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labingiNote: This post is about the work, not the author. The author is relevant to the work, but this post is about something other than his actions and their gender implications in the work. I mostly discuss the show but reference the graphic novels. I like the show overall a lot and will discuss that more in another post; this one is just about race.
As was typical of the 1990s, the Sandman graphic novels are pretty white. For their time, they’re not clueless about showing racial diversity, but their handling of race needed updating for the show. Unfortunately, the show’s attempts to be anti-racist strike me as simplistic. Their approach is to take several characters who were white and cast them with Black people. That’s it; that’s the whole approach. This misses two crucial points about race:
1) There are more races than white and Black.
2) Systemic white supremacy is not just about centering white people; it’s about centering white culture.
General Spoilers for Season 2 and the graphic novel equivalent follow
Point 1: Where’s the Racial Diversity?
To be sure, the show does include people from races other than white or Black (ex. Susanoo), but, dang, are they few. Much of the story is set in the US (season 1 goes to Florida): where are the Hispanic* people? Some of the story is set in modern England: where are the South Asian people? It seems to me that Abrahamic angels come culturally from the Middle East, if anywhere, so why do they mostly look like they come from Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa? (I did find Ishtar more racially appropriate than in the book.)
As to the Endless themselves, they’ve gone from being usually depicted as white in the novels (I guess Despair could be problematically Asian) to five white and two Black: a) still a lot of white people; b) why not visually identify the Endless with any of the other peoples on Earth?
Point 2: Cultural Eurocentrism
Also in keeping with the ‘90s, the graphic novels are very Eurocentric. They sometimes flit to other parts of the world (or universe), but there’s a strong focus Abrahamic religion (not European in origin, I know, but it has been culturally adopted by Europe as the main religious narrative); classical Greece; Shakespeare/Renaissance; Faerie; US; and UK. The show has no interest in shaking this up; it’s just substituting faces.
Take Lucienne: she is the show’s version of the graphic novel’s British-y butler, Lucien, but Black and female. That’s it, otherwise very close to the same person. But I would argue she couldn’t be the same person. Lucien’s ensemble makes straightforward sense: he’s a white guy dressed like a white guy in a traditionally white guy role. Lucienne must be more complex simply to explain why a Black woman is in a traditionally white guy role. Was she originally a white guy who found her inner identity as a Black woman in the Dreaming? Was she originally a Black woman who found her inner identify as a very English butler? Something else? I know they don’t have a lot of time but even a throwaway line or fifteen seconds of flashback to how she ended up Dream’s butler could have grounded this in some awareness of positionality and cultural diversity. There’s none.
In fact, one could argue the show is worse at cultural diversity than the books. The big gaff, for me, is the Nada story. In the novels, her city is fairly clearly coded African. In the show, it looks like Dickensian England with some Muslim architectural hints and people holding spears. It was weird that is was snowing; this might have indicated the end of the Ice Age, but visually it contributed to the Christmas Carol look. For me, this reads as an example of the show’s profound uninterest in non-white experience and knowledge.
Then, there’s pairing Nada with white Dream. Yes, the show makes a token acknowledgement of the fact that Nada is seeing a Black man. It shows him for a few seconds, then switches back to white Dream in modern, Eurocentric dress, which is just jarring in terms of plot logic. But more to the point, wow, what an erasure of the basic premise that Endless are everywhere and everything to everyone (Black, white, human, alien, cat, etc.)! A token nod to a Black actor does not undo the phenomenal whitewashing of taking the only major representation of Dream as a Black man in the novels and turning him emphatically white. Utterly tone deaf, more regressive than the 1990s, and robs a Black actor of a very sweet acting role. One could argue that they’d have to pay more to cast two people as Dream for significant pieces of screen time, but it would have been money well spent.
Overall, Sandman show, I’m not impressed. You got handed a story that is culturally diverse by its nature (if not always well-executed as such) and showed a total lack of interest in interrogating Eurocentric supremacy to explore that. I am left with the impression that your “diverse” casting amounts to lip service.
Sidebar (with spoiler for the end of S2): I like the casting of Jacob Anderson as Daniel a lot. I want to call this out because I’ve been critical of his casting as Louis in IWTV, but that’s not his fault. He’s an amazing actor, and I’m happy to see him in this role.
Note:
*I’m going with “Hispanic” because that’s what most of my students of Latin American ancestry call themselves right now. Latinx/é is sometimes considered the “correct” terminology, but many people of Latin American origin don’t like it. Latino/a leaves out non-binary people, so “Hispanic.”
As was typical of the 1990s, the Sandman graphic novels are pretty white. For their time, they’re not clueless about showing racial diversity, but their handling of race needed updating for the show. Unfortunately, the show’s attempts to be anti-racist strike me as simplistic. Their approach is to take several characters who were white and cast them with Black people. That’s it; that’s the whole approach. This misses two crucial points about race:
1) There are more races than white and Black.
2) Systemic white supremacy is not just about centering white people; it’s about centering white culture.
General Spoilers for Season 2 and the graphic novel equivalent follow
Point 1: Where’s the Racial Diversity?
