Rebecca Kumar
Abstract: The decade in which Stranger Things is set was a crucial turning point in post-civil rights African-American history. For many, the Reagan-era is associated less with halcyon suburbs like Hawkins, where America was once “great,” and more with the virulently racist War on Drugs, which targeted and criminalized black Americans, constructing them as monsters who must be disciplined and jailed. The events of the era continue to impede genuine racial integration in the United States today. This essay argues that the series’ historically amnesic approach to representations of racial difference result in a problematically colorblind portrayal of Lucas Sinclair, the only black child in The Party. And its deployment of horror’s core genealogical convention – the substitution of “the other” with monstrous bodies – reinforces, however unwittingly, ideologies of segregation. As a result, Stranger Things is a telling political palimpsest that overlays Reagan-era nationalism with that of the contemporary Trump-era.
Introduction
“I blame Reagan for making me a monster.” – Jay Z, “Blue Magic”
In the wake of the 2016 series premiere of Stranger Things, its fans buzzing with energetic excitement, Saturday Night Live offered some sobering racial commentary on the series’ first installment. The sketch “Stranger Things Season Two Sneak Peak” opened with a pair of caricatured Duffer Brothers (Mikey Day and Alex Moffat) announcing that the second season will “solve some of the first season’s biggest mysteries, like: where is The Upside Down? Is Barb coming back? And where is that black kid’s family?” (SNL 42.02). While the dislocation of The Upside Down and Barb’s disappearance was the result fantastical circumstances, the absence of Lucas Sinclair’s home life, they admitted, “was a little oversight” on their part – “whoops!” they sheepishly shrug, cringing at their larger racial blunder (42.02).
“So to nip this one in the bud before the blogs” come after them, the Duffer Brothers offer a “Sneak Peak” of Stranger Things 2 : Lucas (Sasheer Zamata), confronted by his parents, has to choose between finding The Upside Down with his white friends in The Party or returning home with his black parents played by SNL cast members, Leslie Jones and Kenan Thompson. Lucas’s mother gives him a stern look and reminds him that, “people who look like us already live in the Upside Down.” His dad adds, “You don’t have to go looking for scary stuff, it’s going to find you.” Dungeons and Dragons may be the central intertext in the series, but this echoes more “My Dungeon Shook,” (1962) James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, warning him of the racial prejudice and violence he’ll likely experience. For Lucas’s father, the Dungeon that his son should be concerned with is Baldwin’s Biblical metaphor for racial circumscription by white America. It poses a greater, more immediate threat than the other, a role-playing fantasy game that “little white kids” play in the safety of cozy, suburban, basements (SNL 42.02).
And if SNL ’s biting critique of Stranger Things’ colorblindness wasn’t clear enough in this opening exchange, when the parodied police chief, a bumbling version of Jim Hopper (Beck Bennett), arrives on the scene, Lucas’s parents immediately put their hands up in the air to show they are unarmed. By doing so, they recall the contemporary #BlackLivesMatter protest chant, “hands up don’t shoot,” popularized after the murder of 18-year-old African American teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in 2014. With this gesture, they also harken to a very different 1980s filmic intertext than the ones that shape the series: Do the Right Thing (Lee 1989), in which Radio Raheem is killed by New York police, representative of the ways in which police brutality is an everyday fear that has long shaped black American reality, no matter where in the country. Black children are particularly vulnerable; Tamir Rice was just 12 years old, the age of Lucas and his friends in Season One, when he was killed by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann in 2014. “Ahhhhh, the monster!” Lucas’s SNL parents exclaim upon seeing the police chief, reminding audiences how very strange and scary it is, from their perspective, that an armed cop is “friends” with their child.
The SNL skit did what the series has not: it considered black spectators, who Manthia Diawara famously argued in the same era in which Stranger Things is set, are interchangeable with “resisting spectators” (66). By rewriting the script from the particular point of view of black American parents raising their child in a predominantly white suburban town in Indiana, the SNL sketch “gave rise to different readings of the same material” (Diawara 67). Its comic effect relied on the fact that many white spectators of Stranger Things have been colorblind to Lucas. Taken by the show’s charming nostalgia, the white spectator can overlook Lucas’s marginalized position as one of the very few African American children in Hawkins and the larger storyworld of the show. Written from the perspective of a resisting spectator with, what bell hooks famously called an “oppositional gaze,” the widely discussed SNL sketch drew attention to the overwhelming ideological whiteness of the show.
