Spolier warning: Contains spoilers for The Handmaid's Tale seasons 1-3.
I'm finally breaking up with the TV series The Handmaid's Tale. This has been a long time coming. I've loathed the adaption since its very first season. I kept watching in the hope that perhaps, with the second season extending beyond the scope of novelist Margaret Atwood's original text, the show may get creative and compelling in order to flesh out its own world. Unfortunately, this simply has not happened.
What originally concerned me has been written about by numerous other opinion writers: the colour-blindness of the show. The world of Gilead is a puritanical and fascist society based around the forced reproductive labour of a handful of women for the glory of those who hold the power. In the novel, Atwood wrote that the 'Children of Ham' had been resettled — the inference being that people of colour had been rounded up and had ultimately met their deaths.
Yet for some reason, the Gilead of the television series had people of colour everywhere. In the television interpretation, we are supposed to believe that a world which is both incredibly class-driven and misogynistic is also miraculously non-racist. Even though we know, through both the theory of intersectionality and basic world history, that this never actually happens.
There are black and brown handmaids, black and brown commanders and mixed-race partnerships. The main character June, for example, has a black partner, and her best friend Moira is a black lesbian. Yet there is absolutely no exploration of that race politics. My own experience with mixed-race partnerships indicates that race politics does not simply evaporate because two people choose to be together — indeed it's consistently present, discussed and important.
The show has instead chosen to completely ignore these important race-based dynamics for reasons it has never bothered explaining. Perhaps the creators felt that in current times, in light of criticisms of Hollywood whitewashing (see, for example, this excellent takedown on John Oliver's Last Week, Tonight), it would be better to be more representative. Instead though, The Handmaid's Tale has managed to merely erase the experiences of people — particularly women — of colour, for no reason other than to make its cast more diverse.
I've now lost count of the number of think-pieces I have read from white feminists claiming that Gilead 'could happen'. According to these pieces, the Trump administration in the US is going to lead that country