Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

Published by BIPOC students and alumni, the letter documents specific instances of racism they had experienced at the school and outlines 30 calls to action. Chief among these calls was one to diversify faculty. In the first call to action, students and alumni said the school must hire more BIPOC faculty, specifically Black and Indigenous faculty, as well as collect and release demographic data, with a distinction between tenured and contract staff. Students and alumni said they created the calls to action, because, while consulted in the past through the school’s Equity and Inclusion committee, created in 2019, “serious steps toward reform have not been shared with us or made public.”

“Hiring practices have also not reflected changes that the school has expressed interest in making,” they added. In one section of the letter, BIPOC students and alumni also anonymously shared anecdotal experiences within the program. It reflected the significance of having racialized faculty in the program, especially in permanent positions: for most racialized students and alumni, it was a matter of better education through greater representation.

“Before joining Carleton’s journalism school, I asked a recently graduated white student about the racial makeup of the program’s faculty,” one of them recalled in the letter. “They asked me why on earth that mattered. This is why it matters.” Students and alumni also shared the harm some of them experienced at the hands of existing faculty in the program, much of which was white until the calls to action were released. “A professor shouted a religious slur at me in an attempt to make a joke,” one of them wrote in the letter. “Once, in a fourth-year Indigenous reporting class, the professor told me racism is simply not real and an excuse,” another shared. “If you thought you saw something as racism or a source said something was due to racism, you’re just not doing a good job as a journalist.”

In the two years since the calls to action were released, the program has brought in almost a dozen sessional instructors of colour and three tenure-track faculty, including high-profile Black journalists Nana aba Duncan and Adrian Harewood. Tobin Ng, a Carleton journalism student entering their third year at the time, says the calls to action were created “out of that frustration.” They elaborated that there “was this desire to just create a really comprehensive document that would basically outline all the things that students had been calling for again and again. There’s the emotional labour of having to repeat [ourselves], and just demand the same things without seeing concrete results,” they said.

Two years since they helped write the calls to action, Ng says the school’s response to the letter, especially through the steps it has taken to diversify faculty in the program, has finally made them hopeful. “I think that the hiring of new faculty is a step towards allowing for things that will last long beyond my time or the time of the students who are involved in this work right now.” Yet, much work remains. While the school has hired professors and instructors of colour, more change is needed to ensure that diverse faculty continue to join the program moving forward, and feel supported enough to stay and grow within it. Some steps the school is taking, in particular, involve rethinking the job of a journalism professor, creating opportunities for research and growth, and recognizing the contributions of both the students and alumni, as well as the new faculty of colour, through allyship and support.

RETHINKING THE JOB
Nana aba Duncan was sharing the job posting for a new chair at Carleton’s journalism school when a colleague suggested she apply for it. Duncan, who had spent much of her career at the CBC and had been actively involved in various diversity efforts at the public broadcaster, was completing the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Massey College at the time. Her research at Massey involved looking at the experiences of leaders of colour. She was interested in this topic in part because she’d never had the opportunity to work under a Black or racialized leader, and because she was looking to take on a leadership role herself.

“I was in this place of thinking about race and leadership and a move in my own career,” Duncan recalls. “I was [also] in this place of making a change and thinking about journalism in a way that could just be better for those of us who come from underrepresented communities or misrepresented communities.” After that nudge to apply for the Carty Chair in Diversity and Inclusion Studies, Duncan took a moment to pause. Then, she superimposed her personal mission “to help change the industry so that racialized journalists can feel like their perspectives and expertise are just as worthy and legitimate as the expertise and experiences of white journalists” onto the job posting from Carleton. “I realized [it all] aligns … so I applied.” The Carty Chair is the first of its kind at Carleton and across Canada. No other journalism program has a chair permanently committed to diversity and inclusion studies.

Until the summer of 2020, Carleton’s journalism school didn’t either. Allan Thompson, a professor and now the program head, insists the school had made the decision to convert its permanent chair in business and financial journalism into one that focuses on diversity and inclusion even before the calls to action were released. The decision was part of other strategic steps the school was taking since 2019, when Atong Ater, a former student in the program, shared her experiences as a journalism student at Carleton in a personal essay published by the CBC that May. A job posting for the position from September 2019, however, continued to advertise the Carty Chair as one specifically geared toward business and financial journalism, as it had been in previous years. While unclear about when the decision to change the focus of the job was actually made, Thompson says the new direction for the Carty Chair as one geared toward equity and inclusion gave the school a unique opportunity to maneuver around challenges that come with the hiring process, such as budget constraints from the university and the ability to hire new permanent faculty only when existing full-time professors retire from their positions.

It also meant the school would have a permanent member committed to spearheading equity, diversity, and inclusion, and that no budget cuts or hiring changes would affect this work. “[Endowed chairs] exist in perpetuity … and the Carty Chair had been empty for a couple of years because the occupant retired and the position hadn’t been filled,” Thompson says of the decision. “Strategically and ethically, I think it was a really wise choice to use that opportunity to create the first chair of its kind in a Canadian journalism school, where that person would have a priority to look at a whole range of equity, diversity, and inclusion issues in journalism,” he adds. “To conduct research, to create new courses, to be available to students and faculty as a resource and to be a champion, but also just to be another faculty member.”

Outside of budget constraints though, Thompson says he recognizes other challenges exist when it comes to hiring diverse faculty too. Perhaps rethinking the job also means rethinking the job requirements, especially the fact you need to have a master’s degree in order to apply for a faculty position. “Are we missing out on some really good journalists out there who have solid careers behind them, who might be interested in teaching, but don’t have a master’s degree?” he says. The conversation, however, goes beyond the school’s decision-making capacity. It continues with the university, which is ultimately responsible for changing job requirements, Thompson adds.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH
Duncan completed her first year as the Carty Chair this July, having designed a course on journalism and belonging and begun working on a podcasting course for the upcoming year. She says the big difference between her job now and those in the past is that at Carleton, Duncan is “simultaneously a professor and the person who cares about diversity.” At the CBC, where she was the founding co-chair for Diversify CBC, a resource group for employees of colour, Duncan remembers the work being unpaid and something she did after hours, often on top of everything else. “I was doing [diversity work] at the side of my desk while also being the host of the weekend morning show, while also having a three- and five-year-old at home,” she says. “The difference between my work here at Carleton and my work at CBC is that I had two sides to myself at CBC,” Duncan adds, “and as strange as it sounds, in this position [of the Carty Chair], I feel freer to express how much I care about inclusion and diversity.”

The work has in no way been easy, especially with working during a pandemic—often remotely or online—working from home while being a mother, and especially working to implement change that can often be emotionally draining too. It has, however, also been immensely fulfilling. “What has been rewarding is how students have responded to my course,” Duncan says, recalling the last day of class for her course on journalism and belonging. Students in the course shared with her a Kudoboard they had made. In it, they wrote their experiences in the class, thanking her for giving them the space to talk about complex issues so openly. Knowing it was her course that made these students feel that sense of gratitude filled Duncan with gratitude herself. “I just want us to continue to be fearless and curious and to do the work with respect.”

