A part of being a very good storyteller is understanding which tales must be advised and which may be higher stored within the drafts. KeyTV’s Southern Fried Rice sadly falls into the latter class.
The restricted net collection, which lives on Keke Palmer’s YouTube community, was met with swift backlash after its debut for its premise, characters, and writing. The story follows Koko, a South Korean American lady adopted and raised by Black American mother and father, who’s—as KeyTV describes it—on a journey to “determine who [she is] past the consolation of what’s acquainted.” The right place to try this, apparently? Wright College, a fictional HBCU situated in her residence state of Georgia.
After watching the collection myself, I can’t fault anybody for having a damaging response. There are such a lot of issues I’ve to query about it. Most evident is the selection to middle a non-Black lady in an all-Black setting and, as an added bonus, to outfit her in a number of the identical aesthetics for which Black ladies are all too usually vilified (you already know, like how cornrows have been deemed “ghetto” till Kim Kardashian wore them). The premise itself is tone-deaf to start with, and it’s not helped by the way in which this present leans into the appropriation of Black magnificence moderately than questioning and difficult it.
This misstep is one thing one may anticipate from a workforce of non-Black writers, however the present was, in actual fact, written by a Black lady, Nakia Stephens (who has a multi-project improvement take care of KeyTV). In an Instagram publish defending her work, she wrote, “Southern Fried Rice is supposed to create dialogue as a result of illustration isn’t one-dimensional.” Stephens, an HBCU graduate herself, stated the present was impressed by the experiences of her non-Black school buddies. Government producer Keke Palmer additionally hopped onto social media to deal with the controversy, invoking KeyTV’s Black creatives within the present’s protection. “It’s crucial folks of shade have jobs exterior of simply being the expertise or the participant on the workforce,” she captioned a video posted on October 23. “It’s my mission…to assist fund and assist the creators of shade behind the scenes, giving them an opportunity to inform their very own story.”