As several of the contributors to this issue have brilliantly outlined, both seasons of Stranger Things subvert conservative tropes and stereotypes that shape Reagan-era film, especially as they concern gender and sexuality. Unfortunately, though, its racialized characters are generally treated as they have always been in the longer genealogy of horror film – as inconsequential. While they are not killed off – a disturbing trope in the genre that Ytasha Womack has highlighted– they are either relegated to the margins as extras or absorbed into suburban whiteness without question or explanation, like Luke and his family (7). Lucas and the other racialized characters in the series seem to exist a world affected by historical amnesia about race relations in the Midwest and the larger United States. The only other prominent black character in the show, Officer Calvin Powell (Rob Morgan), seems to suffer from it too. The notoriously racist and unethical “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was plastered on the front-page news of the New York Times in 1973; it leftmany black Americans suspicious of healthcare and even more suspicious of the government given the U.S. Public Health Service’sinvolvement. And in the 1970s-80s it came to light that an African-American woman, Henrietta Lacks was the unwitting source of “HeLa cells,” one of the most important cell lines in medical research, spurring debates about the interconnectedness between racism and unprincipled healthcare that continue to today (Lacks.) And yet, when Chief Hopper (David Harbour) speculates that the government might be responsible for experimentation on children, Officer Powell remains unbelievably skeptical of the accusation. “I don’t know, Chief,” he scoffs, “This lady, Terry Ives, sounds like a real nut to me. Her kid was taken for LSD mind control experiments? She’s been discredited. Her claim was thrown out” (1.03). Considering the bioethical debates raging in the era, it seems unlikely that Powell could so easily dismiss Ives’ accusation and trust the courts that discredited her claims. Officer Powell concludes that Hopper’s speculation is “a reach,” while Hopper himself becomes the series’ hero for figuring out what many black Americans have known for so long, that the U.S. scientific and healthcare establishments are not to be trusted. This historical amnesia of America’s past, along with conventions of horror and the pervasive whiteness of the series’ 1980s source texts, work together to encourage problematically colorblind spectatorship.
The SNL sketch, however, pierces the colorblind storyworld of Stranger Things, crossing its invisible racial boundary. American towns and cities may hold onto the neoliberal belief that if, in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s words, “blacks, and other minorities would just stop thinking about the past, work hard, and complain less (particularly about racial discrimination), then Americans of all hues could ‘all get along,’” but the SNL sketch reminds spectators that racial difference has long been kept out of places like Hawkins, against black people’s efforts to integrate (1). It reminds its audience that “racial considerations shade almost everything in America,” especially residential areas and housing (Bonilla-Silva 2, Coates). Civil Rights may have amended Jim Crow laws, but the United States has remained spatially stratified along racially demographic lines – all while most Americans believe that the United States is now racially integrated (Bonilla-Silva 2, 28-36; Coates). Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case of Reparations,” for example, features an interactive map that shows Chicago is as segregated now was it was in the 1950s. NPR did a special report on Portland’s inability to diversify its demographic, tracing the city back to its segregationist history (Templeton). And both Chicago and Portland are two of the major metropolises in the Midwest. So: how did a rural, suburban town like Hawkins is imagined to be, come to be home to the Sinclairs? What kind of discriminations did the Sinclairs endure to get there? These questions are never answered and, as a result, Stranger Things reflects Ronald Reagan’s post-Civil Rights America in which there is “racism without racists” and a drive toward securing “safe” (a synonym for segregationist) residential borders from anybody or anything that the community imagines will disturb the status quo. It is telling that, at the same time that Stranger Things de-racializes Lucas, his family, and other characters of color who reside in Hawkins, it also creates a symbolic and metaphysical delineation between “self” and “other” as the characters endeavor to keep Hawkins safe from a threateningly-close, ever-encroaching, parallel dimension: the dark and deadened Upside Down (Hall). While the Upside Down represents the obvious Cold War anxieties about American terrain becoming different (“communist”), this essay suggests that the feared difference is racial, recalling another war of the 1980s besides America’s Cold one: Reagan’s War on Drugs. Thus, the Upside Down is also a black American space, the War on Drugs’ targeted “black ghetto”. As such, its policing – by Hawkins’s residents and the U.S. government – reinforces, however unwittingly, spectators’ segregationist desires for border control.
Given the series’ colorblind racism, its representational advancements with regard to gender and sexuality likewise ironically work to maintain the whiteness of the show. On the one hand, Stranger Things appears to celebrate difference – strong women, soft men, homosocial nerds and weirdos – yet, on the other, it is narratively focused on the securitization of a pervasively white world. Its representational advancements thus veer into what Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism”: when configurations of gender and sexuality realign in relation to forces of securitization. For instance, Stranger Things purports what Sarah Banet-Weiner calls “popular” feminism, which exists “spectacularly in an economy of visibility, where it often remains just that: visibility” (2). This version of feminism is in line with the number of conservative American women who openly identify as feminists (Fishwick). Yet this version of “feminism” is one that merely siphons privilege from white patriarchy, maintaining white supremacy while imagining gender equality. It does not dismantle patriarchy because patriarchy and whiteness are mutually constitutive, their borders secured against everything that isn’t one or the other.