CBC journalist Adrian Harewood also joined Carleton’s journalism program following the calls to action released by students and alumni in 2020. An associate professor at Carleton, Harewood says the position has given him the opportunity and space to conduct research and create courses that illuminate Canada’s Black history. An example of this is a course that focuses specifically on the history of Black journalism in Canada. “I’m really enjoying the process of creating the course and of creating curriculum and of identifying figures and media outlets that might be unfamiliar to people,” Harewood says. “I’m also working on a longer-term project looking at the history of a very prominent Black newspaper in Canada called Contrast that was active in the late 1960s and 1970s and really was part and parcel or a product of the civil rights movement.” Harewood’s parents wrote for Contrast, and he says the research process has been interesting, given that one of the most important interviews for the project was with his 85-year-old father. These opportunities—to research and to build a more inclusive curriculum—are giving Harewood the chance to help reduce the disconnect “between the academy and the community.” He sees his work as a way to “get busy outside of our comfortable spaces.”

“Carleton is not this rarefied place, which only exists for members of the social, economic, and political elite. It is an institution that we own, too,” Harewood says. “I see that as being part of my own job and practice of trying to make space for more people but also to harness the resources of the university and share those resources with the community that we’re a part of.” His goals are varied, but being part of the faculty at Carleton
and having opportunities for research, has magnified them. “I want Carleton to be a leader when it comes to all aspects of journalism education,” Harewood says of his plans. “I want us to be a space where we are comfortable taking risks […] where we embrace discomfort.” Ultimately, Harewood says he wants the program “always to be ahead of the curve. Looking back always, and appreciating history, but also looking forward in a very kind of bold way.”

A FAR-FROM-PERFECT PROCESS
Many of the students and alumni who worked on releasing the calls to action in 2020 have also been working with the school to implement them. The process is far from perfect. Much like Duncan’s experience doing diversity and inclusion work at the CBC, students and alumni involved in addressing the calls to action are not paid for this labour, and many of them do it outside of their full-time jobs.

“We’re all working reporters with many other responsibilities on top of this,” Olivia Rania Bowden, a reporter with the Toronto Star and an alumnus from the program, says. “When we decided to [publish] these calls to action, we were like, where do we have a voice? And what can we push?” For Duncan, the work of diversifying the oldest journalism program in Canada has been a rigorous process on the faculty level too. Whether through diversifying the curriculum and the courses, the guest speakers who engage with students, or the research projects she takes on, Duncan says the work of pushing for equity and inclusion both within the classroom and outside of it is “emotionally draining and sometimes, there are the surprise moments of harm.”

An example of this, Duncan says, is when in some situations, she has heard a person say something racist or offensive or ignorant “and you either don’t know what to say, or you have to do the calculus.” For Duncan, the calculus involves deciding “whether or not I’m going to say something. And then if I decided I am going to say something, what am I going to say? And that calculus also includes: how is this person going to take it? How is my relationship going to change with this person?” According to Duncan, institutions like Carleton need to recognize “there is a burden that they don’t understand and it’s a burden they don’t know. Just as in the same way if my position was held by an Indigenous journalist or a person who went through a lot of trauma as a young person or a trans professor—there’s going to be a burden that they have that I wouldn’t know.”

The nature of the work, according to both the students and alumni involved, as well as the faculty, requires recognition from the school that goes beyond engaging with them. “What really bothers me is when [the school has] made changes, they don’t credit us publicly,” says Bowden. “I know they’ve said they were thinking about this or working on [certain changes] prior to our calls, but the thing is we did it really quickly and really well around our extremely demanding jobs because we don’t have a choice but to make it happen. As people of colour, we don’t have a choice.” It also means recognizing the push for equity, diversity, and inclusion may have begun with students and alumni of colour, but that white students and faculty within the program are equally responsible for solutions and change moving forward.

“Feeling bad or guilty is useful only as much as it is a natural feeling, and if it propels you to action, then that’s good,” says Duncan. “But I think allyship also means not performing your sadness or your guilt about the fact that systemic racism exists. And knowing that the performance of those feelings—it comes across as looking for absolution from BIPOC students or faculty. As we always say, it’s really about doing the work,” she adds. “Do the work with your colleagues, maybe with your other fellow white students, do the work within yourself.”

THE CHALLENGES THAT REMAIN
While Carleton’s journalism program has taken steps to address the calls to action released in 2020, especially when it comes to diversifying faculty and sessional instructors within the program, leaders at the university continue to remain white. The Racialized Leaders Leading Canadian Universities research published in Educational Management Administration & Leadership Journal last year found that “universities in Canada are overwhelmingly top-down institutions.”

“Even with an executive-level diversity advocate, there can be issues with diversity at the organizational level,” the research says. “Scholars have warned that these positions have the potential for tokenism, ‘whereby Chief Diversity Officers [and similar positions] may be seen as the face of diversity, but lack the formidable authority and support to create real and lasting change.’” Data from 2020 used in the research shows that 80 percent of Carleton University’s leadership is white, with 60 percent of leadership positions being held by white men, and another 20 percent held by white women. There are no Black or Indigenous men or women in leadership roles at the university.

Mohamed Elmi, the acting executive director at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Diversity Institute and a co-author of the paper, says barriers at three levels—societal, organizational, and individual—determine how many people of colour seek leadership positions in academia. One of the biggest barriers, however, is that longer career trajectories within post-secondary institutions mean those leadership positions are much slower to change.

“Even though from the outside, they [post-secondary institutions] are viewed as progressive, they are relatively bureaucratic and very slow,” Elmi says. At the same time, Elmi says the responsibility for better diversity and inclusion within the university must not fall on leaders alone. Instead, organizations and individuals that support a university, whether through funding or strategic partnerships, must also call on institutions to address diversity. “You don’t want to put the onus on the individuals, especially in a system that is not responsive,” he says.

A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE
More than two years since the calls to action were first published by students and alumni, Carleton’s journalism school has taken significant steps to address the first: hiring diverse faculty. At the same time, conversations about other calls to action listed in the document are still taking place between the journalism school at Carleton and the university at large. Among these is the call to collect race-based student data and abolish unpaid internships. It is unclear how the diversity of Carleton as a university—or lack thereof—is affecting these conversations. Thompson does say they are ongoing. For students and alumni involved, the unmet calls to action remain front and centre. For Bowden, it’s important the school now goes from addressing the calls to action to defining its mission over the next couple years. It’s a way of ensuring accountability, especially since she feels “a lot of these issues in the industry, I think can be tackled by j-schools.”

