When Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on March 10, 1997 it effectively changed television as we knew it, setting a fresh paradigm for what teen shows, horror shows, and their intersection with comedy could be. It was smart, witty, and moldbreaking with its titular Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a Valley girl with brains, street smarts, and strength whose vocal fry was her disguise in the same way as Clark Kent’s horn-rimmed glasses.
But for all its trailblazing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer hasn’t necessarily aged as well as it could have. Its treatment of race in particular indicates a major shortcoming. This is in what seems to be a forward-thinking and openly feminist narrative woven into weekly creature features and monster hunting. When it comes to its Black characters in particular, Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets an F-. Over the course of 144 episodes and seven seasons, there are only 10 Black characters, and all but one leans way into Black character stereotypes and tropes.
The Villainous Help
It takes an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — 13 episodes — before we meet a Black character with a name. This alone is a huge red flag. Even famously racially illiterate Friends did better than Buffy in this regard, with Jenifer Lewis’ hilarious cameo in the third episode of the Friends premiere season.
In Buffy, Absalom (Brent Jennings) appears in the season 2 premiere “When She Was Bad.” He is one of the key architects behind resurrecting The Master. The Master is an evil figure who would bring about the end of the human world. The Master was such a baddie. He managed to kill Buffy, albeit briefly. This triggered the line of slayer succession. It brought in Kendra Young (Bianca Lawson). Kendra Young was the second Black character with a name into the mix. Absalom only appears in one episode before he’s slain. And it’s troubling that not only does he serve a master — an overtly racist link to real-life slavery history — but he’s a villainous figurehead in the revival of a demonic character, feeding into on-screen stereotypes linking Black men in particular with monstrousness.
While Mr. Trick (K. Todd Freeman) is also a henchman to a villain, this time the nefarious Mayor Wilkins (Harry Groener), he at least gets five episodes of screentime before his demise over the course of the show’s third season. While Trick calls out America’s racist past on several occasions, his characterization is still like that of Absalom, an enabler of evil who serves a master — the villainous help.
But as problematic as these two characters might be, Sweet (Hinton Battle) in many ways takes the cake when it comes to racist portrayals of Black men on Buffy. Sweet is an actual minstrel demon figure, whose power is to make people around him burst out into song and dance. The saddest part about Sweet is that this grotesque racial stereotype is used to propel one of the fan favorite episodes, the musical “Once More With Feeling” that would be one of the best hours of television of all time, were it not for the underlying racism.
Now, if there had been dozens of Black villains dotted throughout the Buffyverse, this argument could be significantly watered down. But since Absalom, Trick, and Sweet makes up 30% of the Black characters, no can do.
Featured in twelve episodes, and the second longest-running Black character on Buffy, Forrest Gates (Leonard Roberts) begins as one of the soldiers in a secret paramilitary group who are tasked with controlling and often eradicating supernatural creatures. In other words, Forrest is a cop. But he doesn’t stay a cop for long as he is killed by the biomechanical demonoid Adam (George Hertzberg), who then turns Forrest into a creature like him. Forrest goes from being a pawn of the military industrial complex to the servant of Adam, made all the more problematic by the fact he’s Black and enmeshed in these dynamics of oppression across the entire spectrum. Yup, there’s that slave-master dynamic. Again.
The only Black man on Buffy to get not just three-dimensional characterization but also empathetic treatment in the story is Robin Wood (DB Woodside), who also has the longest run on the show with 14 episodes. Robin is school principal, but also a Watcher, whose Slayer mother Nikki Wood (April Weeden) had been killed by iconic Buffy antihero Spike (James Marsters) decades before. While Robin might be a complicated person who is well-rounded in motivation and humanity, we still have to put him in the show’s context of ongoing terrible treatment of its Black characters, which is about to get worse once I start diving into the Black slayers. Robin isn’t enough to redeem Buffy’s woeful anti-Blackness.
Black Slayers Done So Wrong
There are four Black slayers across the seven seasons of Buffy, and each come with their own terrible problematics.
