In a new online gallery, Bay Area artist and DREAMer Julio Salgado reimagines some all-time TV favorites with people of color, like this screencap from an imaginary Equis Files.
“Fox Mulder and Dana Scully,” he writes, “come back in the forms of a former Black Panther and Brown Beret who investigate forgotten files that kept tabs on POC activists.”
I grew up watching a lot of sitcoms and rated R TV shows. Why were we obsessed with a bunch of white people hanging out at a coffee shop? Why did a fast-talking mom and daughter stole our hearts? What was it about the friendship between a gay man and a straight women that glued us to a TV every Thursday night? Well, they were very well developed characters whose (mostly white) creators were given a chance to create. Even tho I was obsessed with these shows, there was something missing: people of color.
We recently heard about that hashtag were white Star Wars fans were dying because POC characters were included in the latest movie. Now, I don’t know shit about Star Wars, but I know racism when it’s slapping us in the interwebs. So I took the liberty (cos, I mean, white people be doing that shit when it comes to making POC characters into white characters) to include us POC into some of my favorite shows and sitcoms. Maybe some of these will be re-made with us in them. What white shows that you were obsessed with would you bring back with an all POC cast?
NOTE: These images are sooo not meant to forget about POC shows. These images came out of analyzing the way white people get pissed off when a character that is supposed to be “white” and then made into a POC. So my intention here is to be confrontational and turn popular white characters into POC characters.
Salgado: “This version of Golden Girls is all about social justice and it stars Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Angela Davis, Dolores Huerta and Grace Lee Boggs…may she rest in power.”
La Buffy, of course, “is an Afromexicana who kills racist vampire cops.”
“Xena and Gabrielle are two Native women,” Salgado writes, “who must face off white colonizers.”
Salgado’s Friends, “is set in Oakland. They are mostly college students of color that met at a multicultural center. You’ll see them at protests and rolling deep at First Fridays, rolling their eyes at white people taking up too much space.”