Biracial black women and girls get one of three:

1. Exotic girlfriend/love interest to male lead (reinforce colorism, still get sidelined)

2. Token diversity (there are never two of us for some reason)

3. Tragic mulatto storyline to keep the hackles soothed https://twitter.com/XiranJayZhao/status/1309984464613777408

Here are some examples just off the top of my head. All of them tick off one, if not several, boxes.

Here's the thing, too...I love all of these characters. These cliches aren't necessarily dealbreakers, but DAMN if they're not overdone and for the slimiest reasons.

Fortunately, I can think of several more that challenged these tropes, if not outright subverted/avoided them. All of these also happened to be written and/or directed by black women.

What an interesting coincidence.

I think about this a lot. How my representation is pretty limited and piecemeal, but much, much better than what dark-skinned black women and girls get.

This issue has never been an either-or scenario. It's a nebulous crest of more and less...always conveniently never enough.

It's insidious.

We get a few scraps. We get invested in maintaining superiority. We're still boxed in, tokenized and fetishized. It's shit.

Dark-skinned black women/girls deserve better than being erased. I deserve better than being an exotic divide-and-conquer strategy.

Your daily friendly reminder to flip this thread on the persistent erasure of dark-skinned black women and girls in mainstream and mainstream-adjacent media. It has pictures and everything: https://twitter.com/naysmulti/status/1142874800374853633

The zero-sum game is a myth. Let's end it once and for all.