweet and heart-warming, but also an overdue correction in the self-image and confidence-building of children of colour.
And clearly it was needed, because the world responded positively and the movies made a lot of money.
The groundswell has become irreversible and the more our kids see themselves in the characters they adore, the more possible their dreams become.