Over the long weekend I re-watched one of my favourite series; Gossip girl. Even though it is one of my favourite dramatic/teen series, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of black characters. It fails to represent a variety of races well and it most definitely reinforces the hegemonic idea of ‘White Privilege’.

The cast is predominantly white and the series is based on the elite who live in the upper east side of Manhattan. The females in the series show this idea of white privilege. They are the ones who are succeeding and living off and flaunting their parent’s wealth.

One of the main characters that for me represented this idea of white privilege is Blaire Waldorf. She is known to be the ‘Queen Bee’. She is your stereotypical wealthy white American girl. She gets whatever she wants, whenever she wants. She knows that she is at the top of the food chain and flaunts it.

When we are first introduced to Blair, she is with two girls whom are her ‘sidekicks’, which make up her posse. However, her sidekicks happen to be two African- American girls. Her sidekicks do not show much personality and lack awareness of themselves, as they are just there to take orders from Blair and follow her around. By Blaire giving orders to her two sidekicks, it exemplifies the hegemonic idea of ‘white privilege’ because she is showing that she has social power. From this introduction of these characters, I was taken back to colonialism. Blaire kind of treats her so-called friends as slaves in a way to show that she in a way has some superiority. It just comes to show that racism is still existent in our society as it is portrayed in popular television shows.