While Van Dusen may claim they were intentionally trying to avoid this approach, Daphne and Simon’s romance suffers from a lack of respect for the complex racial dynamics between Black men and white women.īridgerton was never a story conceived with the nuances of interracial relationships in mind. The novel featured no characters of colour and its author, Julia Quinn, has a shady record when it comes to diversity. When home girl said love conquered racism & elitism… /JkmhxZQrK2 And despite Rhimes producing the series, its head writer Van Dusen is white. The social impact of race is rarely explored in the series, save for a scene in which Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) lectures Simon on the vagueries of love curing racial tensions when the queen married the king.
(A bold statement, considering what Harry and Meghan endured as an interracial royal couple in our modern times.) While it’s an admirable fantasy, the show’s general unwillingness to acknowledge racial differences still sours this dream of historical racial harmony, and no more so than in Episode 6. In this episode, Daphne discovers that Simon is capable of having children, despite previously believing that he wasn’t.
