I’ve seen so many cartoon show pitches sent my way where the setup is brown haired white boy with crush on popular girl, moody goth girl and third friend who is black and a super nerd genius
Like literally so many pitches use this set up its weird
im so interested in the Black Nerd Boy Tertiary Friend trope in cartoons i have never understood why it’s SUCH a thing
Isnt this just danny phantom
nah. Ned’s declassified school survival guide, teen titans (kinda), kim possible, fairly odd parents… the tertiary black nerdy friend is definitely a thing
it’s a trope born of ‘trying to appear diverse and DEFINITELY NOT RACIST’. you don’t really want the character as the main character (or you created the main character and went ‘oh shit’). you tend to need the nerd-genius in a bunch of high school-outsider style stories. you don’t want to appear racist, so making the black kid the nerd is SAFE it’s NOT WRITING A THUG SO I MUST BE WRITING A ~REAL~ CHARACTER, etcetcetc
This actually goes way beyond cartoons. Throughout the late 80s and 90s, in a lot of technology-driven thrillers, a lot of the computer geeks are black men. Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible and Joe Morton in Terminator 2 are paradigmatic examples, but you can also look at Die Hard, The Lost World, Minority Report, The Hunt for Red October, etc. etc. There’s actually a book written about it. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but the idea that it’s a short cut to “positive,” politically correct representation is part of the book’s thesis. But the bigger part of the argument looks at the ways in which those films betray a fundamental unease with technology that interacts with race in weird ways. Almost all of those films are anti-tech in some way or another, and the idea is that perhaps this is a fear that needs to be displaced by making the black man the intermediary. To quote the author:
Fears about the dehumanizing disembodying effects of information technology and fears of the black male body work as mutually reinforcing impulses behind popular depictions of black males as computer experts. In this equation cyberphobic whiteness – fearing technology’s capacity to disembody humanity, to take bodies out of the circuit of action – unconsciously projects technology onto the one set of bodies that it most fears.
It’s a wild argument, but interesting. Once you are aware of this pattern in 80s/90s action films, you start seeing examples everywhere. My guess is that this trend (whatever its conscious or unconscious source) seeped into cartoons and kids shows.
