On Race Swapping

Back in the quaint days before Riverdale descended into kidney-stealing cults, underground prison fight clubs and time travel, one of the most notable things about the show was its casting choices. Archie comics have traditionally been mostly if not entirely white, though over the decades the comic series has gradually introduced new characters to add diversity to the cast. Following the trend of 2010s reimaginings of existing IPs, Riverdale changed a large number of originally white characters to other races, several of whom became black. Pop Tate, Principal Weatherbee, Josie McCoy and Melody Valentine (making all three members of Josie & the Pussycats black instead of just Valerie). 

I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about new versions of old media changing the races of its characters to be more diverse. Right now I feel pretty cynical about it and the Hollywood liberal view of “representation.” While I don’t doubt that many of these choices are by people with relatively little power working in the industry with their hearts in the right place, the overall practice is a tool to preserve the status quo.

When audiences and critics correctly identified that the faces we see in our media are conspicuously missing marginalized people, corporations used race/gender/sexuality changes to established characters to placate them. But if we uncritically accept this representation, we fail to ask the deeper questions. Spider-Man is a Afro-Latino teenage boy now, but who is actually writing him? Who is the editor? Who is the CEO? Who is the owner of the company? And who owns that company? The higher up the chain you go, the more actual power the positions hold, the fewer people you’ll find who look like Miles Morales. 

Dig even deeper and you’ll start hitting questions about the fundamental structures of the industry. One explanation for why so many characters in legacy IP are white, straight and male is because the properties originated decades ago when more diverse representation wasn’t seen as important. But that leads one to question why our media landscape is so dominated by legacy IP. Why are characters and stories nearing a century old allowed to devour most of the market while anything new is left with scraps? 

So I’m reluctant to give any credit to companies when they make April O’Neil black or Superboy bisexual. Because instead of doing that, they could have given a minority artist the opportunity and support to create their own brand new story and characters that they would own and control. That’s not to say I categorically dislike race swapped characters. I like quite a few of them, including in Riverdale. I just think we need to be more critical of what they actually represent.

Getting back to Riverdale, I’m mostly happy with the changes they’ve made to the characters’ demographics, and I think it fits in with the overall spirit of the Archie franchise. Archie comics and the town of Riverdale are supposed to represent idealistic wholesome small town America. A little community of simple living where everyone is friends and gets along. That fantasy is probably what appeals to me most about Archie. But this type of fantasy is typically very friendly to conservative and even fascist mindsets. But it doesn’t have to be. I think that making Riverdale more diverse is a great bulwark against those types of political leanings leaking into the narrative and helps audiences of all colors imagine themselves living in Riverdale. 

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

You might expect Riverdale to be criticized for not having enough black people. But surprisingly, it started off with a lot of black characters. The issue is that whatever reason, the show was incapable of holding onto them.

The initial cast of black characters in Riverdale were the following: Josie & the Pussycats (Josie, Valerie and Melody), Josie’s mother Mayor McCoy, Principal Waldo Weatherbee, Pop Tate, Chuck Clayton and his father Coach Harry Clayton. Later on they would add Toni Topaz, Mad Dog, Tabitha Tate and Clay Walker. That’s actually a pretty robust collection of black characters. Much more than I would have expected. But how many actually stick around?

Josie & the Pussycats start off as prominent members of the Riverdale community, with Archie even having romance with both Josie and Valerie. But they gradually fade into the background until they’re gone completely. The Pussycats break up and Josie leaves town to pursue her career and live with her dad. We see them all return later on in the episode “The Return of the Pussycats,” which I thought was pretty good. It felt like it was written specifically to highlight all the black women in the show in response to well-earned criticism. In the last couple minutes it takes a hard swerve that makes it seem like the whole thing was actually a backdoor pilot for a new Josie & the Pussycats TV show. The Pussycats leave Riverdale for good in their tour bus to go solve mysteries in New Orleans. Josie later returns for one more episode in the final season of Riverdale as an alternate version of her character. Mayor McCoy resigns as mayor to protect the affair she’s having with Sheriff Keller and then disappears.

Principal Weatherbee has a solid presence in the beginning, but takes a backseat as the show focuses less on the school’s day-to-day. He leaves the show for a while after getting sucked into the town’s organ-stealing cult and getting a finger cut off. He makes a comeback later on, but doesn’t play a major role. In the rebooted season 7, the principal of Riverdale is a white man named Felix Featherhead who ironically looks more like the comic Weatherbee than Riverdale’s Weatherbee. After Featherhead is fired for being an accomplice to a Soviet communist terror plot, Weatherbee is hired as the school’s new principal. But it’s late enough in the season that I think he only has one scene.