“I’m happy to see [changes] but I don’t want blog posts on our website being like, ‘Oh, we randomly did this and we randomly did this,’” Bowden says. “I want to see that in six months, [the school has] committed to [particular changes], and are they going to happen? And if it doesn’t, somebody is going to face consequences for that.”

“That’s how any planning is done,” she says, adding, “When I do see it, that’s when I’m going to feel more confident about this process.” For Ng, who graduated just this summer, the changes that Carleton’s journalism program has made so far, as well as the ones they hope the school commits to making in the future, could ensure that equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives implemented in the classroom have a positive impact on newsrooms across the country as well. “I think that conversations about accountability and transparency, and bringing that respect and care to our reporting, is something that can start at journalism schools and should continue to flow into the industry,” they say. “[It all] links back to journalism school because I think this is the place where a lot of journalists are shaped and where we first begin to understand journalistic values and the history of our role as reporters.”

Photo by INSTAR Images / Alamy Stock Photo

When it first aired over two decades ago, Sex and the City’s fantasy lay in an idyllic New York City lifestyle of affordable rent, flowing cosmopolitans, closets full of expensive designer fashion, a revolving door of attractive men for one and all, and an endless string of meet-cutes. The four best friend protagonists, Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Miranda Hobbes, and Charlotte York, had it all at their fingertips.

Seventeen years after the finale (and 11 years after the second movie, but let’s not discuss it), the anticipated reboot, And Just Like That… premiered at the end of 2021. While some of that original fantasy remains intact (like when Carrie walks around the grimy streets of NYC in a trailing, white tulle skirt without it becoming dirty), I was struck by the ways in which it has shifted. In this new iteration, it’s the fantasy of successful friendship into middle age that takes centre stage.

Maybe this is two years of social isolation talking, but some of my friendships are struggling. While I do think the pandemic has a part in it, and I’ll never know otherwise, I still have a sneaking suspicion that I’d find myself here even without a disease keeping us from our loved ones. Now, in my 30s, the majority of my friends have settled down with a longtime partner, and many of them have chosen to become parents.

I don’t begrudge them for it, but we live in a heteronormative society, one that values a more traditional family unit above all else. As a single, childless person, I’m not always sure where that leaves me. Unfortunately, it’s usually pretty low on the priority list, far behind children and spouses and work. At least until an empty nest and retirement. Old women together at the movies, I see and love you.

However, And Just Like That… presents an alternative reality where your friends are your family and you don’t have to spend several months going back and forth in a text chain just to organize a brunch. In the first scene of the show, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte are eating at a restaurant, their bond unchanged other than a devastating break-up with Samantha. Their friendship is still the focal point of their lives, despite both marriage for all and kids for Miranda and Charlotte.

At the end of the first episode, Carrie’s husband, John James Preston (also known as “Mr. Big”), dies of a heart attack. In episode five, she has hip surgery. After both of these major life events, Miranda and Charlotte drop everything to care for their friend, staying the night, nursing her back to health. But it’s not only the big stuff. They share frequent meals and walks together, their connectedness is a throughline. Making time for each other is a given, not an option.

Deeply moved, I felt comfort in being with old friends, albeit fictional ones. Then came profound grief for how my own friendships have changed. Ten episodes with Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte left me wondering who will be there not only for the hard stuff but the mundane, which is often just as meaningful: coffee, errands, inconsequential stories about my day. Of course, there’s a certain level of unattainability in And Just Like That…. It is television, after all. But maybe, just maybe, if we start working toward community instead of insularity, friendship can take its deserved place at the forefront of our lives, even if we aren’t on a television show

Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice

When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were both passionate about uplifting Indigenous voices.

However, the first time David approached Rice about co-hosting in 2018, he had to decline. Although he was excited about the idea, he couldn’t take on a new project. He was working full-time at CBC and he had a new baby.

“I shelved it because I never pictured any other co-host. I did not want to go ahead unless I was going to go ahead with Waub,” David says.

David sees herself as a communicator. She has a background in journalism, she’s an experienced facilitator, and she’s the author of two books, including the podcast’s namesake, Story Keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal Writers (Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2004). She’s spent her career promoting Indigenous voices on television, radio, and in literature.

Early in 2021, David heard Rice was leaving CBC so he could write full-time. She approached him again and asked if this was a better time for him to co-host the podcast. He said yes. Right away, they got to work. They successfully applied for funding with the Ontario Arts Council, hammered out the details of what they’d like the podcast to be, and started planning the first season. The first episode aired in March 2021.

Rather than the typical radio show where authors are interviewed about their books, David wanted to do something different. Storykeepers is more like a book club, with a book being discussed in depth without the author present. They record one episode per month. The entire focus of Storykeepers is Indigenous voices: they discuss Indigenous writing across genres—fiction, memoir, plays, and poetry—with an Indigenous guest host.

“It’s a bit of a challenge to transpose that book club kind of vibe,” Rice says. “How we approach each episode is very informal and casual.”

Although they read the books, take notes, and discuss topics ahead of time, David and Rice keep the actual episodes unscripted. For Rice, the podcast was an exciting challenge after working at CBC for so long, where almost everything was scripted.

When planning the season, David and Rice started with a list of books they wanted to discuss, and then they made a list of potential guest hosts. Afterwards, they tried to match them up.

“What we try to do is identify somebody who has some sort of personal or professional connection to that book or to that author or to the Indigenous nation that it’s about just to open our eyes to perspectives we may not have considered either,” Rice says. They bring in voices from Anishinaabe, Cree, Inuit, Métis, and Two-Spirit backgrounds, among others.

They recorded 10 episodes for the first season, including a discussion with Cherie Dimaline about Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster, Duncan McCue about Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, Rosanna Deerchild about Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and more. To encourage listeners to engage with the podcast and interact with them online as if it is a book club, Storykeepers offers book giveaways. At the end of the season, David and Rice were thrilled when they realized the podcast had over 47,000 downloads.

Season two kicked off in January 2022 with a discussion of Katherena Vermette’s The Strangers with guest host Jamie Morse. Rice has taken a slight step back for season two, as he will be a judge for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and he’s editing his forthcoming novel. Instead of participating in every episode, he’ll be co-hosting every second episode.

“I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I want to do the books we feature in the podcast properly,” Rice says.

He expects to return to co-hosting every episode in fall 2022.

Listeners can look forward to hearing about an exciting lineup this season, including Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, and the podcast’s first episode featuring a graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

David hopes the new season reaches even more listeners. She would like people to come to them and tell them what they’re reading. She’d be thrilled to hear from Indigenous writers and artists interested in being a guest host on the show.

“We can do this for 10, 20 years and still not get through all the books by Indigenous authors,” David says. “I feel like I kind of owe it to Indigenous authors to keep this going so that they can see themselves and their books in here. We’ve just touched the surface.”

