Decolonizing Ted Lasso: Race & Gender On A Football Field
This story starts with Ted Lasso. A dear friend loved the show and I wanted to share that experience with him. It was a stretch because being Indian, nothing about British complacency is going to feel enjoyable to me. Britain is the culture at whose hands mine suffered racism, economic exploitation, multiple genocides and colonisation for over three centuries. If you’re not from the subcontinent, you will never understand the effort it takes to appreciate Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Enid Blyton or JK Rowling. No, not even if you’re of Jewish descent. And as Shondaland proves, not even if you’re black.
——————–This post contains spoilers about the show Ted Lasso.——————–
Early in season 2 of Ted Lasso, a sexual relationship starts between two people. One is a 50-year-old, rich, white, British person who owns an organisation. The other is a 21-year-old, black, Nigerian person who has made it out of a brutally exploited continent and is an employee of that organisation. In any frame of reference, this is not love, it is predation. Yet, it is never presented as predation and why? Because the predator is a white woman and the victim is a black man. It would seem that protection from predation is only for the white race. It’s called white feminism.
Ted Lasso goes on to typify white supremacy with reluctant race tokenism. The first actor of colour we see is of ambiguous ethnicity. I zoomed into a scene in the later seasons where he looks at a map showing his origins and one of them is India. His trajectory goes from being a victim of bullying (just in time for white male saviours) to a sulky employee (because asking for rights is a betrayal of the white masters) to a laughable challenger (“Wunderkid” haha). After all, he’s only from the part of the world that has many more English speakers than the entire country of UK, in addition to several hundred of their own languages).
Remember the Nigerian? His thread drags in an African billionaire who wants to set up a top team that won’t have to endure the racism of football. Of course, that means he has to be a buffoon. Never mind that the Ted Lasso show begins with a literal billionaire blatantly cheating on his wife and then the new girlfriend when she’s pregnant, creating all kinds of ridiculous trouble just because he can afford it. But he’s just treated like a sharp-dressing, albeit wicked old man. If it smells like racism, it is. Ironically enough, the grey areas are only for white people.
Now these were issues that I felt able to express outrage about. But it started with something much more fundamental. Racial groups are smaller than one other group. The biggest discriminated against minority in the world – WOMEN.
Ted Lasso’s Mary Sue & Other White Men
The show is called Ted Lasso and he’s its central character. It opens with his affability and softboi charm, cookies and all. The first episode even tapes a metaphorical protection of women’s honour on a nude picture of Keeley. Thereafter though, the show builds on several other major characters. And that’s where we get a Mary Sue occurrence. Ted can do no wrong because he’s never in situations that challenge him, his racial privilege or his gender power. What about the other white men?
Jamie does not respect Keeley during their relationship at all. Or after that. He backs off after breaking up mostly because he is concerned with what Roy thinks of him (not Keeley). Men caring what other (white) men think of their treatment of women, is not progressive. Later, his apology is less sorry and more worry about how it’ll look traced back to him.
And ugh, let’s not even get into that bizarre relationship Jamie has with his mother. Even coming from the land of proud mama’s boys, Jamie & his mom fondling each other just threw me off. The over-the-shoulder cleavage shot of his mother comforting her adult son, Jamie stroking her thigh while feeding – these don’t feel like accidents. It reminds me of the men who rush to blame women for every male crime. When all else fails, blame it on the mother. Mary Sue Ted Lasso is safely ensconced elsewhere so he doesn’t have to make the effort, in a show that carries his name.
Keeley tolerates Jamie’s disrespect because she has no choice at the time. She is a two-bit celebrity without too many options (as Shandy first says about her) and dating a big-time star footballer is security. The big plot involving Keely is a direct consequence of Jamie’s dehumanisation of her.
In what world does “sorry” cut it? Only in the mind of the kind of narcissistic man who treats women badly. “I said sorry, why are you such a bitch?” is the attitude men like this take. He distinctly says “I didn’t delete the emails”. Suggesting this was something she sent to him, not something on the public internet. “He didn’t leak the video” is like saying “Oops, this one I didn’t mean to”. “I didn’t rape her THIS time.”.
This episode centres other people’s journeys using this horrible thing that happened to Kelley as if it’s just a plot point. Jack’s shame, Rebecca’s support, Roy’s jealousy, Jamie’s redemption, random fans creeping. Where do we get to see what is going on with the person it happened to? Again Mary Sue Ted Lasso: Busy elsewhere.
It’s a common trope in pop culture – to use violence against a woman as a plot point to further other people’s stories. This rape happened and look how it proves A is so kind for giving her a blanket and B is so cruel for calling her a slur and C is so complex for being angry then apologising. Do we even know the victim’s story? This is the kind of thinking that makes judges let rapists off scott free “because his life will be ruined”. And I’m talking about rape because that is exactly what this is. A violation, a nonconsensual sexualisation to demean and hurt the woman.
We’re nearly at the end of the season before a woman gets to have a say. But by this point, everyone has decided “Now Jamie is a good guy” because he isn’t bullying teammates anymore (mostly because they’re doing better) and because he taught Roy how to ride a bicycle (because Roy is his best chance of clawing back to fame). They never refer to Keeley’s trauma ever again and by the next episode, she’s back to babysitting Jamie, smilingly deciphering Roy’s grunts while singlehandedly getting ghosted, dumped and her company snatched away by her ex.
Blackguard Nate
We are treated to a whole episode of Nate being babysat by his parents, his girlfriend and a starstruck restaurant manager. It feels like a Very Special Episode, a hasty write-in to check off the woke box.
This explanation (‘Ted Lasso’s Nate shows us a different kind of toxic masculinity‘) is a pretty empathetic and objective analysis of the character’s progression. And here’s another that also considers Nate’s daddy issues in a way that the show never did (‘Why Ted Lasso Needs to Redeem Nate in Season 3‘). It really stood out in a show that used daddy issues to redeem many other characters.
If it had happened to one of the numerous white guys on the cast, I’d have really respected this show for contrasting the ways masculinity goes. Instead, they chose to impose this unflattering portrait of negative masculinity on one of the few characters of colour. Nate isn’t even given the dignity of a racial history. But Nate’s skin colour is visible to us all and in blithely hating him for being a villain, the audience also masks its racism.
This is a minor change from the episodes and episodes of Ted’s complaining and inability to do this job while refusing to get help and other people doing his job but also patting him on the back and completely reassuring him. He never faces a single minute of prejudice for his mental illness so why shouldn’t he continue to wallow?
With all these detours, let’s come back to the titular character of Ted Lasso. Why focus on the side characters? Mainly because the main character has such obnoxious main-character energy! And he’s such a Mary Sue!
Much has been made about how Ted Lasso was a breath of fresh air. The timing of its release was certainly fortuitous. Most people watched it amidst terrifying reports of COVID-19 deaths and vaccine fearmongering. So really, anything with people smiling would have felt fresh at the time. A friend lost his father at that time and told me that this show gave him a reason to smile in those final, bleak days. The show also claims to rehabilitate toxic masculinity but as I’ve described, it’s a pretty convenient, hyper-privileged version of rehabilitation.
But the show does do something personally important to me. It talks about anxiety. The friend who introduced me to it is also the one who helped me understand my mental health issues before I did. He says the episode depicting a panic attack helped him recognise one in me. This is why this show has gone so hard on me, for me. How do I reconcile my last hope with something that is so hopelessly devastating – racism & misogyny? Don’t tell me it’s because people are complex because Ted Lasso certainly isn’t.
