What really got me about "Sex and the City" wasn't the dippy, Spice Girls-lite feminism espoused by Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw and her squealing, endlessly giggling gaggle of designer-laden ladies. It wasn't the offensive suggestion that the interests of ostensibly intelligent, capable career women can be boiled down to two words: "labels and love," or the insipidity of a plot in which a woman swoons over and decides to wed a man because he builds her a small mansion - here termed a "closet" - that renders said woman positively orgasmic.
And while there was much to dislike in the rampant product placement, the cloying ethics of female liberation through consumerism and the rah-rah depiction of women in their late 40s behaving like alcoholic schoolgirls at a never-ending sleepover, none of this seemed like anything more than the sparkly pink escapism promised from the get-go.
What I was less prepared to encounter, however, was an almost exclusively white upper-East Side demimonde in which all ethnic inhabitants are either ignored or roundly stereotyped. Charlotte's condescending timidity about eating in Mexico (even at their lavish resort) is imbecilic at best, and Miranda's rallying cry of "follow the white guy with a baby" while searching for an apartment in Chinatown reminds viewers that a traditionally ethnic neighborhood can only be palatable to white upper-class tastes once it has been sufficiently gentrified.
But such minor plot details and character traits could be overlooked if it weren't for the more overwhelming raison d'être behind the character Louise from St. Louis, Carrie's assistant - noticeably the only black character in the overwhelmingly Aryan world of the film. Despite the occasional witticism, Louise retains essential characteristics of a self-denying, modern-day Mamie to Sarah Jessica Parker's Scarlett O'Hara, and stereotype upon stereotype is shamelessly employed. Too poor to afford even one of the glittering bevy of designer purses to which Carrie's journalist income apparently allows her unlimited access, Louise must rent one from the online company "Bag, Borrow or Steal." While Carrie and Co. don diamonds and pricey pearls, Louise's requisite bling comes in the form of oversized gold hoop earrings and a tacky gold keychain that spells out "Love." Looming (literally) large over the lily-white quadruplets, the full-figured Jennifer Hudson plays the wild-haired black counterpart to the perfectly coiffed and trim Caucasian ladies who roam the streets, bars and catwalks of "Sex and the City's" Manhattan.
Although she nurses Carrie back to health, organizes her trainwreck of a Web site and teaches her post-jilted self-value, Louise is still never given more than a supporting role - the all-too-typical token sassy black sidekick with the additional merits of being a conveniently self-abnegating proponent of soulful and near-spiritual faith in the power of true love. Instead, the film is larded with periodic depictions of foursomes of glamorous young women jauntily traipsing Manhattan, presumably to demonstrate the "mature" women of the film passing along the torch to a new generation of pre-alcoholic fashionistas.
When Louise announces to Carrie that she is returning to St. Louis to marry her childhood sweetheart (who months earlier had rejected her), her character is skipped over as the obvious choice for a budding Carrie Bradshaw. This plot point further demonstrates the shows mushrooming deficit on the affirmative action front. Louise is perpetually kept out of the limelight so that Carrie may once again find her rightful spot at the center of it. Even on the day of Louise's wedding gown fitting, she is a bundle of selfless servitude, subjugating her own glory to call and remind Carrie about the closing of her apartment. Louise has no chance to succeed in the big city as her white counterparts do - serving as Carrie's counsel was honor enough.
As movies with racist subtexts go, "Sex" is far from the worst. But it comes at a historic moment when we're finally seeing the first black presidential candidate, a man who has brought race-relations to the forefront of many national political discussions. Shouldn't 50-plus years of civil rights work have brought us beyond hokey images of a doting, motherly black woman who helps her distressed white employer learn to cope and love herself?
That such cliches are still very much alive was proven anew recently when Fox News referred to Michelle Obama as "Barack's baby mama." Such insidious stereotyping feels like a retrograde relic of our parents' and grandparents' generations. One would think that a movie such as this, which aims for a young, modern and socially enlightened audience, could have seen the bigger picture.
Cordes Selbin is an English and humanities senior.
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