The show does continue its tradition of feeding us high fashion and providing humorous banter between friends, but that's all that kept me from turning off the TV.
I'm not a superfan or SATC expert, but I do think Miranda's role as the anxious, fumbling white woman is disappointing.
One of the reasons SATC was so popular was because the show depicted successful women not afraid of a challenge, willing and able to grow. It was extremely jarring to see Miranda, who was the assertive, sharp, spicy-tongued lawyer in the original series turn into a bumbling, awkward woman tripping over her words.
Miranda is now getting her masters in human rights and befriends her Black professor, Nya Wallace. The awkward conversations between these two women are emblematic of what is wrong with representation in television today — that throwing token racialised characters onto television is not enough, the way the story is told is just as important.
Miranda assumes Nya is not a professor, makes casually racist comments about Nya's hair and behaves like a white saviour when her professor is having trouble finding her identification to pass campus security.
Some might find that Miranda is a reflection of the anxiety and fear that white women experience in our society today — trying to avoid offending racialised people, and seeking assurances that they are doing the right thing when it comes to racism.
In later episodes, we see an unrealistic development of Nya's friendship with Miranda. We jump into the future with no depiction of any difficult conversations Miranda may have had with Nya about her white privilege in the classroom and the difficult work she needed to do to show growth to gain Nya's trust.
This depiction of Miranda does a disservice to her original self — I expected Miranda to still be at the top of her game. But today's version misses an opportunity to show what it means to be a good ally to our racialised friends and colleagues.
What I saw was a white woman's reality being made visible, acknowledged and even legitimised, while a racialised woman's struggle was situated only in relation to that of the white woman.
As feminists Audre Lorde and Mariana Ortega have written, presenting "loving, knowing ignorance" of the knowledge and experience of women of colour is not only arrogant, but reproduces a harmful and dominating relationship where knowledge about women of colour is shared from the perspective of white women.
Racialised woman's reality is invisible
Novelist Toni Morrison"s book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination discusses how identity is formed against a black shadow — that Black people are represented through the lens of white perception. The racialised woman's reality is invisible, overlooked and pathologised based on how it affects the white woman.
In Miranda's interactions, it is her discomfort that is the focal point. The experiences of racialised women are made invisible in this. Nya was experiencing microaggressions, and her behaviour was that of a woman who was used to putting up with them.
I know a television show whose primary aim is to entertain cannot be the primary source for anti-racism work, but if the show was really dedicated to bringing in more representation, inserting queer and racialised people into the mix as ancillary characters is not enough.
Miranda would have been the ideal character to show how to make space for our racialised colleagues in respectful and thoughtful ways, leading her friends through critical thinking rooted in empowerment, not guilt. Critical race theory teaches us that a key way of elevating voices from marginalised or less represented communities is to give them meaningful space.
