I honestly don't believe he was elected based on Affirmative Action at all, but I do believe there were some people who were guilt-tripped into voting for him because no one wants to be called racist by some random crazy person bringing it up out of the blue, and surely it didn't help that's the altar he was being lifted on by the media creaming themselves over the thought. The DNC itself, though, I'm sure had to pick their poison apple in the basket of Affirmative Action, and so it was either gonna be a black man or a white woman continuing on a presidential dynasty--well, Americans were getting tired of dynasties. Still are tired of dynasties.
The DNC really just played itself. Put all their eggs in one basket, I suppose.
Earlier, some younger Kiwis were mentioning stories of what it was like to be in school when Obama was being elected, and I honestly have a hard time remembering what it was like for me since I had been too busy focusing on school work and wondering what to do after graduation, so I hadn't paid attention to the buzz going around (I'm sure some students were excited at the thought). What I can tell you is that that was actually the year when I started noticing "race" for the first time. Like, as an actual concept I was noticing it when I didn't before (even during history lessons) because race was always brought up whenever Obama was being talked about and why it was such an important milestone to America's history that we vote in a black man into office. I remember thinking the whole election year "Why is everybody caring about this? Why are we making skin color such a big deal?" because I actually live someplace diverse, and ever since I was born I've always had diverse family members, neighbors, and friends and classmates, people of multiple colors were in every cartoon and show I watched, and I had never noticed everything around me was so diverse because it wasn't something I had ever cared to notice until the TVs and radios kept making it a big deal that it was hard to not notice. Hell, I didn't realize being black was an actual thing because darker-colored people were just brown to me no matter what because I thought they were just outside in the sun more than me.
So basically, 2008 was my "wake up call" or something like that in realizing there's such a thing as race. And that's when racial tension came to my attention, and I honestly have no idea if it was always that bad (social stuff going on in the '90s was something I had to learn about in hindsight), or if it actually got worse because Obama getting elected meant you couldn't even yawn in the direction of a television with his face on it without being called a racist. It's why I wonder if he was allowed to have the leeway of doing anything or not at all by the basis of him being scrutinized based on the color of his skin and not by his own works and beliefs.
I do want to return to a general state of colorblind, which I feel we had around the late 90s to early 00s.
I grew up as the exact target demographic for something like Captain Planet. One of the things I remember about that show is that the show didn't really care about the cast's races despite being explicitly global. When the writers did bother to do backstory episodes they showed why the culture was good - and bad. As an example, Wheeler had a drunk dad that beat him but had a loyal street gang of friends. The show didn't disconnect the cultures from how they operated, nor did they refrain from showing how
your personal responsibility was key to
your good future.
For all its faults (and there were many) and the hokey writing (we're talking Thundercats levels of cringe) the general storylines in Captain Planet were executed well.
Shows like Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog, TMNT, and X-Men also dealt with an important concept that seems absent in today's kids media: being different is simultaneously okay
and irrelevant. The differences in physical form weren't what made a
person. Acceptance isn't celebration, it's goddamn boredom.
Nowadays there's garbage like Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and the She-Ra reboot occupying an overwhelming part of pop culture, where superficial form, orientation, and color differences matter way more than ideological and personality differences do.
If you look at this era of showmaking, it all started vaguely around when Obama became commander-in-chief. I'm not going to say it's his fault, because it's not; rather, it's the heightened consciousness that everyone put on his skin color. This collective "oh my GOD he's BLACK" seeped into pop culture and honestly infected everything; the people that grew up on this toxicity have now become adults and are running rampant.
The most prominent example I can think of for how this has affected entertainment for adult viewers was in the show The 100. The show opens after the near-extinction of the human race. One character managed to be an extremely prolific sword fighter and leader of a huge union of tribes, essentially the POTUS of what remained of humanity. She also happened to be a lesbian. It was pretty well done, the occasional romance here or there, not really in your face or shown more than others in the show. She unexpectedly died near the end of season 3. Well, that was just going too damn far. In a show that featured off-screen nuclear deaths of 7 billion people and the on-screen graphic deaths of hundreds of others, killing the one random lesbian broke the internet. Suddenly, this was a #BuryYourGays moment and a travesty because surely the
lesbian wouldn't be treated as an
equal on this show. no no no, she should have been
spared because
reasons. It wasn't like it was mentioned once and never brought up again. The consequences of her death actually directly shaped the rest of the season plus the next one, and still has vestigial components today. It was an important story point that was well executed but none of that matters because of muh diversity.
The diversity quotas just make everything so much more annoying.