While Archie is in prison for a murder he didn’t commit and is forced to fight in an illegal underground juvie fighting ring (it’s a long story), he befriends his bunkmate Mad Dog. After they’re freed from prison, Mad Dog attends Riverdale High and joins the football team. He becomes a solid part of the cast for a while but is never seen nor mentioned again after the timeskip. 

Chuck Clayton is another short-lived Riverdale black character, but I’ll get to him in a minute. Out of all the black characters I mention, the only ones who maintain a solid presence from their introduction to the end are Pop Tate, Toni, Tabitha and Clay (who was only introduced in the final season). 

Chuck Clayton

Chuck Clayton is one of the few non-white Riverdale characters who is not the product of race-swapping. The comic version of Chuck Clayton was introduced in 1971 as part of an effort to include more non-white characters in the franchise. He’s a swell guy and a great football player, but his real passion is drawing comics. In the Archie: The Married Life series, he grows up to purchase and operate Riverdale’s local comic book shop along with his wife, Nancy while the two work on their own strips. 

In Riverdale, he’s a brash and cocky jock on the football team who sexually harasses his female classmates. His passion for drawing doesn’t come into play until a far too late attempt at salvaging his character. After which his actor is rescued from Riverdale by the CW’s Black Lightning where he plays Khalil AKA Painkiller, and Chuck is never seen again.

Riverdale has a reputation for trying to make commentary on social justice issues only to faceplant, and the show’s treatment of Chuck is the prime example of that. In the episode “Body Double,” Veronica goes on a date to Chuck only to discover that he and other members of the football team have a “game” called “Sticky Maple.” They’ll post a picture of a girl on social media with maple syrup edited onto their face to show that they had sex. Yes, the maple syrup is a metaphor for cum. 

If it wasn’t bad enough that the boys would do this with girls they slept with, it also happens to girls they didn’t sleep with. Chuck has done this to both Ethel and Veronica, neither of whom had sex with him. 

Betty and Veronica come up with a plan to get revenge where they drug Chuck and threaten to drown him in a hot tub. Betty, in her Dark Betty persona (look, it’s a whole stupid thing I’m not gonna get into it), takes it even further than Veronica, for a moment seeming like she would actually kill Chuck. 

The issues with this should already be obvious. Chuck is Archie’s first black character. The only black male on the show aside from his father who was black in the source material. The only black male (at this point in the series) who is a peer to Archie and pals. And they decided to severely alter his character into someone who sexually preys on white (or in Veronica’s case, white-passing) girls. Which leads to an extended scene of watching a white girl taking pleasure in torturing and coming close to killing a black boy. What makes this even more galling is that, from a narrative perspective, he is simply the wrong character to do this to. It should have been Reggie.

Reggie Mantle is Archie’s rival from the comics. He’s rude, arrogant, slimy and competes with Archie in everything including girls. Riverdale’s characterization stays consistent with the comic (at least until the final season). His race gets changed so that he’s now Korean-American instead of white, but the core of his character stays the same. The way the character behaves throughout the show makes it abundantly clear that this scenario would have fit him much more than it would Chuck.

Chuck disappears from Riverdale for a long time after this. He makes inconsequential appearances later, with his last significant appearance in “Tales from the Darkside.” An episode in which they try to speedrun a redemption to him so quickly that it might as well have been a retcon. He has a crush on Josie and as evidence that he’s no longer a sex pest, the show says he’s been going to church (classic sex pest move) and has started getting into drawing. Cheryl frames him for sending a pig’s heart to Josie (long story but she did it because she’s gay) and from then on he might as well not exist.

That these are Chuck’s only two major appearances shows how badly his character was handled. The sticky maple episode didn’t just hurt his character. It made him radioactive. In one barrel of the shotgun, Chuck has been marked as a sexual predator. Which is difficult (though not impossible) for a character to come back from. Especially since this episode happened during a period when sexual harassment and abuse both in fiction and in real life were under closer inspection thanks to the #MeToo movement. In the other barrel, he became a symbol of the writers’ failure in which their attempt at a scathing #MeToo commentary was swallowed up by racist imagery. Both barrels. Bang. They killed his character.

 I don’t think it would have been impossible to turn this around. Reggie’s character arc throughout the entire show is him being an asshole who slowly learns to be a better person. The further into Riverdale you get (before hitting the last season where he’s a totally different character), the more apparent it is that the sticky maple plot would have fit right in. If the show had put in that much effort into Chuck’s character redemption, they could have made up for their mistakes. But failing to do that work and instead trying to redeem him in such a rushed manner at the last minute before the actor runs out the door to a show that treats him better brings nothing but shame to everyone involved.

Toni Topaz

Toni is one of the newest characters in the Archie universe. She was only introduced into the comics in 2012 and hasn’t had made many waves in books since. Her character’s in a curious position where she’s technically not a Riverdale-original character, but the show has put more work into her than the source material did. 

