The Colors of the Power Rangers (part 1/?)
I think, when it comes to modern shows and movies, we struggle a lot less for racially diverse characters to be represented than we used to. Most shows may even have several shades of brown on screen at the same time. A lot of bad and mean people think we have too much diversity. They'll point to very few and far between instances of characters of color getting prominent roles and so things don't need to change at all. We're fine. Racism is over. Stop complaining.
As Reddit user u/deleted correctly pointed out, representation within the red ranger role needs to be done better. Their post got zero upvotes and 83 comments. The top comment on this correct post, from different user u/deleted, is a seemingly long list of times where the red ranger role was seemingly diverse, but even then those are a handful of instances in a 30 year running show, and half of those characters were still white.
The reason the post singles out Red Rangers specifically is because in most teams, the red ranger is the leader of the group. This is more explicitly said in some seasons more than others, but even when red isn’t given the literal role of leader, their character is still often given heightened screen time and stakes. We’ll get into this more later.
Anyways, having diverse characters in cartoons was getting increasingly common in the 80s and 90s, but racial diversity in live action shows was incredibly important. Only a few decades ago did Fred Rogers have to fight to have a black man be given a respectful appearance on his show in 1969. I'm sure in the 90s, a lot of people want to feel like they've come a long way in terms of representation.
Of course, being born in 1998, I still subconsciously felt that a lot of media was catered to a group of people that i was outside of. That subtle feeling of being secondary for a reason I couldn’t comprehend at the time. If I had to draw “a person” I would reach for the beige crayons before the brown one. Representation, or a lack of it, really affects young children. You begin to notice when the people that look like you on tv are almost never the main character, unless everyone else in the show is black too.
But a show that I feel really contributed to showing people of color can coexist with whites on screen was Power Rangers. A show that changed casts almost every season with different ethnicities being given new colors, roles, and powers felt almost groundbreaking. As a black kid, being shown people that looked like me doing cool flips and kicks alongside the usual kinds of people that do them made me feel like I could do them too. But looking back on things, I start to wonder if things were truly as diverse as we say they were.
Even today, on a sort of weird, almost corporate level, I think diversity is usually left to be as basic as “ok let’s have mostly white people, and then a black and brown person for a little flavor. An Asian would be great. A Latino if we’re really desperate.” And honestly, I think Power Rangers might have suffered from that mindset. But I’m willing to put my power coins where my mouthplate is and find the data to really see how diverse Power Rangers was, from the beginning to the end. I’m going to list every Ranger based on both season, suit color, and each ranger’s race, and make several fun charts for each.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered in 1993. Over 4 million kids and maybe even some adults watched as 5 colorful teenagers were chosen by floating head alien Zordon to become 5 even more colorful teenagers to defeat the evil Rita Repulsa. This season set the precedent for most of the show’s tropes, not which of least being the casting philosophy. Unfortunately, this season is also where I hit my first snag in my data collecting.
We have Jason, the Zordon appointed leader and Red Ranger, probably because he's the best fighter. Billy, the nerd and worst fighter of the group as blue. Trini, the kind and intelligent but less of a nerd than Billy, girl as yellow. Zack, the funny, dance and hip hop loving black ranger. And finally Kimberly, the prettier popular girl (I know she has other traits but honestly they're all goody two shoes characters that it's hard to really differentiate them). Double finally, Tommy, the green ranger who was evil for a bit and then joined the team for real, and is also the other best fighter. He’s complicated. I’ll get into him in a bit. But they obviously weren't afraid to play with teenage stereotypes back then when you consider the team as a whole.
Let's poach the elephant in the room while we're here. Yes, Zack, a black man is the black ranger, and Trini, and Asian woman, is the yellow ranger. Everyone says this is a coincidence and I guess I believe them, but it's just funny that this ended up working out this way, especially because this kind of thing hasn't really happened in a season since then.
Billy and Kimberly are both white, Zack is Black, and Trini is Asian. But what is Jason? To me, this is the most mixed man I've ever seen in my life, so doing research on this took me a long time. Sometimes in the comics he's depicted with more Asian features, and other times he is depicted very caucasionally. In either case, I feel comfortable enough labeling him as white/white passing.
But even then, I still got wrapped up in my analysis of Austin St John’s (the actor) character. So in a play of desperation to actually get this project that I’ve talked about for like 3 years at this point rolling, I asked a few of my coworkers.
My prompt towards them essentially was: “I’m going to show you a group of people and you’re going to point out their race to me. Don’t think about it, just say it.”
Two of them pretty confidently just said he was white (they’re both white) and the other two got really uncomfortable and thought I was testing them or trying to trick them so they refused to respond (they’re also white). So Jason’s white. That’s that.
A lot of (often disingenuous) white people want to claim that because a character has any sort of ethnic background, that either lessens their whiteness or makes them entirely a person of color. But much like sex and gender have an overlap but aren’t interchangeable words, so are race and ethnicity. Let’s look at the next cast to see what I mean.
Jason, Trini, and Zack were written out of the show for a reason I might talk about in a future video, but their powers were transferred to a new set of heroes, Rocky, Aisha, and Adam respectively. Tommy also lost his green powers and became white (haha).
Some new room elephants have joined the party though! They race swapped black and yellow! They did it! They fixed racism once again. But smaller elephant is Rocky, the new red ranger. Both his character and his actor are of Hispanic descent, which fans love to point out. But also this is a white man. A person named Steve Cardenas plays a character named Rocky Santos. He is white. Ethnicity =/= race. Just ask Rory Gilmore.
Next up we have the Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers. The main cast got turned into kids so Zordon had to call in his friends from the planet Aquitar to fill in. I don’t think they did the best job, like I remember them getting their asses kicked a bunch, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
Can aliens have human races?
