Ok so this is by no means a complete list (I’m only 6 episodes in) but here’s a few things I’ve noticed (there’s a TL;DR under the read more). Granted some of these may be resolved by the end of the series but right now this is what bothers me.

You are completely right in noticing that everyone is talking English with an accent instead of their languages. let me elaborate on why this is annoying. If you watch with the subtitles on you’ll notice that at some points they use the subtitles to say, “in Swahili,” or “in Korean” which basically acknowledges that yes they don’t want to make their audience “work” to make out the English. That is a fundamentally ethnocentric view to take and its compounded by the fact that because the show has such a diverse cast they could have conceivably made it so it was equal in its focus in different regions. This wouldn’t have been just a “Western hemisphere” show it would have been a show that literally spanned the world.

Furthermore they specifically use languages other than English when the audience is meant to be confused and using the subtitles then. why is this an issue? Well think of it this way, it makes English the common language when they can actually feel each other. Making English the default heightens the xenophobia most Americans already have towards foreign languages. For example, I’m bilingual, if Lito’s parts were all in Spanish I would have understood all the parts that were in English and Spanish. Reading the Korean, and Swahili would not have been a huge burden at all and others who are fluent in those languages would have felt more included.

Moving away from the languages bit here’s a short list of other instances of racism:

Where’s Caephus? Here’s the imdb screenshot

Here’s Caephus’ trailer

Admittedly this might be an oversight but I want people to complain to imdb. He’s fucking brilliant ok? And as the only man of color in the central group (I’m sorry Naveen Andrews’ Jonas doesn’t count as a central character) he deserves to be credited!

Lito Rodriguez is played by Miguel Angel Silvestre a Spaniard (that is a white Spanish born European) and he’s not Latinx. This is an important distinction because any Spanish born person who’s white only experiences occasional xenophobia in the US. They don’t have the added burden of being latinx. And in Latinoamerica Spanish born people have automatically been chosen to rule over the mestizos/mixed people. Because they’re white.

In colonial era Mexico being born to Spanish parents classified you as a criollo, (which is to say that there was a caste system in place that prioritized white Spaniards and their offspring over anyone else) and just for context this caste system was in place until at least my father was in school in Mexico. So they basically cast a white European to play a Spaniard telenovela star which is by default a latinx industry basically following the white supremacist formula established when Columbus came to the “New World” white people ruling in PoC countries.



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