grown-ish Attempts to Give Everyone a Safe Space and Ends up Just Making a Mess

I enjoy grown-ish and black-ish, but just like its parent show, grown-ish sometimes struggles to really stand for something in order to be a more inclusive show. And by inclusive, I mean not just a show for black people and liberal white people. While I understand why that happens from a marketing standpoint, it also means the show doesn’t always hit the mark with what it wants to say.

In its most recent episode, “Safe and Sound,” it tackles the idea that everyone deserves a safe space, including conservatives and conservative women. This storyline is told through Latina conservative character Ana Torres (Francia Raisa), who we’ve always known to be a Republican, but that hasn’t been brought up since the pilot. When helping to support Aaron in protesting the closing of the all-black dorm, Hawkins, she says that she wishes her people had a safe space. Aaron thinks she means a Latina dorm, but what she really means is one for conservative women.

This leads to a fight not just between her and Aaron, but also the whole group, as they argue over who has it worse: gay people, Jewish people, black people, or conservatives. Of course, there are no Native actors or characters in the cast, and the one Asian character is absent from the discussion. Honestly, the whole thing was exhausting to watch.

Ana and Aaron continue to buck up against each other until Hawkins ends up getting closed, along with all the “safe space” dorms. This leads to Ana and Zoey getting into a conversation about free speech, where Ana shares that her grandfather has been in a Cuban jail for years because he said “one thing” the Communist government didn’t like, which is why she values her rights and frames why she’s a conservative. Zoey tries to take that information to Aaron to bridge between her two friends, only to get called shallow.

The episode ends on a happy note where Zoey brings everyone together, saying, “Unless everyone has a voice, none of us has a voice,” and gets the dean to stop Hawkins’s closure.

That’s all well and good, except it doesn’t really say anything about the larger issues at play here.

First is the whole oppression Olympics that necessitates a hierarchy of pain in order for any pain to be taken as valid. It does not have to be Jewish people vs. Black people vs. gay people, because none of those things is one singular identity. There are gay Jewish black people, fyi.

We need to be able to have spaces in which groups can work out their own issues and anxieties without worrying about whiteness or having their arguments appropriated by racists and trolls. To not be the “black kid” or the “trans woman,” but instead be a person without all that baggage.

Secondly, it is disingenuous to place Ana, a conservative character, as an advocate that everyone should have a safe space, when conservatives have been the ones against safe spaces. It’s also disingenuous to act as though politics being promoted by conservatives don’t harm other people. Ana is a Republican who believes in LGBT rights and climate change? Dope. Where does she stand on pro-choice issues, welfare? Does she call out the racist protocol the right has been following? Is she an Ana Navarro Republican or a Meghan McCain Republican?

We can have a conversation about how both Democrats and Republicans have failed black and brown communities. We can have a conversation about the purpose of a safe space. What we can not do is act like “reaching across the aisle” means accepting someone else’s racist politics. The politics of oppression should not be afforded the same deference as the politics of fighting oppression.

Right now, we as a country have been told that we need to make space for the rage of angry white men who feel emasculated, talked down to, and put upon because the world is getting more diverse, while they label BLM a hate group. It amounts to dismissing experiences of racism while patting white supremacists on the shoulder because they feel like they don’t have a “white culture” anymore.

If we’re talking about having a discussion about the viewpoints of moderate Republicans vs. liberals, then let’s actually have that conversation. Let’s talk about the prison industrial complex, immigration, abortion, and gun violence. Ana mentions California not having open carry as a bad thing, ignoring that the reason they don’t is that white politicians were afraid of the Black Panthers. That would be nuanced. That would be interesting. What we got was neither, and that’s because Zoey wants to be in the middle. grown-ish wants to be in the middle. Well, the middle is all fine and good when it comes to talking about most things, but if we are talking about politics, then you need to figure out what you fundamentally stand for.

That doesn’t mean we are never willing to compromise or that we never have friends we have political differences with, but we all know that on both sides, there are issues that matter enough to us that we will not compromise on them. Having an honest conversation about those things, even when it can’t end in a harmonious place, means more than an ending where everyone is holding hands, signifying nothing.

(image: Freefrom)

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