Photo by iStock; Design by Valerie Thai

In August 2021, the UN Secretary-General declared the findings of a recent global climate report “a code red for humanity.” In response, a team of journalists and researchers released the “Climate Coverage in Canada” report in November, which heard from 143 scientists, 148 journalists, and 1,006 members of the public on how they perceive news about climate change.

While early findings indicate scientists and journalists agree that the earth is growing warmer due to human activity, the Canadian public seems less sure—only 80 percent of those surveyed said the earth is warming because of human activity, as compared to 97 percent of scientists and journalists. Sean Holman, an author of the study and professor of environmental and climate journalism at the University of Victoria, says that if journalists and scientists are in consensus about climate change, it’s worth examining why Canadian news coverage doesn’t reflect the severity of the crisis at hand.

Canadian news management isn’t on the same page

The study found a disconnect between what journalists want to cover and what they’re assigned. Of those less willing or able to cover climate change, 44 percent of journalists cited a lack of interest from newsroom management. “Journalists on the ground understand how climate change is affecting Canada,” says Holman. “But those running Canadian newsrooms might not have the same understanding.”

Neither journalists nor scientists have faith that current coverage properly equips voters to make political decisions about climate change. Only 18 percent of scientists and 21 percent of journalists believe the public knows enough about climate change to make informed voting decisions. Beyond providing more climate coverage, scientists and journalists agree newsrooms shouldn’t provide a platform for op-eds that reject climate science findings. Holman remarks that while media organizations such as the BBC and the Los Angeles Times have policies against climate science rejectionism, some major Canadian news media outlets seem to be in the business of promoting it.

More cooperation is needed between scientists and journalists

Though scientists and journalists surveyed had similar understandings of climate change, nearly half of the scientists said concerns about being politicized or misrepresented kept them from doing media interviews. Both groups say climate scientists should be consulted in editorial decision-making about related coverage.

“There’s an opportunity there … for scientists and journalists to be talking more,” Holman says. “We need to be creating a shared community to support evidence-based decision-making.” One solution with widespread support was forums hosted by journalists, where the public can directly ask scientists questions about climate change and its impacts.

What comes next for climate coverage?

The study explored how regular news coverage can better incorporate climate change information. More than 90 percent of scientists and journalists wanted to see stories about natural disasters and extreme weather that explain how those events are likely to increase, both in severity and number, because of climate change.

From the 175 open recommendations submitted by scientists and journalists, the study heard support for another strategy: localized rather than globalized coverage. “Climate change often feels like it’s something happening far away rather than something close at hand,” Holman says. He emphasizes specific and regional information should be available, so people feel like they can make a difference in their everyday lives.

In Scarborough, Ontario, in Cedarbrae Mall, down the escalator and across from the Dollarama, there’s Frugo, a store that feels very much like a flea market. There you’ll find an assortment of items that range from vintage to essential. A few years ago, I found a small orange faux leather handbag and modelled it in the aisle. In that playful moment of dress-up, I tapped into a childhood fantasy: dressing like the women whose style I idolized in 2000s music videos. I didn’t buy the purse because I didn’t think it was in style at the time, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

To me, the Y2K fashion resurgence is a second chance. It’s an opportunity to embrace the looks of yesteryear that I desperately wanted to emulate when I was a child. Music videos were a peek into the life I wanted to live and the way I hoped to dress when I was grown. I really thought I’d grow up to look like Destiny’s Child circa 2001 – 2004. It never occurred to me that fashion would evolve by the time I was old enough to dress like the video vixens from Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy.” But Gen Z’s interest in ’90s and 2000s fashion has brought back a lot of those looks, including fringe, string-tied crop tops, skorts, and faux leather everything.

When I imagine the looks I wanted to imitate, I think of the video for Destiny’s Child’s “Girl.” There’s a scene where Michelle wears a lavender cardigan dress set with a matching wide-brim hat, which was the kind of lavish, grown woman attire I aspired to. It’s also a reflection of the current interest in matching sets: think Missy Elliott’s tracksuits or Saweetie and Paris Hilton in Juicy Couture. I wanted to be in the club, like Toni Braxton in the video for “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” wearing tie-dye jeans and a cropped jewelled halter top.

Of course, my body and life in general aren’t what I expected them to be at age 28. 2000s fashion was designed around skinny bodies. Along with reintroducing low-rise jeans and gold chain belts, comes the scorn for fat bodies and anyone who dares flaunt their protruding belly. The 2000s was a blatantly fatphobic era. While people pretend that the body positivity movement has erased their discomfort with seeing fatness, fatphobia still very much exists within our systems today. We see this through people’s fear, including my own, of low-rise jeans. This fear is rooted in the belief that our bellies (and our fatness) should be hidden.

No pleasure comes from hiding. I haven’t completely eliminated fatphobia from my shopping experience—it’s hard to find clothing from your vision board that’ll fit over thick thighs and a round belly—but if I don’t dress like the video vixens I admire now, then when will I? As fashion evolves, the love for ’90s/2000s aesthetics will fade away again. And just as Allison P. Davis notes in the article “A Vibe Shift is Coming” in The Cut, some of us will “stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.” We’ll even create a lifestyle that accompanies that vibe. The only thing I wouldn’t say is “stuck.” It implies that we won’t incorporate new looks that complement our chosen era or challenge our fashion sense as we mature. Instead of being “stuck,” I’ve found a way to fulfill my little Black girl daydreams and perform my many personalities as I grow in age, body and imagination—from sensual video vixen to luxurious aunty.

Photo courtesy Afros In Tha City

“Our goal was amplifying Black voices,” says Ado Nkemka, deputy editor of Calgary-based media collective Afros In Tha City. The media collective is the only one of its kind in Mohkínstsis/Calgary, exploring topics relevant to the Black experience and supporting the voices of Black journalists in a hegemonically white media landscape.

Founded in 2016, it was originally events-based, offering community discussions, panels, and events and began writing and publishing in 2020, following the death of George Floyd in the U.S. and the racial reckoning that was happening in Canadian consciousness as well. The platform has come a long way since then and published its first piece in October 2020.

The topics covered by Afros In Tha City include music, lifestyle pieces, social commentary, articles about race-based data, environmentalism, artist profiles, and much more. Writers from the collective have gone on to publish on other mainstream platforms such as the CBC and Huffington Post.

“I think that there is a balance,” says Nkemka, “of, like, trying to be a legitimate business, but also not just spitting information out for the sake of spitting it out but [to be] intentional. I think intentionality has to come with that social consciousness that we’re trying to develop.”

An example would be Afros In Tha City’s use of slow journalism, a practice featured at another Calgary-based independent publication, The Sprawl, which Afros In Tha City is affiliated with. When journalists thoughtfully craft an article on an issue, it acts as a resistance to capitalist practices in mainstream journalism, says Nkemka.