This point is relevant to both the political contexts of 1980s nostalgia and those of the present, specifically the relationship between the fantasy of securitization played out in Stranger Things and the election of Donald Trump as a candidate committed to homeland security. Stranger Things premiered just before the 2016 American presidential election, at the height of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns. For many Americans, the impending election felt like political déjà vu. A Clinton was again on the ballot and Trump was recycling some very familiar rhetoric. The republican nominee had already established his position as an American nationalist, who insisted that he, if elected, would maintain “law and order,” a euphemistic phrase that celebrates the police. His public promise aimed at intimidating protestors involved in the uprisings in both Ferguson, after the verdict concerning the murder of Mike Brown, and Baltimore, after the murder of Freddie Gray (Nelson). Trump also created a platform based on “border control,” targeting undocumented immigrants in the United States, who he unabashedly further criminalized by calling drug dealers and rapists, insinuating a renewed War on Drugs (Lee). Trump was tapping into the romantic Reagan nostalgia that had emboldened American conservatives since the 1980s president’s death and the election of more progressive Barack Obama, both nearly a decade earlier – and he was doing it with fervor, to appeal to the Tea Party republicans who believed even Reagan was soft. It was, indeed, Reagan who popularized both phrases. “Law and order” was his catchphrase as he exacerbated Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs and his tough criminal justice stance, feeding the prison industrial complex (Alexander; Hummel). And while largely a failure, from a conservative perspective, Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was synonymous with “border control” and, as Alex Leary has documented, “the law gave birth to ‘amnesty’ as a slur”. While “law and order” may imply a domestic concern and “border control” may imply a foreign concern, the two phrases are actually intertwined. They are both about maintaining segregation. Stranger Things appears to be anti-Reagan and anti-government by making fun of Mike’s father, conservative Ted Wheeler (Joe Chrest), for his privileged cluelessness about the nation’s corruption. But he is nevertheless a telling political palimpsest, overlaying Reagan-era nationalism with that of our contemporary Trump-era (see Figure 1). “We’re all patriots in this house!” he proudly announces, when government officials show up at his home in search of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) (2.02). His statement seems to suggest that his home is a microcosm, a representational extension, of Reagan’s state. It, like, the nation, is a sovereign space that must be purged and protected. This paper argues that Ted Wheeler’s declaration of unbridled patriotism might as well be the refrain for both Hawkins’s xenophobic exclusivity and likewise the current political moment in America.
Closing “the Gate”: Metaphors of Segregation
Stranger Things is celebrated for its sense of authenticity in its recreation of the 1980s. However its painstakingly detailed mise en scène of Reagan’s American suburb, which emphasizes the fashion, music, movies, food and general consumer goods of the era, is rendered opaque in relation to the lived experience of black Americans in the decade. Lucas is not representative of most black boys in the period, but he and family’s strikingly seamless racial integration into it is curiously decontextualized As Antonio De Loera-Brust highlights:
Lucas is a rare representation of a young boy of color enjoying an all-American boyhood – just like the white kids. But Lucas is also underdeveloped […] How did Lucas’s family get to Hawkins? How aware of his ethnicity is he? What do his parents do? How did their neighbors first welcome them to the neighborhood?
These questions are particularly pertinent, De Loera-Brust points out, because the real-life Indiana town, Goshen, was once a “sundown town,” that violently penalized African-Americans if they were found in town after sunset. In 2015, Goshen passed a resolution, apologizing for that history, and acknowledged how it foreclosed racial integration for years to come. De Loera-Brust writes: “[Goshen] was a slowly emerging black world stifled and driven out of town to make room for the nice small town whites would build for themselves. If Hawkins were real, it might have been a sundown town, like the real town of Goshen. That might explain why Lucas is so racially isolated.” Even now, black Americans only make up 3.1% of the population of Goshen (City-data.com).
