Stranger Things' Erica is a Stereotype

So I finally finished watching the latest season of Stranger Things and for the most part, I loved it. I am wondering how long the casting process was because ALL of the kids are PHENOMENAL ACTORS! I found the new season engaging of course and delightfully suspenseful. There was enough relationship, family, and friendship drama in addition to the main plot to keep someone like me satisfied. In particular, I was loving Steve and Nancy. I like Jonathan but prefer Nancy with Steve. Hopefully she will come to her senses in season three.

I was disturbed by how attractive I found psycho Billy's booty, and enjoyed the eighties music as well. Pat Benatar made some good music! Speaking of music, it was kind of refreshing to see that rock music accompanied many of Bad Boy Billy's scenes since all the movies and shows now use hip-hop to signal rebellion, delinquency and just... being up to no damn good. Metal and just plain old rock are perfect for that too. Anyway, that is another discussion.

Pat Benatar's eighties classic "Love is a Battlefield" was featured in Season 2 of "Stranger Things"

One thing I didn’t enjoy as much was Lucas’ sister, Erica. Priah Ferguson who plays Erica is cute as a button and is incredibly talented. The character of Erica though, just set off some alarms. I know I am in the minority in that opinion. Hell, I think I am ALONE in that opinion but I guess that just goes to show how much of a contrarian I can be.

Erica was one of four female characters introduced in this latest season. The others were her and Lucas' mother Mrs. Sinclair (Karen Ceesay), another experimented upon, traumatized girl, Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), and Max (Sadie Sink), the russet-haired skateboarding, video game genius that both Lucas and Dustin fell for. Max is the latest in the recent spate of white female television characters with superior STEM abilities in some shape or form. I suspect that’s because there are more women in the writing rooms and behind the camera in Hollywood and believe it’s overall a great thing. I am hoping that they will soon start casting more black and multi-racial girls in those types of roles as they also exist IRL. That sort of representation and inclusion is crucial. If readers can think of any other GOC who've played such roles besides Haley Brooke Walker who played Shannon Fisher on Chicago Med in Season Two's "Alternative Medicine" episode, I'd love to hear about it!

What casts a pall on the character is that Erica is a throwback to the insidious old stereotypes of black girls and women

Certainly, due to Ferguson's immense talent and charisma, Erica is a breath of fresh air. A thorn in Lucas’ side, Erica provides contrast to the rest of the kids in the show who are too burdened with trauma, fear, and responsibility to be flippant or rudely dismissive about anything. What casts a pall on the character is that Erica is a throwback to the insidious old stereotypes of black girls and women. Further, she was written in a one-dimensional manner; more caricature than character. Fine, Erica can be a smart aleck and be funny but in a show like this one she can also be just plain smart as well. There should be an underlying reason why she behaves the way that she does. Perhaps a resentment at the hypocrisy she sees in the people around her, for example. Dustin, one of the main characters, has a bit of a temper but he is also very knowledgeable about science, history, etc. His attitude makes sense in a way that the way that Erica's is written, doesn't. His faults don’t render him an intellectual cipher. However, the writers seem to have invoked the old lazy stereotype of the sassy black girl to make certain viewers feel more comfortable with having a black girl on their screen. At the beginning of my post I mentioned that I basically thought the show was brilliant. The Duffer brothers (and the rest of their writing team: Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Paul Dichter, and Kate Trefry) wove intricate storylines with a large cast of characters and kept it all interesting. This is why it is even more concerning to me that the type of creation and shaping the character of Erica seemed a mere afterthought.

There is plenty of material out there about harmful media stereotypes

We need writers who are just as excited to write black female characters (and other marginalized people) as any other character. I can't presume to know the mood of the Stranger Things writers room but the uninspired nature of the final product in this case, gives me reason to believe they weren't as enthusiastic as perhaps they should have been. Writers should also be knowledgeable about other cultures. Duh! There is plenty of material available about harmful media stereotypes starting with Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, which he wrote over forty years ago, to the more recent The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America by Tamara Winfrey Harris . There are also much more scholarly works on the subject that people can delve into. Anyone reading know of any other great books on the subject, holler at me. It is my fervent hope that any serious television and film writer would have resources like these in their libraries and writers rooms. They, along with resources on other marginalized people, should be mandatory for getting any sort of degree in media or communications. If this is already the case, more work needs to be done.

Speaking of scholarly work on the black female experience, the results of a study conducted at Georgetown University were recently released to the public and stated what many black women already knew. It indicated the differences in the way that young girls are perceived by the majority of society. The study illustrated that young black girls are often seen as being more mature and more sexually available than other young girls. The sad thing is that some young black girls do internalize this stereotype and Erica would be symbolic of a child who did so. They behave in ways that fulfill other people’s expectations of them without being able to really question if that is who they truly are. The character Erica appears to be about eight years old. I can see an eight year old talking about getting married. I can understand an eight year old having a “crush” on an older person- not in the way an teenager or an adult would but a sense of admiring a man in her life. I think that is normal. I believe an eight year old girl would play with male and female dolls and fantasize that they were together. However, it is a stretch for me to think that an eight year old would be playing with dolls and admiring any man’s muscles and being able to verbalize that as in the clip below. Maybe she would pretend they were “getting married” but not lusting over a man’s muscles. Further, if a little white girl were cast in the role, I believe they would have found a different way for her to be funny rather than give her all this grown up crap to say.

Finally, there wasn’t any one affectionate, loving interaction between Erica and her brother. They were combatants in every scene with nary a nuanced nod to an older brother’s love for his little sister or vice versa. All of Caleb’s affection was reserved for the flame-haired Max. Particularly poignant were the last scenes of the final episode where we saw Lucas (again) scream at Erica then SLAM THE DOOR IN HER FACE. A few scenes later, he respectfully albeit nervously approaches Max and asks her dance. I believe the last shot that we had of them is him holding her gingerly around the waist. Quite a juxtaposition.

So, I’m not here to tell the Duffer brothers how to write their show. Bottom line, it’s a brilliant freaking show. However, I wouldn’t recommend any black girl to watch it. There is nothing there to emulate and it doesn’t show black girls in a positive light in any way except as comic relief or punching bags. Please checkout a video of all of Erica's scenes below and feel free to let me know what you think.

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