Some quick thoughts before tonight's episode...
I LOVED Tim in 8x02. He was going through his own stuff but put Lucy first throughout the episode by supporting her and not paying his demotion forward.
“Have you eaten yet?” really stuck out to me. If you’re Asian, you hear this a lot. It’s a love language. Saying this to Lucy while holding boxes of sushi sold home the point that he’s dating an Asian woman. Tim did the representation work this episode that was absent from Lucy.
“We eat ingrained misogyny for breakfast”
There’s a moment in 8x02 that keeps bothering me, and it’s not because misogyny isn’t real. It’s because the show keeps reaching for “womanhood” as the only lens for Lucy Chen.
When the white Secret Service agent ignores three WOC and defaults to a white man (Tim) instead of the woman who is literally in charge (Lucy), framing it as only misogyny takes away from what just happened.
Because Lucy naming only misogyny keeps her positioned as “a woman” - not a WOC - and in American media, it’s white-default.
It’s implying she doesn’t share the “WOC” bit in common with Angela and Nyla. Like she can only extend herself into womanhood as the commonality, not racialized womanhood. That’s whitewashing.
And what makes it worse is that the scene doesn’t even play as Lucy thinking he was misogynistic to the other women. It reads like: he was misogynistic to me. Lucy is the sergeant in charge. The two times that he defaulted to Tim, he should’ve defaulted to Lucy. She’s upset that her authority was undermined. Ingrained misogyny was about her, not so much about Angela or Nyla. The reality is, there are fewer Asian-American policewomen on the force than there are Latinas and Black women. Lucy is in a precarious position where her race actually matters a lot.
This is why “ingrained misogyny” doesn’t cut it.
Beyond this, there are multiple “little choices” that add up in this episode:
Shoes on in Lucy’s apartment and in Tim’s home (yes, I noticed).
Celina and Angela being given culturally specific lines and references without blinking (Diego Rivera, “Christina,” etc.). But with Lucy, moments that have a racial layer keep getting whitewashed.
The string bracelet. Lucy wears the same string bracelet throughout this season. It’s Melissa’s personal item, and it comes from her predominantly white social circle whose nucleus is East Asian cultural appropriation. As an Asian-American, I don’t feel good about this.
Even during roll call, Lucy walked past an Asian cop to take her seat and she doesn’t acknowledge him, doesn’t nod, doesn’t do the quick “hey,” nothing. She sits in between him and Nolan, talks to Nolan instead, and even flicks her hand back in the guy’s direction.
When Asian representation is already scarce, a micro-choice like a nod toward the Asian cop would be meaningful. These are the kinds of tiny human beats actors can adjust on their own.
Whitewashing in fandom (the 8x02 version)
Deric Augustine livetweeted 8x02 and used the blonde emoji for Lucy.
Deric is very sensitive with his skin-tone and heart-tone emojis but he chose a blonde woman for Lucy. It’s not nothing. It contributes to overall whitewashing.
He doesn’t do it with Harper and Lopez:
Secondly, when Tim made sea bass, veggie burger & fries, and croissants for Lucy in 7x18, the entire fandom not only identified what he made, but they made connections to prior episodes. He brought her sushi in 8x02 and it’s a callback to 5x18, but I've only seen it generalized to "a meal" "snacks" & "food”. It’s this pattern again of “white” food getting amplified and highlighted but sushi gets little fanfare.
Asian-American fan discussions
I came across a couple of discussions from within the Asian-American community about Lucy’s portrayal as a white-default woman. They’re worth reading: here and here.