Goshen is not the only real-life reference for Hawkins. There is another setting that grounds Stranger Things, but is also decontextualized: Georgia, where the series is filmed, which provides the actual landscape of the fictional town of Hawkins. Georgia, especially Atlanta, is undergoing rampant gentrification – which is directly proportional to the increased number of television filmings that take place there, making the city “home” to multiple American shows and movies (Apperson). This new “Hollywood of the South” has a longer history of race relations, from slavery to Civil Rights (Dockterman). In particular, Atlanta in the 1980s, the era in which Stranger Things is set, was brimming with racial tension in the 15 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination. The “Child Murders” also affected the city; from 1971-81 more than 28 black children were killed – which, if a historical citation for Stranger Things, is problematically de-racialized (Lindsey). Finally, in the decade in which Stranger Things was set Atlanta, like many predominantly black areas of the United States, was hit hard by the combination of Reaganomics and an excessively violent and racist iteration of the War on Drugs. Reagan’s public policy plans slashed social safety nets by assaulting the tax code, targeting who he called “black ghetto’s welfare queens.” This assault also defunded schools and resulted in the loss of jobs (Crunkite). Many poor black Americans turned to selling drugs, which entered their communities as a side effect of Reagan’s Iran Contra, to make a living. Although these dealers often sold to white American users, they were explicitly demonized as the problem (Jay Z “The War”). In 1989, the F.B.I documented that Atlanta had “the nation’s highest crime rate” (Applebome.) Yet as Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, black Americans had little to do with the drug trade itself. As she points out The War on Drugs actually predated the heroin epidemic of the 1970s and crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, which were only later used to justify and exacerbate the war against black Americans whose integrationist successes during the Civil Rights movement threatened the stratification of power between whites and blacks (5). In 1994, John Erlichman, Nixon’s White House domestic affairs advisor, admitted that the soft war was started to disrupt and imprison anti-war protestors and black Americans as both groups were resistant to white American exclusivity abroad and at home:
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities […] We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (qtd. in Hummel).
Reagan followed suit so powerfully that he is now more associated with the war than Nixon. Reagan set the precedent to openly target black areas, co-sign racial profiling, and incarcerate so many black men that now one in three are in jail, some serving life sentences for non-violent, simple possession crimes, and others serving time for no crime at all (Alexander;13th ). Of course these factors contribute to Atlanta’s recent demographic shifts – after decades of “white flight” following the Civil Rights movement, whites are returning, in droves, to what has been lovingly called “the black mecca” by black Americans across the county (Apperson; Hopson; Kruse).
Owing to the way that Lucas is so colorblindly kept safe from these racial realities, both past and present, in both Indiana and Georgia – material and social contexts that inform the show’s very production – De Loera-Brust’s central question about Stranger Things is rarely asked: “Could Hawkins be a place haunted not just by the Upside Down, but by the ghosts of our country’s racist past?” I would argue that the Upside Down is America’s racist past. Or, more specifically, the Upside Down is a representation of America’s longstanding fears about racial integration, with its monstrous “others,” the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer, representative of threats to America’s halcyon suburbia, “the kind of town where nothing ever happens,” infecting and destroying all that seemingly made America great (2.09).
That monsters or monstrous places are embodiments of phobias is not new. Robin Wood argues that horror, since the 1930s, can be interpreted in two ways: simply, “as a means of disavowal (horror exists, but is un-American), or […] as a means of locating horror as a ‘country of the mind’, as psychological state” (85, his parenthetical). I believe that these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. What horrifies the (white) American spectator is a construction of what is “un-American” or threatens American life. Take for example an important horror intertext for Stranger Things, Jaws (1975). In Spielberg’s film the ocean that borders the idyllic beach is a source of pleasure, but also represents a mysterious “othered” space that humans feel entitled to delight and traffic in – but not vice versa: the ocean should not overtake the beach. The uncontrollable shark is an extension of the ocean’s possible dangers, crossing an ill-defined border into the shallower coastal waters where carefree American teens skinny dip and innocent children play, killing them. Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that a popular reading of Jaws ’ shark remains that it is a construction, a representation, of “the foreign threat to ordinary Americans.” As a result the shark represents both something un-American and a psychological state: American xenophobia.
Stranger Things – especially the first season – parallels Jaws in so many ways that the series’ marketers created a homage movie poster in its honor (see figures 3 and 4). In Stranger Things, the Upside Down acts much like Jaws ’ ocean and the Demogorgon acts much like its shark. The Upside Down shares a dimensional border with Hawkins, but cannot be contained within it. Once the “gate” opened, the Demogorgon crossed the dimensional border –literally tearing through the walls, invading homes – feeding on Hawkins’s children: Barbara Holland (Shannon Purser), Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), and almost Holly Wheeler (Anniston and Tinsley Price) (1.01, 1.03). The Upside Down and its monsters operate similarly to their Jaws counterparts: they are figured as un-American threats.