“The reader reads through it and knows that,” Nkemka explains, “‘Okay, this isn’t rushed’. I took my time. This wasn’t some—and this is totally shade—but this isn’t some like, ‘Oh, I’m trying to get five articles out in a day type thing ‘cause, you know, business.’”

According to Nkemka, there may be multiple visions in the expansion of the media collective, including panel discussions, a podcast, a spoken word night in collaboration with other organizations in the city, and a future iteration in their ongoing collaboration with The Sprawl. All of these plans further the goal of cementing Afros in the Calgary arts scene.

“We’re hoping that through our work, and hopefully through non-editorial events where we can really engage with the community, people begin to trust us,” Nkemka says. “And not only support but feel like they can come share their stories with us and know that we want to do those stories justice.”

Photo ©Disney Channel/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the summer of 2008, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

My family and I were “visiting” my paternal uncle in Canada at the time. I say “visit,” because it was more of a two-month trial for my parents to gauge whether or not they wanted to immigrate here from Lahore, Pakistan.

During the days, my aunt and uncle took our family to downtown Toronto for sightseeing. At night, they let us make a small dent in their enormous collection of Bollywood films.

During a visit to the Toronto Public Library’s Yorkville branch while on a break from sightseeing, I picked up High School Musical: The Junior Novel, a novelization of the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) of the same name. After reading (and re-reading) the novel, and repeatedly flipping through the eight pages of photos of the movie’s cast inside it, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

High School Musical was released on the Disney Channel two years earlier, in 2006. The film is, as the name suggests, a musical set in a high school, one named East High. Its plot centres on Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, who first meet at a New Year’s Eve party—during which they discover their love of song together—and later at East High where Gabriella is a transfer student.

Though Troy is the captain of the basketball team and Gabriella eventually joins the scholastic decathlon team, they both decide to follow their newfound love of music and audition for the school musical together. Their decision inspires admiration from other students, who also decide to reveal their secret passions; derision from their friends, who try their best to convince them to “Stick to the Status Quo” (a song from the movie); and outrage from the drama club royalty, Sharpay and Ryan Evans, who try to sabotage them.

The movie premiered to an audience of 7.7 million, the highest-rated premiere for a DCOM ever at the time. Fifteen years after its release, it remains the ninth most-viewed premiere of a DCOM, while its sequel, High School Musical 2, claims the first spot with 17.2 million. It has left behind an enormous legacy.

The film spawned two sequels (the third film even received a theatrical release grossing almost $253 million), three foreign adaptations, a spin-off film, a concert tour, a sing-along reunion, an ice show, an actual staged musical, a reality competition, a book series, several video games, and a Disney+ TV show that launched the career of pop star Olivia Rodrigo.

In the novel, Troy and Gabriella feel “a spark of electricity” while singing to each other that leads them to almost kiss as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. My prurient, pubescent brain became so fixated with that scene that I re-read it nearly every single day before returning the book. My fixation eventually evolved into a desperate need to watch its source material and witness the chemistry between Troy and Gabriella for myself.

However, since two years had passed since the film’s release, Family Channel—which owned the rights to broadcast Disney Channel shows and films in Canada—did not air a rerun and my cousins didn’t own the DVD.

When I requested them to reserve a copy at the library, I found out that it had a months-long waiting list. When I sought out the DVD in stores, its price—$19.99, as I recall—seemed exorbitant when I converted it into Pakistani rupees. When I tried to search for snippets of it on YouTube, all I found were lyric videos featuring stills from the movie.

When I finally returned to Pakistan, bought the DVD—and its sequel, which had been released a year earlier—and watched the movie, my desperation didn’t dull; it matured into mania.

I turned on the subtitles during the songs so I could write down the lyrics to memorize later, rewinding the scenes so I could get the number of getchas in “Get’cha Head in the Game” right. I practiced the “Bop to the Top” dance routine in my bathroom—my DVD had a dance practice in the bonus features. I recorded the songs onto a cassette so I could listen to them without having to set up my DVD player.

I slobbered over Zac Efron, squealed after learning that he and Vanessa Hudgens were dating and shipped—though I didn’t know that was the term for it—them together. I scoured the web for any and all news of High School Musical 3—which was released in October that year—during the short bursts in which I was allowed to use my parents’ computer. I begged my mom to buy me books from the High School Musical book series and became the proud owner of High School Musical 2: The Junior Novel, as well as four other books in the series.

I probably would have accumulated more had I not suddenly been forced to give most of my books away. My parents had enjoyed their free trial and decided to immigrate to Canada.

My parents moved our family from Lahore, Pakistan to Toronto eight months later in March 2009, in the middle of my Grade 6 school year. Though I was devastated to leave all my friends and extended family behind, I decided to view the move as the “Start of Something New” that Troy and Gabriella had sung about. However, when I arrived in Canada, I found out that High School Musical had left me woefully underprepared to navigate the North American school system.

Though my family did have a DVD player (after numerous years of breaking and fixing our VHS player), we didn’t have cable. Thus, much of what I’d learned about North American schools aside from High School Musical was through brief snippets of sitcoms on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, depending on what my maternal cousins—who did have cable—felt like watching.

What I’d gleaned from reruns of Kenan & Kel, Kim Possible, That’s So Raven, Phil of the Future, Drake & Josh, American Dragon: Jake Long, and Hannah Montana was that all North American schools had cafeterias that were filled with tripping hazards, science labs where experiments always went awry, and locker-laden hallways where conversations, confessions, and confrontations happened—sometimes at the same time.

This was in stark contrast to my school in Pakistan, where students brought all their textbooks and notebooks to school every day in heavy backpacks, which was probably why they stayed in one classroom throughout the day unless it was for music, gym, or lunch, and ate the aforementioned lunch in the school yard.

I’d also learnt that North American students had surprise pop quizzes, free (but not always appetizing) lunches, and no uniforms; that every school had a teacher who hated you, an athlete that everyone worshiped, and a popular blonde girl who never hesitated to sabotage you; and that it didn’t take long for new students to fit in.

I envisioned myself as Gabriella at my new school. I had brown hair and brown eyes; I had the grades and the love for reading; and I had a decent voice—I had been part of the school choir in Pakistan. I failed to take into account, however, that I also had the label of “immigrant” attached to me.

As an immigrant student, I spent several months figuring out whether pencil crayons were pencils or crayons (they were coloured pencils), what Language Arts was (English), and why students had to change into gym clothes (in Pakistan, we just had to change our shoes). As a Muslim immigrant student from Pakistan, I fielded microaggressions about my “good English,” why I didn’t wear the hijab (I started wearing it full-time in Grade 8), and how I was so smart.

This experience, I later found out, was not limited to me; many new immigrant students in North America often struggle to overcome the sociocultural and linguistic differences present between their native country and their new country. These struggles are further amplified if the students are racialized and belong to minority faiths, given how deeply Christianity and xenophobia are entrenched in the entire North American education system, including Canada.

