The “Whites” Who Loved Me: How Bridgerton Facilitates Digital Lynching

Although the opening series of Bridgerton, a nineteenth-century mixed romance, was celebrated for the casting of Black characters, its use of white–Black inter-marriage is part of UK–US storytelling traditions that treat mixed relationships as worthy of screentime only if they involve a white person—what Derrick Bell in 1980 coined as ‘interest convergence’: when Black people are only allowed to progress with the interests of white peoples. Discussing Bridgerton as part of a wider anti-Black brand of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion [EDI], this paper argues that the way its Black characters are used and abused on screen is like a digital lynching. Here, white characters use Black people (i.e., to give them children) while simultaneously keeping them mentally dependent on the white family. While there is not a physical death, the place of Black partners in this so-called alt-London is nothing short of a zombification of Black humans. Additionally, this paper encourages readers to think about how the near-exclusive use of white-centring mixed love as representative of all mixed romance is racist. In other words, even in fantasy, Black men are written out of Blackness, forced to take on the culture of their partner. As this “fantasy” occurs in a world “made white” by colonialism, characters like Simon Bassett and Marina Thompson do not “pass” for white, but their world is one where few “see” colour except when Black folks upset white spaces. Those who choose not to “see” are most in fear of losing power, as novelist Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination “it requires hard work not to see”.