They are most obviously the result of American Cold War tactics gone wrong, foreign, likely Russian communist, leakage into quiet American suburbia. But I argue that they are also foreignized threats; they are made to seem foreign, constructed so, but they are actually domestic – homegrown. The Upside Down is what Freud might call an “uncanny” space, frightening but familiar. That it mirrors Hawkins – as inversion, suburbia in toxic decay – is significant. It suggests a closer, more familiar threat that the un-mappable ocean of Jaws (2.05). In other words, the Upside Down and its monsters might represent black American spaces and bodies. Even though the Upside Down and the Demogorgon aren’t literally black, throughout the series, the significations of racial difference are deployed. The Upside Down and Hawkins are oppositionally defined – much like suburbia and the black ghetto, whiteness and blackness. The protagonists’ central task is to preserve and defend Hawkins and Will from becoming different. And whiteness has long depended on defining and defending itself via racial difference. Kim Hall reminds us that racial discourse predates its wholesale attachment to skin color; the interplay of lightness and darkness, chiaroscuro’s ability to make whiteness legible in comparison to blackness, has long existed (2-6). She argues: “the binaries of black and white might be the originary language of racial difference” (2). Similarly, Fred Moten argues that blackness signifies “an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the time being absolutely indispensible to normative order (180). Blackness is thus a powerful and horrifying fiction. Drawing on Moten, Calvin Warren goes so far to argue that black people have no ontology; instead he says that, “the function of black(ness) is to give form to a terrifying formlessness (nothing)” (5, parentheticals his). The tagline for one of the Stranger Things movie posters reads: “Don’t go into the void” – reminding viewers of the ever-present terrifying nothingness, the empty black space that, if not contained, can erase racial difference (Figure 4).
This context informs the ways in which black American spaces and bodies have been imagined and treated as non-American since slavery, when these metaphysical ideas of blackness were mapped onto bodies. Ava DuVurnay’s documentary 13th, outlines just how black Americans were constructed as America’s domestic “others” whose citizenship must be limited. The film traces how since the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. has tried to contain free blacks that it believes are a threat to America’s safety, constructing stories and stereotypes about their criminality, baseness, and difference, justifying their segregation from American whites. Segregationist Jim Crow laws were put into place in response to these early efforts to make black Americans full citizens. The War on Drugs and mass incarceration of black men were the response to the Civil Rights Movement for desegregation. If overlaid onto the world of Stranger Things, this domestic xenophobia finds allegorical resonance: the Upside Down and its monsters cross the segregating line and terrorize Hawkins after “sundown” and the corruption, danger, and decay associated with the uncontainable black American ghetto overtakes white suburbia. Stranger Things suggests that maintaining segregation, keeping the gate closed, requires consistent warfare. Indeed, in the final moments of Season Two, the camera pans back, leaves the Hawkins Middle School gymnasium – the venue for the adorably awkward “Snow Ball” – ventures outside, and then turns upside to reveal the same warm and festive gym, inverted. The final image is of the gym in the Upside Down, lightening flashing, the Mind Flayer’s black tentacles extending menacingly over the unassuming Hawkins kids (2.09). This final image represents the primary phobia about integration: how the “self” can very easily become “other” when the “self” is not actively profiling, policing, segregating.
“Nobody Wants to be Winston, Man” or Disassociating from Blackness
Because Stranger Things does not engage directly with Reagan Era racism or with blackness’s signification in the 1970s-80s horror films that it recycles, its black characters not only lack racial identity, but also seem to reject racialization. Instead of characterizing Lucas with regard to his experience growing up as one of the few black kids in Hawkins, the show depicts Lucas in a largely colorblind manner, focusing on his nerdiness, his commitment to destroying the Upside Down and closing the gate, and his burgeoning romance with Max(ine) Mayfield (Sadie Sink) – as if these aspects of his life have nothing to do with race.
Lucas’s skin color rarely comes up in Stranger Things, and when it does, it is quickly disavowed. It is quietly recognized in the first season – Lucas is nicknamed “Midnight” by a pair of white bullies, Troy and James, that harass the Party – but nothing more comes of that racial taunt (1.01). (Overall bullying in Stranger Things is de-racialized – even in Season Two when Billy Hargrove [Dacre Montgomery] throws Lucas into a wall for befriending Max, yelling, “stay away from her!”) (2.09). And it comes up, more significantly, when Lucas and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) get into an argument over Halloween costumes (2.02). The Party decides to go as the Ghostbusters (Reitman 1984), but both Lucas and Mike arrive to school as Venkman, played by Bill Murray. Mike is visibly irritated because he presumed that Lucas would be Winston, the only black Ghostbuster, played by Ernie Hudson. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Will share uncomfortable glances and Lucas says what they are all thinking: “Nobody wants to be Winston, man” (see Figure 5). Dustin agrees non-verbally, pursing his lips and nodding. Will agrees so wholeheartedly that he suggests that there could be “two Venkmans” on their team. (Notably, neither Dustin nor Will volunteer to be Winston.) In order to get his way, Mike tells Lucas that he thinks, “Winston is cool”. But Lucas claps-back and says that Mike should be Winston if he thinks he’s so cool. When Mike responds that he “can’t,” Lucas demands to know why and Mike begins stuttering: “B-because…” Lucas finishes his sentence for him with a not so rhetorical question – “Because you’re not black?” – encouraging Mike to think through his racial assumptions, however unconscious they may be.
