Op-Ed: Dear Sex and the City Reboot- Please Don't Be Racist This Time

By: Audrey Garrett

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Carrie Bradshaw, you have done it again. You have kept us hanging on your every word and dot dot dot for almost 11 years now. Finally, you return, gracing us with your inconsistency, cigarettes and articles ending with rhetorical questions. Our only hope is this time you return with a legitimate understanding of race, cultural appropriation and human decency. ​

​The reboot of Sex and the City adorably titled, And Just Like That... is set to air on HBO Max sometime next year. The reboot will follow the well-to-do Dior-buying, and art-gallery-bidding white women Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte York (Christine Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) as they age into their 50s and dissect the clueless comments and missed phone calls of their white heterosexual partners.

Comedic relief and energetic fourth member of the original friend group, Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall) will not be returning to the franchise. The reboot will also lose original producer and director, Michael Patrick King, who has produced the past six seasons and two movie sequels. Comprised of 10 half-hour episodes, And Just Like That... will now be directed by the starring actresses themselves. The new leadership has Sex and the City viewers begging for racial diversity, along with an end to recurring all-white lunches where racist and transphobic comments are accepted and giggled at. After years of critiques from viewers on the show’s white-only cast’s frequent microaggressions, and belittlement of anyone not white and a size 2, the reboot has all viewers asking: After all this time, will the 50 something prima donnas finally acknowledge people of color?

The question comes for good reason as SATC has never been politically correct. The whitewashed HBO show was always been too preoccupied emphasizing Carrie’s struggles of breaking a heel on the way to see her noncommittal boyfriend, or Charlotte realizing she can’t be with a man who curses when he orgasms. The show was privileged, and shamelessly so. New York City through Carrie Bradshaw’s eyes was a never-ending nightclub where Wall Street males stalked early 20-year-old models, leaving Carrie a victim only in her mind, as a wealthy, white, able-bodied 30-year-old. The show historically ignored racial dynamics, socioeconomic struggles and gender-nonconforming individuals. Samantha infamously calls her trans-women neighbors “trannies,” before throwing a bucket of water on them as they talked under her window at 2 A.M. Carrie calls her jewelry, “ghetto gold,” mockingly. The show was barely even feminist as the foursome’s conversations and lives revolve around setting the perfect trap to find the perfect guy who “is just nice, sweet, handsome and great”. Directed by a man, this male-aspiring narrative is not surprising, and will hopefully be reversed with Parker, Nixon, and Davis in the director chairs. ​

The performative feminist show was popular nonetheless. Everyone wanted to watch Carrie and her girl gang pursue men and redirect brunch conversations towards their own interests and recent sexual encounters. The Sex and the City prequel, The Carrie Diaries, starring Anna Sophia Rob, at least acknowledged other races, casting a black woman as Carrie’s boss and an Asian teen as her high school best friend. The less problematic prequel, directed mostly by female director Amy Heckerling, did what SATC and its movie sequels never could: not be racist. In the first Sex and the City movie, the women travel to Cabo, Mexico where Charlotte brings an extra suitcase of chocolate pudding and bottled waters to avoid food poisoning. She warns her friends, “it’s Mexico” before getting food poisoning by accidentally drinking the water in the outdoor shower. Anti-Latino messages persist as Charlotte inevitably gets food poisoning and Samantha fetishizes the staff. 

The second movie, nearly two-and-a-half hours long and creatively titled Sex and the City 2, is filled with cultural appropriation to pass time. The women travel to Abu Dhabi (Saudi Arabia and Morocco prevented the cast from filming in their countries after reading the script), where anti-Muslim rhetoric and cultural appropriation fill every scene. Anything experienced or seen that is not explicitly Western, consumerist culture is mocked and belittled. Carrie asserts at their first five-star resort brunch that headscarves and hijabs, “freak [her] out,” while Samantha screams in a market square, “Condoms! Condoms, yes! I have sex!" in a country where sexual indecency can be a reason for arrest. Flustered by a country that doesn't congratulate their whitewashed, heterosexual sex-driven culture, the women flee to the airport, wearing borrowed headscarves and face coverings using Carrie’s tanned leg to flag down a taxi cab. The male directing here is blatant and was shockingly accepted by HBO films and Warner Bros pictures. 

If the SATC reboot wants to be successful in a anti-racist society of the show needs to be self-aware. “And just like that…” can not fall into the common trope of Bradshaw beginning an episode contemplating a heterosexual white woman's struggle of sexism, then feeling lost and begging for male approval and validation. The four white women can have sex and live in New York City but cannot continue being racist, homophobic and narcissistic to the point of isolation in a melting pot of 8.4 million.

The women SATC grooms and motivates should not exist. No white woman should sit at a brunch table joking about, “Ghetto Gold” as a jewelry style or harbor transphobic phrases from their friends as they nibble bites of smoked salmon. The new series needs to have the fifty year-olds realize their privilege and leave each other for a more diverse group of friends. Comments like Carrie's infamous “ghetto gold” would have them evacuated from the New York City bodega. These women need to be checked, stop talking about the men who bounce in and out of their lives when they’re bored and need to have people of color who don't just serve to be accessories to their lives. Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte need to be put in their place...which is not their broken record fear of a suburban kitchen mom or a subway car fashion show they are uninvited to for not knowing what subway line gets you in and out of the Bronx.

​In my daydreams, rogue SATC member Samantha Jones is somewhere in the burrows of New York, in stilettos, using her PR connections to advocate for medical rights for pregnant women of color and embarking on a new social scene less ridden with white complaints and self-sabotaging shopping sprees. 

And Just Like That... begins filming this May for HBO Max.