Interracial Love on Parenthood

WARNING: This post contains small spoilers.

I just started watching Parenthood a couple weeks ago through Netflix instant streaming. While I haven't yet finished season 1, it looks like baby mama Jasmine (Joy Bryant) and baby daddy Crosby (Dax Shephard) will be adding their burgeoning relationship to the small list of interracial TV couples. Or, as revealed through skimming headlines in search of a photo, will at least provide and on again off again pairing, which will no doubt result in a steady relationship by the end of the series.

Jasmine, Crosby and Jabbar in Parenthood

  As Parenthood opens, bachelor/player Crosby finds out he has a son named Jabbar (Tyree Brown) when Jasmine suddenly appears with child in tow after their brief fling five years earlier. So far, the storyline is relatively race-free aside from first meetings between the characters' families. Crosby's parents experience five seconds of surprise quickly followed by insistence that Jabbar refer to them as Grandma and Grandpa. Jasmine's family exhibits thinly-veiled hatred toward Crosby (which Crosby's father announces is most surely due to his race) until Jasmine informs everyone that she had pretended Crosby had left her and the baby even though in reality he had never known about Jabbar. Crosby's mother Camille (Bonnie Bedelia) wins over Jasmine's family by knowing that Jasmine's brother was named after a black political figure. In response to their surprise she asserts, "Berkeley in the 60s, baby."

Black women who are attracted to white men--and vice versa--are often deprived of seeing those same pairings in healthy relationships on TV. Parenthood seems to do a good job of creating a realistic (if not slightly utopian) interracial duo to fill this void. Additionally, if my knowledge of TV-land and its story arcs does its job here, I can go so far as to say that Jasmine and Crosby will be the Ross and Rachel of Friends, the Big and Carrie of Sex and the City, and the Luke and Lorelei of Gilmore Girls. Perhaps not in such an iconic fashion, but at least in terms of a popular story device in which the pull and push of the character's affections continues throughout the series.

Yours in Love,
Shannon