Black students have their hair and bodies policed, are streamed into lower education tracks, and are suspended at a disproportionate rate in Canadian schools. Middle Eastern and Muslim students are called terrorists; South Asian girls are bullied for their body hair; and East Asian students are mocked for their eye shape. Nearly all racialized students are teased for their “weird-smelling” food, their perceived lack of fluency speaking English, or their cultural or religious traditions (such as oiling their hair) in Canadian schools.

Whether it is due to their race, religion, or culture, or an intersection of all three, BIPOC students often face both covert and overt racism, not only at the hands of their fellow students but also teachers and school staff.

Despite how common this experience is, however, immigrant and refugee students are almost never represented in mainstream media. When they are, they are often Long Duk Dong-esque figures used as punchlines because of their “weird” food and even weirder behaviour.

Though the casts of movies and TV shows aimed at teens have been slowly diversifying in the decade since I immigrated, the BIPOC actors almost always play supporting characters to white leads and the movies and TV shows they star in almost never capture the racism and microaggressions many BIPOC students experience in the education system.

This is also the case in the High School Musical cinematic universe. As long as the student in question is kind, hardworking, and tries their best, they can achieve everything they want. The closest High School Musical comes to showing BIPOC students’ experience in the education system is the drama teacher Ms. Darbus’s dismissive attitude toward Troy’s best friend and basketball teammate, Chad Danforth, who is Black.

Many of my teachers, throughout both middle and high school, demonstrated an amplified version of this attitude. Ms. Darbus’s attitude was limited to telling Chad to settle down in class and implying in conversations with his coach that Chad’s athletic accomplishments outweighed his academic ones. My teachers, however, regularly lambasted racialized students—especially Black boys—for ordinary offences such as being late, wearing caps, and chewing gum inside the classroom; derided them for being “loud” and “disruptive;” and treated them with decidedly less empathy than their white students. I vividly remember my Grade 8 teacher rolling her eyes at several female Black students for cheering too loudly during a school event.

Though I couldn’t earn Gabriella’s popularity, I did eventually earn her reputation of being my high school’s “freaky genius girl”—though I was more freaky than genius.

I couldn’t participate in many extracurriculars like the students in High School Musical because they required both time and energy. I needed someone to give me a ride to and from rehearsals, games, and performances; someone to pay for jerseys, equipment, instruments, entry fees, and hospital bills in case of injuries; and someone to persuade my teachers to give me extensions for deadlines that I would miss for these extracurriculars. I felt hesitant asking my parents for this, knowing how hard they were already working.

Thus, I decided to excel in the classroom instead, causing students in my grade to mock me behind my back for being a teacher’s pet. They didn’t realize that this was the only way to ensure that I received the same opportunities as my white counterparts and that despite it, I still often got passed over for opportunities, awards, and empathy in favour of my white peers. I once had a teacher yell at me to go find a park bench when I fell asleep in class after staying up all night to finish assignments.

Thirteen years have passed since I first became obsessed with High School Musical, six since I graduated high school. Yet sometimes I still seethe with anger at the callousness that I and my fellow immigrant, racialized students experienced—and continue to experience—in the Canadian education system. I wish I could go back in time, armed with the knowledge and confidence that I now possess, and stand up to the teachers and students who doubted, dismissed, and derided me and my peers.

Though some Canadian school boards now offer anti-racism support—after numerous demands from racialized students and parents—the Canadian education system continues to harm and disadvantage immigrant and BIPOC students.

Fifteen years ago, Troy and Gabriella and the rest of the East High Wildcats assured the world that “We’re All in
This Together.” They were wrong.

Photo by INSTAR Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Every week, when I was a teenager, I used to squirrel my hand-me-down laptop away to my bedroom and scour the internet’s sketchy streaming sites for the latest episode of Gossip Girl. (I couldn’t watch it on the family TV—after all, it was, per its marketing, “every parent’s nightmare.”) From quippy dialogue, to attempts at edgy subject matter, to nonsensical use of cell phones, it was a show that was completely of the 2000s.

The first season aired in 2007, in the back half of the decade known—in the parlance of zippy tabloid journalism—as the Naughty Aughties. It was supposed to be an age of irreverence, the age of snark: it was biting, it was catty, it was mean. From burgeoning blogs to reality TV, so much of that decade’s entertainment was predicated on the appeal of laughing at rather than with.

That world can feel very distant these days. Our current pop culture landscape is for the large part one of feel-good shows, peppy positivity, and political awareness. When a reboot of my favourite teen soap dropped this July on HBO Max (and streamed on Crave in Canada), it looked a little different. This time the clutch of privileged Upper East Side teens are presented as racially diverse and fluid in gender and sexuality. Where the publicity for the original focused on shock, scandal, and designer clothing, this new version, creator Joshua Safran told Variety, was to “tell more queer stories.”

Gossip Girl is not the only ’00s show hitting small screens for the second time. HBO also plans to drop new episodes of their Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That… this fall, minus Samantha, but with the added promise of three new series regulars played by women of colour. Meanwhile, a reality show entirely conceived around gawking at fat people’s bodies, The Biggest Loser, premiered a rebooted version in 2020 that purported to be about a “holistic … look at wellness.”

But have these shows really changed, or are they a product of our neoliberal moment?

Referring to the contemporary renaissance of 19th century liberalism, an ideology that espoused laissez-faire economics and minimal government interference, neoliberalism is underpinned by a belief in the necessity of sustained economic growth. In our late capitalist era, this mindset has also taken on the trappings of socially liberal positions, resulting in hypocrisy—acknowledgement of systemic issues while pushing “solutions” that rest on individual actions. We live in a time where our governments prefer to offer a sugar-coating of palatability to bitter pills like widespread economic inequality. And in an effort to engage more progressive young demographics, so do television networks.

While the new iteration of Gossip Girl aims to be more diverse, there are no fat characters, no characters with disabilities, and as Refinery29’s Kathleen Newman-Breemang points out, the actors of colour cast in the new series are all light skinned. The handful of LGBTQ2S+ characters act out scenarios ranging from the mundane (marital spats) to the downright troubling (student-teacher hook-ups)—not so much the “queer stories” promised as a rehash of established heteronormative tropes from the show’s original run.

Queer Eye, which was rebooted by Netflix in 2018, takes a slightly more holistic approach to revamping its source material. The original run, which aired from 2003 to 2007 and originally went by the title Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, was predicated on the dual stereotype of the straight man as slobbish and emotionally disconnected and the gay man as fashionable, neat, successful, and emotionally intelligent. While the show made strides in representing a certain (very narrow) kind of queer identity in the pop culture mainstream, it typically shied away from political statement, representing any problems plaguing its “straight guys” as mere personal failings—a lack of personal style, an uncultivated sense of taste.

