Friends: A Cultural History by Jennifer C. Dunn

Author:Jennifer C. Dunn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Tv, Non-Fiction, Illustrated, Media Tie-In, History
ISBN: 9781538112748
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-12-03T23:00:00+00:00

Joey, Ross, and Charlie at a conference in Barbados.

Warner Brothers / Photofest © Warner Brothers

Having both Gabrielle Union’s and Aisha Tyler’s characters date both Joey and Ross further privileges the white male characters as individuals and suggests that the seemingly limited black female characters can be interchanged for one another and passed from one man to another.

These episodes also contrast Charlie with Monica. The running joke through both episodes for Monica is that the humidity in Barbados is wreaking havoc with her hair and making it get increasingly curly, until it resembles a Disco-era Diana Ross (or her daughter black-ish’s Traci Ellis Ross currently). While Charlie does not interact with Monica much in these episodes, the rest of the white cast makes comments about how unattractive Monica’s ginormous hair is. But when Monica decides to do something about her hair, Charlie is there to comment. Monica gets her hair under control with cornrow braids with shells at the bottom. Monica’s “cultural appropriation sets the groundwork for the key thing her braids do—give rise to an ironic joke that explicitly characterizes Charlie as inauthentically black.”[23] The friends make fun of Monica by pointing out that she has shellfish in her hair and that they can see her scalp. While Charlie cannot think of anything other than that “it’s something” at first, she later encourages her by saying, “You go, girlfriend!” The way she says the line reveals her discomfort, prompting Ross to ask if she has ever said that phrase before. She admits she has not. Interestingly, in an earlier season, Monica too tried to be supportive by yelling, “You go girl!” before she admitted that she could not pull off the phrase (Episode 2.19, “The One where Eddie Won’t Go”). At once, “Charlie must suffer Monica’s commodified consumption of blackness and the ensuing spectacle of whiteness and racism in the episode”[24] and Charlie is whitewashed as her inability to use colloquial language is on par with Monica’s.

Much like the black scientist Peter from the earlier scene who never speaks, Charlie cannot use the black diction that Rhonda did. The classism, racism, and patriarchy that Charlie is required to negotiate as a black character who must assimilate to keep her space among the friends is made explicit. It is a white man who makes it clear that she is unable to perform blackness, precisely because, for the friends, she has never been black.[25]

Charlie ends up then as “not too black” while at the same time she ends up being critiqued for “acting” black “even as she is confronted with the spectacle of a white woman who has commodified it and who is found amusing for doing so.”[26] At the same time, this particular white woman has already established that she cannot get away with “acting black.” So both women are established as acting white.

Having set Charlie and Ross up as perfect partners (in contrast to her relationship with Joey), the series then faced the difficulty of how to break them up in order to continue Ross’s trajectory toward Rachel in the end.

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