Like many people, I’ve watched a lot of TV during the pandemic including recently finishing all nine seasons of The Walking Dead. TWD follows the lives of groups of people near Altanta, Georgia trying to survive following an apocalypse that’s turned most of the world into flesh eating zombies with poor motor skills (they can’t climb, swim or move faster than an average Tim Horton’s lineup).
Life is pretty bad, except for one thing: there’s no racism. There are “good” and “bad” people of different races but no racism. In fact, in the 131 TWD episodes I watched, there was only one reference to race in one early episode when one of the minor bad white characters called one of the good Black characters the n-word and then the main good character smacked the bad guy and told him “There are no more n%$#s and there are more dumb as shit, inbred, white trash. There’s just us.” After that, nobody ever mentioned race again. So, to repeat: this story, set in Georgia, about groups fighting for scarce resources to survive, has no racism in it. Well, no blatant racism.
The leaders of all the major warring groups are white men, two are “bad” and the third, the star of the whole show, is “good”. Rick Grimes is a former sheriff from a small Georgia town who doesn’t seem to have a racist bone in his body (and, to his credit, manages to keep all his bones in his body for nine seasons). Rick leads his group in defending themselves against the walkers (as they call the zombies) and the other groups. They do some pretty bad stuff but always only in immediate or proactive self-defence. No one in Rick’s group or any other one ever does or says anything to suggest they see other groups as anything but bad people. They only see the walkers as sub-human. There aren’t any groups that hate people because of who they are and justify taking their stuff based on that. Sure, they kill each other for each other’s stuff and self-defence but all while respecting each other’s basic humanity – which is much easier to do when you’re literally surrounded by zombies. [Of course the zombies aren’t racist. They’ll eat anyone…although comic duo Key and Peele envision what things might look like if the zombies retained a little more of their former selves in their sketch White Zombies.]
There are many other times in TWD that scream for race to be raised only for the characters to remain silent.
- Rick hooks up with Michonne, a dark-skinned, dreadlocked samurai sword wielding warrior and they have a brown kid but they never mention race in the past, present or future.
- After Rick’s group defeats another group, some of the surviving former bad guys join Rick’s group at Rick’s urging and over the objections of some of Rick’s group who want to just kill them. Shortly after, the former bad people start disappearing. Two of Rick’s group investigating what’s happening discover members of their group about to execute a Black woman who was formerly with the bad guys and find out they’re responsible for killing the other missing people. After briefly trying to dissuade their comrades from killing the woman they walk away and let them execute her. However, a white woman who was with the bad folks before, including trying to kill members of Rick’s group like the Black woman did, is allowed to stay on as a trusted member of Rick’s group.
In addition to not mentioning race or racism on a personal level, no one mentions the role they may have played in starting the apocalypse. In fact, no one seems to know what caused it. This isn’t surprising since TWD creator Robert Kirkman only revealed the source of the outbreak in 2020. Comicbook.com reported Kirkman “said the zombie outbreak occurred because of a “space spore” when asked on Twitter, which is likely another homage to the godfather of the zombie-horror genre George A. Romero. In his classic [1968] film Night of the Living Dead, scientists speculated the creation of zombies could have been caused by a space probe to Venus bringing back radiation with unintended effects.”
Space spores? In all 131 TWD episodes, only one character ever mentions anything suggesting that the outbreak could have been caused by humans in, say, a lab designed to create viruses. In the last episode of TWD season one, the last surviving scientist at the U.S. Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta infers the disease might have been created by the CDC – before he blows up the entire place and himself to avoid anything (else?) getting out.
No other character ever questions if the outbreak could have been caused by something like a military bio-weapon gone bad or a drug company rushing a vaccine to market for profit. They don’t even wonder if it came from natural causes or not, unlike the media reports on the current debate over the origins of the COVID-19 virus. It’s like centuries of race-based capitalist exploitation that led to things like slavery and the decimation of Indigenous people and land never happened. There’s no memory, no accountability and best of all – no guilt.
Also, despite Atlanta’s almost 500,000 people being half Black, TWD has no groups of Black people roaming the countryside, some possibly looking for payback. The TWD world is essentially a massive chance for white folks to start over, blameless – and still in charge.
This wasn’t the case with the film that launched it all: George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. In NLD, the main protagonist is a Black man named Ben who gets trapped in a house with a group of white people just as the zombie apocalypse starts. After leading the group in fighting off the zombies, Ben is shot by a white sheriff. So, NLD’s white sheriff shoots the Black hero and TWD’s white sheriff is the hero. How things have changed…
Now, don’t get me wrong. TWD was great TV. That’s why I watched 131 episodes and eagerly await season 10 hitting Netflix in July. But, as I watched it, I had the same feeling as I did while watching Game of Thrones that I blogged about. I was disturbed that so many people watched it with almost none appearing to notice how blatantly racist it was.
This brings to mind a quote by Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin:
“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to look for it on the bloody floors of Charleston churches and in the dashboard cameras on Texas highways, and overlook it in the smart sounding logic of textbooks, policy statements, court rulings, science journals and cutting edge technologies.”
Her quote could be revised for the Canadian context as:
“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to only see it on bloody London, Ont. street corners and residential school mass graves and overlook it in our technologies, policies, hiring practices, staff, management and the massively popular American TV shows we all happily consume.”
Comicbook.com also reported that, when asked about the origin of the zombie virus during a 2018 Q&A on Tumblr, TWD creator Kirkman said, “It couldn’t be less important to the story and the lives of these characters.”
It appears the other thing that both Kirkman and his characters have forgotten is the old saying, “Those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”
These zombie shows are the dramatic representation of a future where everyone says, “I don’t see color.”, still without realizing that’s part of the problem.