While the rebooted version introduces some racial and cultural diversity, the “Fab Five,” the series’ makeover experts, by no means embody the breadth of LGBTQ2S+ communities that use the queer label. The show has, however, captured our current zeitgeist of self-love, body acceptance, and self-care.

The version of these things that the show peddles are divorced from their radical progressive roots. The show co-opts terms like “self-care”—originally coined by Black feminist poet Audre Lorde. The makeover subjects—the show calls them “heroes”—are suffering, we are told, because they don’t love themselves enough, they don’t take time for themselves, they judge themselves too harshly. Hair products and interior decorating then become supposed radical acts, imbued with the power
to shift one’s entire life.

But, many times in the series, it quickly becomes clear how hollow these concepts are. Episodes where the Fab Five help out a young climate change activist or a previously unhoused community worker quickly beg the question, how does any of this address systemic problems?

In July 2021, Netflix released a one-off episode of the show on YouTube, accessible to anyone with or without a Netflix subscription. The episode, sponsored by Delta Air Lines, featured a 26-year-old Delta employee living a spartan lifestyle as he struggled to pay off his student loans. The makeover subject, William Holmes, says in the episode that he is burdened by student debt like “most millennials,” and that it is “really slowing our generation down” in life.

For millennials who have been repeatedly told that financial security would be within our grasp if we gave up luxuries like avocado toast, the show’s advice is downright infuriating. The Fab Five decide Holmes’s main problem is that he’s not “being in the present and having fun,” as the show’s culture expert Karamo Brown puts it. In the end, Holmes gets a new wardrobe and new decor for the bedroom in the house he shares with several roommates, as well as a smattering of advice to “be more confident” and “[go] out and see the city, because life is good.” There is no offer to pay off his debt, let alone a message about the broken systems that created the student debt crisis that Holmes is a part of. Unable to grapple with the reality that lifestyle cannot save a life, the show unearths problems and makes vague offers to solve them with a Band-Aid solution.

Some recent reboots attempt to capitalize on the politics of the current moment without addressing their past misdeeds. Friends, the juggernaut sitcom that ran 10 seasons, ending in 2004, depicted an almost entirely white New York City, and faced questions and criticisms around its lack of diversity during its original run. One of the show’s few Black employees, writers’ assistant Amaani Lyle, filed a lawsuit alleging a culture of racism and sexism behind the scenes at the show. Rewatching it on streaming services 20 years later, many younger viewers have bristled not only at the lack of diversity, but at its incessant homophobic jokes and homophobic and transphobic plotlines.

The 2021 Friends reunion did not address these issues, instead recruiting an assortment of celebrities, political figures, and fans to talk about why Friends had been so special. A collection of people including Malala Yousafzai, the women’s education activist and youngest-ever Nobel laureate, talked about how the show had brought them through lonely, difficult times in their lives. It’s not just a show, they suggest—it has more power than that.

Yet, the show’s importance seemingly does not cut both ways—for many people who, for years, brought up their problems with the show’s content, the implication was that the show couldn’t possibly have power, that it was just a sitcom.

A similar case is Project Runway, the fashion design reality show that first aired in 2004. At the time, the direction of the show was heavily shaped by producer Harvey Weinstein, who saw it, according to a 2017 LA Times report, not only as a vehicle to put a bunch of models on TV, but to meet them himself. Along with shots of young models in their underwear, the show often featured contestants insulting plus-size models, and even using a transphobic slur as a catchphrase.

After Weinstein was brought down by a wave of sexual assault and harassment allegations in 2017, the show was retooled and relaunched with a new host, model Karlie Kloss, and new judges. This new version attempted to incorporate modern criticisms of the fashion industry by using a range of model sizes and setting challenges based on sustainable design. But, again, behind the surface-level changes, the show makes no attempt to dismantle the industry that supports it. In one 2020 episode, a contestant made a quip about Kloss’s connection to Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner (Kloss is married to Kushner’s brother) and was promptly sent home.

The catty shows of the 2000s have been declawed, but what we are delivered so often is neoliberal rhetoric without any progressive substance. So much of TV today has the gleam of corporate art—cold, frictionless, inoffensive, but insubstantial.

Nostalgia is often cited as the cause for our cultural obsession with reboots and sequels, but perhaps there is another drive, not to revisit the gleeful meanness of the 2000s but to surgically remove the painful elements of a property of which we remain fond. Perhaps some reboots come from an attempt to turn painful artifacts into empowering ones, not entirely disingenuously. But the problem is a constant idealizing: if not of the past, through the lens of nostalgia, then of the present, serving up a race-blind, post-feminist, progressive world, where all that needs to change is your skincare routine.

Neoliberalism is, in a way, the ultimate reboot. Reboots are safe. They’re comforting in their familiarity, and they offer the illusion of change without the hard work of making that change. Like signage for condo developments promising community growth while gentrifying a neighbourhood, or bank-sponsored floats in Pride parades: a progressive veneer hiding something more sinister.

Photo by Doug Peters / Alamy Stock Photo

“Sometimes people’s … personal life becomes bigger than their work,” says pop star Britney Spears at one point during Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times-produced documentary released in February 2021. Though the complaint backgrounds a montage of Spears being chased around by paparazzi in the late 2000s, it may as well have been issued on the topic of more recent discussions about her, where her ceaseless legal problems have often threatened to eclipse her actual art.

Directed by Samantha Stark, the film serves as the sixth instalment in the Hulu/FX docuseries The New York Times Presents, and is broadly concerned with the origins and contours of the legal conservatorship (or guardianship) that has governed Spears’s life for nearly 14 years. The star was placed under a temporary conservatorship of both her estate and her person in February of 2008 after an extended period of personal and legal struggles, which culminated in two involuntary psychiatric holds at the top of the year. The arrangement was made indefinite that October, and while it remains in place at the time of writing, Jamie Spears, Britney’s father and former co-conservator, officially filed a petition to end it in September 2021.

A secondary tale that emerges in Framing Britney Spears is that of #FreeBritney, the fan-led movement that has sought to liberate Spears from the conservatorship, concerned for her personal well-being and believing that she’s being taken advantage of financially. (Former co-conservator Andrew Wallet once called the arrangement a “hybrid business model” while petitioning for a raise, and Forbes recently estimated Jamie Spears to have earned at least $5 million before taxes from it.) #FreeBritney “runs from the innocuous to the extreme,” journalist Liz Day explains in the film. Some fans scrutinize and explain court documents; others look for what are supposedly hidden messages being posted by Spears on Instagram.

