This blog discusses the hit comedy How I Met Your Mother aired on CBS. The show follows a group of friends who live in New York City. The narrator is one of the friends in the group; he is retelling the story of how he met his wife to his children. The show consists of multiple flashbacks about the journey of finding his true love. The name of one of the characters is Barney Stinson who happens to have an African-American homosexual brother named James. They were both raised by their mother, Loretta who is white, neither father were in the boy’s lives. The show highlights the idea of mixed race experiences through the character of James. The interactions between Barney and his brother James seem natural and there doesn’t seem to be any lost connections because of the differences in race between the two brothers. The show does not go too in depth with the feelings of James and whether or not he felt a sense of not belonging while growing up with Barney and their mom Loretta. But we can infer that he had experienced some of these feelings when he was younger because in one episode there is a flashback to when Barney and he were in college; James had not yet come out about his sexuality, and he made many comments that seemed to be stereotypes associated with an African-American heterosexual man. These comments reflected an idea known as “performing.” An individual will perform to what they believe is expected of them based on their race to seem authentic and to fit in with the community. Performing could include things like speech, hair style, language, clothes etc. Based on the comments made by James it indicates he was performing to seem more authentic.
Another episode revolved around Barney and James returning back to their childhood home where they began cleaning out the house for their mother. Both of them have never met their fathers and Barney believes his father is Bob Barker. The boys run across a letter with a picture of the two boys; on the back it says “your son.” Both boys want to know who the man addressed on the letter is because they want to know which one of them is the son of this mystery man. When they track down the man, he is clearly not Barney’s father but James’ father. In the scene with James and his father you can tell there is a certain connection between them. An interesting twist to the scene is that because Barney wants a father figure in his life he begins calling this man his father.
He seems to begin to portray what he believes to fit the idea of what it means to be authentically black. One of the other characters catches on to this idea of performing that Barney is portraying and makes the comment “Can’t we just let the guy be black for this day?” The question that comes to mind after this scene is “What does being black mean?” Markers of authenticity can be language, speech, movement, physical features, fashion food, tastes and interests. Barney portrays the marker of authenticity with tastes and interests because he joins in with James and his father in singing a very soulful song.
How I Met Your Mother slightly gives light to the issues of biracial people. The show could definitely expand more on the experiences that both Barney and James experienced during childhood for example whether they experienced questions from other children about why they looked different. But the show did introduce mixed race into their show although they don’t explicitly talk about the specific experiences faced by James. Many issues such as passing and performativity can be picked out from the slight introduction that the show depicts.
What is represented in the show How I Met Your Mother is a start to what can be expanded to highlight more ideas about race and mixed race so that more people that are not hyper-aware of the issues that surround these ideas of race and mixed race can become more in-tuned to them. Overall the show touches on a small bit of mixed race content but has lots of room to expand on the issues of mixed race individuals.
Works Cited
“Barack Obama” November 3, 2010
Wikipedia “How I Met Your Mother” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother
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