There is a similar sense of novelistic spaciousness as a strong racial dynamic begins to unfold around the thirtysomething couple, Bette and Tina. Bette Porter, the ambitious director of a mediocre small museum, is played by Jennifer Beals, whose best-known movie work has been in racially unmarked (read: white) parts. Bette, however, like Beals, is of partly African-American descent, and the show’s early episodes begin to ramify the implications of that in her relationships with Tina, with their prospective child and the choice of its sperm donor, with her partly alienated half-sister Kit (Pam Grier), and with her inflexible father (Ossie Davis), whose approval she continues to need. It is too early to tell how revealingly these issues may reach beyond Bette’s family and into her community. What is clear already, though, is the difference made by the show’s generous contextualization of its characters’ intertwined lives, where no single character, relationship, or issue need be the lesbian one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If anyone gets “Showtime,” perhaps you can monitor this show to see how Jennifer Beals’s “white mulatto” character is treated. I don’t like the idea of Ossie Davis playing her father, since he is...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63,141],"tags":[121,136],"class_list":["post-5161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-d-powells-view","category-news-clips","tag-biracial-and-multiracial","tag-popular-culture-and-literature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p89tuq-1lf","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/AD-Powell.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7139,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5161\/revisions\/7139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}