Overall I like her character. She’s introduced as a member of the Southside Serpents, Riverdale’s resident biker gang originally led by Jughead’s dad. She dates Jughead for a while before the show settles on what it realized was her true identity: Cheryl’s girlfriend.

Due to gang war shenanigans I won’t go into, Toni became homeless and was living in a tent by the river with many of the other Southside Serpents. Cheryl, as her girlfriend, graciously offers to let her move into her mansion. It’s at this point where Toni’s character begins to lose all agency and become nothing but an accessory to Cheryl. 

For a much too-long stretch of Riverdale, Toni has nothing going for her except being Cheryl’s girlfriend. There are large stretches where she doesn’t even speak unless it’s to affirm Cheryl like she’s a supervillain’s hired goon going “nyeh dats right boss.” Even when her beloved girlfriend seems to be having a psychotic crisis where she has dug up the taxidermied corpse of her dead twin brother and is treating him like a living part of the family, Toni has no opinions of her own on the matter. She just goes along with whatever Cheryl wants. That she has to delicately choose between this and homelessness is never addressed. This is the kind of treatment that led Toni’s actress, Vanessa Morgan, to criticize Riverdale’s treatment of the show’s black characters. 

After the criticism received, Toni’s character gets a much-needed upgrade after the show’s timeskip. She once again has a lot going on in her own right instead of just being Cheryl’s hanger-on. She’s the leader of the Southside Serpents, owner of the Whyte Wyrm bar and club and the guidance counselor of Riverdale High. She’s also pregnant for a long time, deciding to have a kid with Fangs and Kevin in a confusing poly but kinda not relationship after discovering she has a condition that will soon make her infertile. 

Archie Meets Emmet Till

After a season and a half of ruining the show culminating in Cheryl levitating above the town using her magical witchfire to stop a comet from obliterating the town, the writers felt it was time to take Riverdale back to a more grounded place. Pope Tate’s granddaughter Tabitha (who is now an angel I guess) used her time travel powers (…yeah) to slide the show’s entire cast back to 1955, where the rest of the series would take place. This worked more like a soft reboot, with the events of the previous seasons quickly wiped away from everyone’s memories and trudging forward with brand new plots for the season.

The writers took the opportunity of the show now taking place in the 50s to comment on the social issues of the era. Right out the gate, they took a big swing: the lynching of Emmett Till. I’ll say this about the Riverdale writers: they didn’t faceplant. Judging it in a vacuum, the episode is fine. But let’s be real here. This is Riverdale. The show where they snort drugs called Jingle Jangle while doing The Great Gatsby LARPing and get into gang wars over tickle porn production. Later in this season Archie and Reggie are going to lose their virginity together spit roasting a sex worker (presumably going “gosh” and “golly” with every thrust). As much as I like Riverdale, it’s a very stupid show. A show like this making a Very Special Episode about Emmett Till feels exploitative. Like the show is using this deadly serious historical tragedy to shore up its own credibility when it comes to social justice commentary. 

Black Athena

Partway through the season, Toni founds The Black Athena Literary Club. It’s an organization where the black students of Riverdale can discuss black art and social issues. This might sound good on the surface, but it’s an overcorrection that continues to alienate Riverdale’s black characters from the rest of the cast.

I’ve criticized Riverdale’s treatment of black characters before, but this wasn’t the solution I was asking for. I never wanted all the black characters sequestered into one room while they debated Nora Zeale Hurston and James Baldwin. I wanted them to get to be full participants in the show’s narrative just like the white characters. I think that they did a good job at fixing their mistakes post-timeskip/pre-superpowers! Tabitha was a great addition to the cast and Toni had a full plate that didn’t reduce her to being an accessory. But making Black Athena the nucleus of the show’s black cast just served to otherize them. At this point their purpose in this show is not so much to be real characters, but as tools to educate the white audience. The biggest condemnation of Black Athena is that the club is mostly populated by nameless black characters who, outside of that classroom, have zero relevance to the show’s plot. They don’t even have speaking lines outside that room.

Riverdale will go down as a defining piece of art for its era. It encapsulates the social climate of the mid-2010s to early 2020s where mainstream art felt compelled to loudly embrace the socially progressive trend that seemed to sunset into the Trump II world. It had its heart in the right place just as often as it embarrassed itself. Even though I’ve written 3,000 words on the show’s shortcomings toward black people, I’ll always feel fondly for the show. Ten years in the future, when the last breaths of the Trump II era are choked out as Disney attempts to exonerate Derek Chauvin in Zootopia 3, Riverdale‘s issues will seem quaint. And then we’ll have a whole new show like Riverdale that will be weird about black people in new and exciting ways.