Absalom’s actions set into motion the introduction of Kendra Young, a Jamaican slayer who was raised in isolation and trained since childhood for the role. Kendra clashes with Buffy and her gang of Scoobys as she finds their dedication to social lives and fun a distraction from the sacred duties of the Slayer and her helpers. Not only is Kendra wholeheartedly Othered in her characterization as someone disconnected from American life and culture — with an accent to boot — she only appears in three episodes in the show’s second season. After her introduction in the first two episodes, we don’t see her again until the finale 19 episodes later, where Kendra meets a grisly on-screen death.
Things do not get better for Black slayers going ahead.
The next Black slayer we meet is Sineya (Sharon Ferguson), the original slayer from prehistoric times who is stylized in stereotypical “African” garb, reducing the entire diverse continent into an Orientalized and whitewashed state. In fact, Sineya’s face is literally painted white, she has messy dreadlocks, and wears an outfit that looks like Egyptian mummy wrappings. One of her nicknames is literally “Primitive,” making her a caricature figure in the show. Where Sweet played the minstrel trope, Sineya falls into the “Magical Negro” category, as she mostly appears to Buffy in dreams and visions. Sineya is whitewashed in a new way as she possesses Tara (Amber Benson) to send messages to the Scoobys and is presented as a force of conflict with Buffy and Co’s methodologies, rather than a helper. Sineya appears in only three episodes, and honestly, it’s three episodes too many.
Creator Joss Whedon settles into yet another stereotype by fashioning Nikki Wood (April Weeden) as a Pam Grier Coffey-inspired slayer, wearing the signature black leather jacket that her killer Spike would steal after murdering her and wear for the majority of the show. She’s also only in three episodes, and like Sineya, has a whitewashing moment where she returns through the possession of a non-Black character named Dana (Ravi Nawat), a slayer activated in the show’s final season. It’s wild to look back with the knowledge that Spike’s iconic look includes an item of clothing he appropriated from a Black woman, and that even in the years since the show ended nobody discusses this extremely problematic fact.
With Rona (Indigo Tauvia Dawn), another slayer added to the canon during the great slayer activation spell of the final season, Buffy had nine whole episodes to treat her as humanely as Robin Wood was. But nope. Like Sineya and Kendra, Rona was set up as an antagonistic character toward Buffy and the other slayers. She argued with them, fought their plans, and for many of her episodes sports a broken arm in a cast that indicates she’s somehow a lesser slayer for the injury. Rona was also given no Watcher, and constantly finds herself needing protection, rather than doing the slayer protecting.
We know that the story is capable of creating three-dimensional co-slayers, as we saw with Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku). They just chose not to give that opportunity to any Black slayer, all of whom were relegated to minor characters who fell into racialized tropes.
The Sex Object
The only Black woman to appear in Buffy who isn’t a slayer is Olivia Williams (Phina Oruche), Giles’ love interest from the UK over three episodes. Her first appearance is highly sexualized, wearing only Giles’ button-down shirt. While she is a gifted Watcher and researcher in her own rights, the story presents her in conjunction with Giles’ sex life and sexual history, reducing this highly intelligent and resourceful career academic to sex object. If we’re doing social justice math, the Black women featured in Buffy are by far treated the worst.
Because Buffy the Vampire Slayer only features 10 Black characters, their faults rise to the surface particularly quickly given they are representative of just how un-inclusive the show was even for all its forward feminist thinking. In the years since Buffy concluded, Joss Whedon has been accused of “casual misogyny” and outright racism on his sets, including the Buffy spinoff Angel and his mistreatment of Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in The Justice League.
But all along the cracks in the veneer of what was once considered a masterpiece of modern feminism have been visible. They are seen in each of the Black characters seen on screen with the exception of Robin Wood. Many members of the Buffy cast have even spoken out in embarrassment and criticism of the now rather unbearable whiteness of the show. While the casual racism embedded in these nine roles is not necessarily surprising, it still remains shocking.