Megan Vick reads this moment as a subversion of racial tokenism. She highlights that “The Token Minority trope” is:
a tale as old as non-segregated television time. There’s a group of white kids in the center of the action, but they also hang out with one person of color (most commonly black) who is often steeped heavily in stereotypes and basically just there to say, ‘Hey, we’re a diverse group!’ They might drop a couple of one-liners, but they never take center stage or do anything meaningful for the story.
Vick argues that with this scene, Stranger Things “didn’t let nostalgia recreate one of the most overplayed racial faux pas of all time. The series highlighted the toxic trope, but then cleverly subverted it without making the audience feel like they were receiving a lecture on diversity and inclusion.” By rejecting identification with Winston, Lucas rejected his identification with a token character. He openly refused to be “shoved into a box because of his skin color” (Vick.)
I largely agree with Vick, but the nagging fact that “Nobody wants to be Winston” remains. That is, all the boys, including Lucas, want to be a white Ghostbuster. While fans of color should identify with and cosplay any character that they want, regardless of skin color, in this instance, the boys vehemently reject the only black Ghostbuster and seem to disassociate with blackness altogether. Stranger Things doesn’t ask of Ghostbusters :why did the only black Ghostbuster “join the team super late,” as an add on? Why wasn’t he “funny”? Why wasn’t he a “scientist”? – it takes these lacks as givens and instead asks: why can’t a black kid be a white Ghostbuster? (2.02). My point is not to suggest that Lucas, or any black kid for that matter, should be forced to identify with or even like Winston. Rather, my point is that in its effort to revise 1970s-80s racial tokenism, Stranger Things insidiously de-racializes Lucas. To my point: The Party’s debate about Winston ends before the boys can really discuss Mike’s racial assumptions. Dustin interrupts the argument to point out the seemingly more important fact that they are the only kids in school that dressed up for Halloween that year, diverting spectators’ away from Lucas’s racial difference to the boys’ supposed sameness as nerdy outsiders. This shift assimilates Lucas into an imagined version of indiscriminate nerdiness, even though, as his exchange with Mike indicates, he’ll never be just a nerd – he is, more specifically, a black nerd who experiences everything, including fandom, in a different way than the rest of the Party. The show doesn’t fully explore what it is like for Lucas to reject and dissociate from black characters not only because they do not share his personality traits, but simply because, like Winston, they are not well-developed, contextualized, or likable. It doesn’t invite meditations on how it feels for fans of color to identify with white characters over black ones. As a result, the show creates a black character who is “constrained to begin defining [himself] in relation” to the constructions of blackness I’ve outlined above (Moten).
The representation of Lucas’s family suffers from similar de-racialization. Lucas’s kid sister, Erica (Priah Ferguson), is a fan favorite, endearingly poking fun of her older brother’s nerdiness every chance she gets, but she is unfortunately stereotyped. Take, for instance, when Dustin needs backup for his rogue Demodog in Season Two. He urgently shouts “Code Red! Code Red!” to Lucas, but he is instead met with Erica on the other line of the Walkie Talkie. Dismissing Dustin’s insistence that she communicates his message to her brother, Erica replies to him with an eye-roll: “mmmhm, I have a code for you, instead: it’s called code: Shut. Your. Mouth!” and abruptly shuts off the Walkie Talkie (2.05). Erica attracted several immediate admirers. Essence described Erica as a “funny, side-eye icon with tons of ‘tude” and crowned her the “a pint sized shade queen” and Vulture called her “the queen of Withering One Liners” (Scott; Jung). Both articles mentioned the countless tweets that celebrated her; some fans hope that the third season will focus solely on her. Her fandom is well deserved. As young black girl, Erica adds much needed representation to cinematic horror and sci fi. Yet again and again, she has been described as “sassy” – an adjective that has stereotyped black American women since the portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (Fleming 1939) (Cooper).
Brittney Cooper writes in Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, “Americans adore sassy black women [but they] don’t realize that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage” (1). Cooper’s claim should go without saying; of course black women aren’t inherently sassy. As she points out, their sass is a reaction to their intersectional positioning as both black and female. Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds audiences in her TED Talk “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” there is generally no “frame” to capture the overlapping identities that shape black women, so they are rendered invisible, as movements to end racial inequality tend to rely on men for their representational optics. The face of the Black Lives Matter movement, she points out, is largely male, even though Black women are the victims of police brutality at equal and sometimes higher rates. Ironically, the Black Lives Matter was started by three queer black women: Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Cooper argues that black women get constructed as “angry” when they openly question their marginalized positionality. Despite their rage being legitimate “Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be contained,” she writes, “as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone” (3). So many “black women turn to sass when rage is too risky” because sass “puts white folks at ease” (2). If “nobody wants to be Winston,” it seems nobody wants to be the Angry Black Woman, either. Thus sass is a strategy to dissociate from this particularly gendered construction of blackness just as geek masculinity is the means to dissociate from Lucas’s race.