To be sure, the show does include people from races other than white or Black (ex. Susanoo), but, dang, are they few. Much of the story is set in the US (season 1 goes to Florida): where are the Hispanic* people? Some of the story is set in modern England: where are the South Asian people? It seems to me that Abrahamic angels come culturally from the Middle East, if anywhere, so why do they mostly look like they come from Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa? (I did find Ishtar more racially appropriate than in the book.)
As to the Endless themselves, they’ve gone from being usually depicted as white in the novels (I guess Despair could be problematically Asian) to five white and two Black: a) still a lot of white people; b) why not visually identify the Endless with any of the other peoples on Earth?
Point 2: Cultural Eurocentrism
Also in keeping with the ‘90s, the graphic novels are very Eurocentric. They sometimes flit to other parts of the world (or universe), but there’s a strong focus Abrahamic religion (not European in origin, I know, but it has been culturally adopted by Europe as the main religious narrative); classical Greece; Shakespeare/Renaissance; Faerie; US; and UK. The show has no interest in shaking this up; it’s just substituting faces.
Take Lucienne: she is the show’s version of the graphic novel’s British-y butler, Lucien, but Black and female. That’s it, otherwise very close to the same person. But I would argue she couldn’t be the same person. Lucien’s ensemble makes straightforward sense: he’s a white guy dressed like a white guy in a traditionally white guy role. Lucienne must be more complex simply to explain why a Black woman is in a traditionally white guy role. Was she originally a white guy who found her inner identity as a Black woman in the Dreaming? Was she originally a Black woman who found her inner identify as a very English butler? Something else? I know they don’t have a lot of time but even a throwaway line or fifteen seconds of flashback to how she ended up Dream’s butler could have grounded this in some awareness of positionality and cultural diversity. There’s none.
In fact, one could argue the show is worse at cultural diversity than the books. The big gaff, for me, is the Nada story. In the novels, her city is fairly clearly coded African. In the show, it looks like Dickensian England with some Muslim architectural hints and people holding spears. It was weird that is was snowing; this might have indicated the end of the Ice Age, but visually it contributed to the Christmas Carol look. For me, this reads as an example of the show’s profound uninterest in non-white experience and knowledge.
Then, there’s pairing Nada with white Dream. Yes, the show makes a token acknowledgement of the fact that Nada is seeing a Black man. It shows him for a few seconds, then switches back to white Dream in modern, Eurocentric dress, which is just jarring in terms of plot logic. But more to the point, wow, what an erasure of the basic premise that Endless are everywhere and everything to everyone (Black, white, human, alien, cat, etc.)! A token nod to a Black actor does not undo the phenomenal whitewashing of taking the only major representation of Dream as a Black man in the novels and turning him emphatically white. Utterly tone deaf, more regressive than the 1990s, and robs a Black actor of a very sweet acting role. One could argue that they’d have to pay more to cast two people as Dream for significant pieces of screen time, but it would have been money well spent.
Overall, Sandman show, I’m not impressed. You got handed a story that is culturally diverse by its nature (if not always well-executed as such) and showed a total lack of interest in interrogating Eurocentric supremacy to explore that. I am left with the impression that your “diverse” casting amounts to lip service.
Sidebar (with spoiler for the end of S2): I like the casting of Jacob Anderson as Daniel a lot. I want to call this out because I’ve been critical of his casting as Louis in IWTV, but that’s not his fault. He’s an amazing actor, and I’m happy to see him in this role.
Note:
*I’m going with “Hispanic” because that’s what most of my students of Latin American ancestry call themselves right now. Latinx/é is sometimes considered the “correct” terminology, but many people of Latin American origin don’t like it. Latino/a leaves out non-binary people, so “Hispanic.”
Thoughts
Date: 2025-07-31 05:17 pm (UTC)That's the problem I have with most portrayals. It looks tacked on, because it is tacked on. There's no thought about how or why things are the way they were, let alone how to make changes plausible. It's not that diversity can't be done well; it's that people don't bother. Most of them are just ticking a box because someone told them to do it. The results are often irritating rather than inclusive.
Recently a friend tipped me to a magazine called Enchanted Living. It is beautiful, but also surprisingly less fluffy than I expected, and more diverse. The fairies are different sizes and shapes and colors. The Gossamer issue includes a chunky black fairy with large curling ramshorns. I get the sense that the contributors are using one of two approaches: 1) How would I best render this sort of fairy? 2) Given the model(s) I have, what kinds of fairy could I render? Of course, mystical things appear in cultures around the world, so they've got lots of inspiration. It still leans European, but the diversity is much more plausible.
I'm particularly fond of stories that look at diverse experiences, pull in actual challenges that different groups of people have, and draw inspiration from a wider range of mythologies. Build in the diversity from the core out, and it works better. That's hard to find in a world obsessed with remakes over originality. :/
I enjoyed the first season of Sandman, haven't seen the second yet. But I don't expect particularly good diversity from stories that weren't originally designed for it.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-08-02 05:01 am (UTC)That's a good point, and I think it explains why a lot of old franchises, like Marvel, can feel clunky with representation. (And maybe why Black Panther worked quite well, because it was designed originally to foreground an African superhero.)
I do think The Sandman is kind of designed for diversity. It was fairly "diverse" by '90s standards. There was the potential to do more with it. Oh well. I have found S2 really good on the whole. A shame the scandal somewhat vitiates it all.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-02 05:03 am (UTC)