And though the movement can be conspiracy-like in nature, at least some fan speculation has turned out to be correct. In audio from a June 2021 hearing, which was transcribed by Variety, Spears spoke publicly for the first time in years about her legal arrangement, telling judge Brenda Penny, “I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive.” Among other things, Spears alleged that her handlers have prevented her from visiting friends who live only a short distance away, that she’s been medicated and forced to work against her will, and that she hasn’t been allowed to have an intrauterine device removed even though she’d like to have another baby. (Spears has two teenage sons with ex-husband Kevin Federline.)

Where Stark’s documentary most succeeds is in efficiently recapping the events that led up to June 2021, giving viewers the necessary legal and cultural context to fully understand the conservatorship. And yet, because of that same efficiency, the film has to make necessary omissions for the sake of its runtime. One of these is Spears’s actual body of work—the thing that made her a beloved cultural figure in the first place. A few words are said about her 1998 video for “…Baby One More Time.” Former MTV VJ Dave Holmes notes of her meteoric rise that “she produced excellent videos.” But then we drop the subject completely; it’s established that Spears is working constantly through the 2000s and 2010s, including performing a wildly successful Las Vegas residency from 2013 through 2017, but the art itself takes a back seat to her snowballing legal problems.

And, perhaps because the film has driven so much of this year’s conversation about Spears, that elision of her work has carried over to what feels like the majority of social media posts and think pieces about her. This is particularly unfortunate in her case because her art has been the main channel through which she’s attempted to take back control over her life and narrative in the more than two decades that she’s been famous. On numerous occasions, she’s used her music and music videos to plead for respect and privacy, to laugh at herself when it was clear that she wasn’t going to get any, and even to carry out revenge fantasies against people who’ve hurt her. To downplay this, as the film does, is to inadvertently and mistakenly paint her as a passive figure in all that she’s been through.   

Spears has been known for singing about fame and its complications since as early as her second album, 2000’s Oops!… I Did It Again. The film features multiple montages of her fielding invasive questions from journalists and the public during her imperial years, with Spears addressing her body and self-publicized desire to remain a virgin until marriage. But, while we see that her music is breaking records worldwide, there’s no indication that said music quickly became about being a young woman navigating young adulthood in the public eye.

In 2000’s “Lucky,” she tells the story of a starlet who can’t figure out why she’s so sad even though there’s technically nothing missing in her life. “I’m so fed up with people telling me to be someone else but me,” she sings on 2001’s “Overprotected.” She opens “I’m a Slave 4 U,” from the same year, with an accusation: “All you people look at me like I’m a little girl.” Media scrutiny of Spears around this time could indeed be quite horrid, but an equally important part of the story is how she capitalized on it, when she could just as easily have recoiled.

Tabloid coverage of the star entered a new phase in 2002, following her breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake. His music video for “Cry Me a River,” released in November of that year, depicts him breaking into the home of a Spears lookalike and watching her shower from the shadows. The ex-lover in his lyrics is implied to have cheated on him, a narrative that the press ran with. “He essentially weaponizes the video for one of his singles to incriminate her in the demise of the relationship,” critic Wesley Morris summarizes in the film. But Stark chooses to end that particular chapter there, skipping over what Spears did next, which was respond.

In her 2004 video for “Everytime,” Spears is depicted as one half of a famous couple feeling the strain of omniscient paparazzi. In a scuffle with photographers and frenzied fans, she’s hit in the head with a camera. She doesn’t realize that she’s been wounded until she’s in a hotel bathtub, where she loses consciousness and eventually dies. The camera-as-weapon metaphor was arguably heavy-handed, but the video served as a reminder to the public that there was a real person at the centre of this insatiability. Its most haunting moment has a man clamouring for an autograph while Spears is carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. There’s no retaliation at Timberlake, just a shifting of perspective.

Some challenges would be trickier to recast artistically. Spears’s so-called breakdown proper is generally considered to have lasted from late 2006, when she filed for divorce from Federline, until February of 2008, when the conservatorship took effect. The film covers this period in excruciating detail, from the week that she famously shaved all of her hair off at a Los Angeles salon, to losing custody of her sons, to various rehab and psychiatric ward stints. Not covered, of course, is the work that she released while this was happening.

On 2007’s Blackout, there was no attempt at deflection. “Piece of Me,” the album’s second single, has Spears instructing any critics to “get in line with the paparazzi who’s flipping me off / Hoping I’ll resort to some havoc, end up settling in court.” The song pokes fun at the “hot mess” persona that had by that point made her a favourite punching bag for late-night television, and one of the tabloid industry’s biggest cash cows. As with some of her early work, it was as if Spears recognized the constant surveillance and unflattering coverage to be inevitable, and turned her attention to how she could exercise agency within that dynamic.

The film abbreviates the next decade or so, giving us a montage of Spears making television appearances, touring, promoting fragrances, and winning awards for her work. “She’s living the life of a busy pop singer, and yet we’re also being told that she’s at risk constantly,” says journalist Joe Coscarelli, referring to the conservatorship remaining in place. Her work during this time continued to reference her bumpier years, and often emphatically. In the video for “Hold It Against Me,” from 2011’s Femme Fatale, her fall from grace is represented as a literal plummet, the star surrounded by monitors playing music videos from her cultural peak. In its climax, she battles a double of herself, seemingly alluding to her
own demons.

A more complicated entry was the video for “I Wanna Go,” from the same album. Spears plays herself in a revenge fantasy targeted at the media, cussing journalists out in a press conference before wreaking havoc outside the courthouse. At one point, she hams it up for a photographer before smashing his camera on the ground. When she finds herself cornered by several more, a long-corded microphone appears, which she swings around to violently take each of them out. While the metaphor is once again unsubtle, it corroborates the idea that Spears thinks of her music as her main form of resistance.

But the same video happens to end on a less cathartic note. After she’s rescued from the onslaught of press by a friend, who begins escorting her away from the scene, he turns back to face the lens with an evil expression, diabolical laughter heard in his head. The shot is an homage to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video from 1983, which ends with an identical moment. But it can also be read as a suggestion that Spears was skeptical of the people she was being told to trust.

Since her debut in the late 1990s, the star has been plagued by the narrative that she’s malleable, an empty vessel through which other people’s ideas and wants can be communicated. That line of thinking, combined with evidence supplied by tabloids that she needed help, allowed the conservatorship to go unquestioned by many people prior to this year. But as Spears’s former team member, Kevin Tancharoen, says in the film, “That idea that Britney is a puppet who just gets moved around and gets told what to do is incredibly inaccurate.”

Taken together, Spears’s artistic output paints a picture of a woman who doesn’t take anything lying down, a fact that can co-exist with the many instances—personal, cultural, and legal—in which she’s been unambiguously targeted. Downplaying that work in discussions about her runs the risk of buying into the idea of her as vulnerable and absentminded, just as her legal opponents have spent almost a decade and a half insisting she is. “Believe me,” she sings toward the end of “What U See (Is What U Get),” a deeper cut from her sophomore album. “You’ll be looking for trouble / If you hurt me.”