Stranger Things uses sass to construct Erica as a young black girl who is more than merely “palatable,” she is “adored” as being innately, naturally, delightfully sassy – even though, as one of the few young black girls in Hawkins, she likely has plenty to be upset about (Cooper 1). Erica is further disassociated from black female rage in light of her mother Mrs. Sinclair (Tara Wescott in Season One and Karen Ceesay in Season Two) (she doesn’t have a first name), who seems to be fashioned after The Cosby Show ’s Clair Huxtable, characterized by her graceful and proud “respectability” – not irrational anger (crunktastic).
Legitimate anger seems to be reserved for solely the white women and girls who are slighted in the series: Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Eleven, and Max. This is made even more obvious when they are juxtaposed with the only other prominent female character of color in Stranger Things, Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), who renames herself Kali, referring to the Hindu goddess of destruction. Kali is a South Asian woman who was also the subject of Dr. Brenner’s abusive experimentation and Eleven seeks her out as a “sister”. Kali’s escape from Hawkins Lab eventually lead her to a life of squatting and then eventually “saving” and heading a rag-tag team of other outcasts, some also of color (2.07). As I’ve outlined elsewhere, the “Thuggee Cult,” an organized gang of professional robbers and murderers in India from the 15th-18thcenturies, were devotees of the goddness Kali. The word “thug,” that is now used to describe a violent criminal, particularly a black man, is etymologically linked to the Thuggee Cult (Kumar). Kali’s gang in Stranger Things is, then, a gang of “thugs” (see Figure 6). They engage in a host of illegal activities for survival. And, more significantly, Kali charges them to enact violent revenge on anybody who was associated with Brenner’s project. Taking Eleven under her wing, Kali teaches her to access and channel her rage over the injustices she’s experienced, for destruction. While Kali is not black – in any case, like the other characters of color in the show, her skin color and race are not mentioned or specified – it’s clear that her signification is. Eleven tells her about her escape and how Hopper had taken her in until he can make a deal with these men to set her free; Kali is not convinced and says: “we’ll always be monsters to them, you understand?” Eleven eventually dissociates from Kali and the possibility of intersectional sisterhood is foreclosed in favor of “saving” suburban white boys who are not saddled with racial and gendered rage, but are, rather, constructed as the victims of it.
Conclusion
In their recent anthology on representations of race Joss Whedon’s works, Mary Ellen Iatropoulos and Lowery A. Woodall argue that:
there’s a connection between foregrounding whiteness and complacently enabling racism to continue; such aesthetic strategies naturalize what is culturally constructed in uncritical terms, and even when they expand to encompass more diverse characters, are not proof-through-absence that there’s not race to be found, but rather, illustrate that racism is rooted deeply albeit subtly into the fabric of […] fictional worlds and our own (14).
The same can be said for the colorblindness and insistence on border control in Stranger Things, which offers incredible opportunities to engage with blackness in more comprehensive and creative ways – that does not reinforce whiteness. The show hints at this possibility when Dustin adopts his “Demodog.” I do not suggest that The Party makes romantic and sentimentalized connections with the Upside Down and its monsters; doing so would allegorize some feel-good, neoliberal fantasy about racial integration. Rather I’m suggesting that the show explore ambivalence about the “other,” like the wavering feelings that Dustin maintains toward the young Demogorgon, Dart, even after he realizes that he killed Mews, the cat, and is part of the Mind Flayer’s army (2.08, 2.09). It is striking that Dustin can even distinguish between Dart and the other Demodogs in the Mind Flayer’s army and Dart can recognize him in return (2.09). Ultimately Dustin abandons Dart and the young Demodog dies. However ambivalence, such as Dustin’s toward Dart, may be one way in which all the characters in the series, including the characters of color, can, “open the door,” and in the final words of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, “touch the other…feel the other… and explain the other” to themselves.
Works Cited
13th. Directed by Ava DuVernay, Netflix, 2016.
Apperson, Jarod. “An Afterward to White Flight: Atlanta’s Return to Community & Long RoadToward Integration.”East Patch Atlanta, 28 January 2013. https://patch.com/georgia/eastatlanta/bp–an-afterward-to-white-flight-atlantas-return-to-cd126722ab4. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Applebome, Peter. “Drugs in Atlanta: A Lost Generation.” The New York Times, 14 December 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/14/us/drugs-in-atlanta-a-lost-generation.html. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press, 2018.
Bonilla Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations”. The Atlantic. June 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/. Accessed16 November 2018.
Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection.” Horror Film Reader, edited by Alan Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 2001.
—. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TED Talk, 16 November, 2016. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality?language=en. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Crunkite, Walter. “Rap vs. Ronald Reagan”. Rap Genius, 16 January 2012.https://genius.com/posts/775-Rap-vs-ronald-reagan. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Crunktastic. “Clair Huxtable is Dead: On Slaying the Cosbys and Making Space for Liv, Analise, and Mary Jane.” Crunk Feminist Collective, 23 October 2014 http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2014/10/23/clair-huxtable-is-dead-on-slaying-the-cosbys-and-making-space-for-liv-analise-and. Accessed 13 November 2018.
De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “The strange racial politics of ‘Stranger Things’”. America The Jesuit Review. 10 November 2017. https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/11/10/strange-racial-politics-stranger-things. Accessed 4 November 2018.
Diawara, Manthia. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Screen, vol. 29, no. 4, 1988, pp. 66-79.
Dockterman, Eliana. “How Georgia Became the Hollywood of the South.” Time. 26 July 2018. http://time.com/longform/hollywood-in-georgia/. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 1967.
Fisher, Carmen and Guardian Readers. “Can you be a feminist and vote for Donald Trump? Yes you can.” The Guardian, 17 November 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/feminist-vote-for-donald-trump-women-hillary-clinton-gender. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, Penguin Classics, 2003.
“Goshen, Indiana”. City-data.com. 2016. http://www.city-data.com/city/Goshen-Indiana.html. Accessed 17 November 2018.
Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Cornell University Press, 1995.
Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2, 2008, pp.177-218.
Hobson, Maurice. The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”. Movies and Mass Culture, edited by John Belton. Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Hummel, Brady. “The Return of Law and Order.” Medium, 17 July 2016. https://thepolicy.us/the-return-of-law-and-order-in-america-ac7c2b6ae7e6. Accessed 10 November 2018.
Iatropoulos, Mary Ellen and Lowery A. Woodall. Joss Whedon and Race: Critical Essays. McFarland, 2016.
Jay Z. “Blue Magic.” American Gangster, Roc-A-Fella- Def Jam Records, 2007.
Jay Z, Molly Crabapple, Jim Batt, Kim Boekbinder. “The War on Drugs is an Epics Fail.” The New York Times, 15 September 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004642370/jay-z-the-war-on-drugs-is-an-epic-fail.html. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Jung, Alex E. “Erica From Stranger Things 2 IS the Queen of Withering One-liners.” Vulture, 1 November 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/11/stranger-things-2-erica-sinclair-queen-of-one-liners.html. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Kinsley, Michael. “The Irony and The Ecstasy.” Vanity Fair. January 2015. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/01/ronald-reagan-policy-political-failure. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Kruse, Kevin. M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton University Press, 2007.
Kumar, Rebecca. “Let Yo Booty Do That Yoga”: Black Goddess Politics. The Scholar and Feminist Online, vol. 14, no. 3. Web.
Leary, Alex. “Memory of immigration reform under Ronald Reagan haunts current debate.” Tampa Bay Times. 3 February 2013. https://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/memory-of-immigration-reform-under-ronald-reagan-haunts-current-debate/1273597. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Lindsey, Payne. “Atlanta Monster”. Audio blog post, HowStuffWorks, 4 January 2018. https://atlantamonster.com/. Accessed 11 November 2018.
Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism, vol. 40, no. 2, 2008, pp. 177-218.
Nelson, Louis. “Trump: ‘I am the law and order candidate’” Politico.com, 11 July 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-law-order-candidate-225372. Accessed 10 November 2018.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, performances by Slavoj Žižek, Zeitgeist Films, 2013.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition, Duke University Press, 2018.
Stranger Facts (UpsideDownFacts). “Erica Sinclair will appear in every episode in Season 3 of #Stranger Things”. 2 March 2018 12:11 pm. Tweet.
Stranger Things. Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Netflix, 2016-present.
“Stranger Things Season Two Sneak Peak” YouTube, uploaded by Saturday Night Live. 9 October 2016. . Accessed 13 November 2018.
Vick, Megan. “How Stranger Things Subverted the ‘Token Black Kid’ Trope.” TV Guide. 6 November 2017. https://www.tvguide.com/news/stranger-things-subverted-token-black-kid-trope/. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018.
Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago Review Press, 2013.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Ye Hee Lee, Michelle. “Donald Trump’s false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime.” The Washington Post, 8 July 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/?utm_term=.2ebf885f8bd3. Accessed 10 November 2018.
Biographical Notes:
Rebecca Kumar Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at Morehouse College, in Atlanta Georgia, where she teaches courses in Literary and Cinematic Theory, Ethnic Studies, Early Modern and Early American Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition. She holds a Ph.D. from Emory University and a B.A. from New York University. Her scholarly interests include: postcolonial literature, film, and theory, ethnic studies, gender and queer studies, and cinema and visual studies. Her work focuses primarily on adaption and appears in the anthologies, Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film, and Art and Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies as well as the journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online.