California-based artist and activist Julio Salgado has made a series of illustrations called "POC TV Show Takeover" reimagining popular TV shows with only people of colour as the cast.
"I grew up watching a lot of sitcoms and rated-R TV shows. Why were we obsessed with a bunch of white people hanging out at a coffee shop," asks Salgado.
"Why did a fast-talking mom and daughter steal our hearts? What was it about the friendship between a gay man and a straight women that glued us to a TV every Thursday night? Well, they were very well developed characters whose (mostly white) creators were given a chance to create. Even though I was obsessed with these shows, there was something missing: people of color," he further says on his Facebook.
Salgado is a Mexican-born artist who grew up in California, and has actively been making illustrations based on the lives of people of colour, particularly focusing on immigrant and LGBT life.
Only having been released last week, his series has been lauded, as well as critiqued for being "anti-white".
"It's really interesting to me that folks are freaking out over an "anti-white agenda." What is anti-white? To imagine a world where POC are shown as full-fledged human beings on TV? That's exactly what I tried to do with these images: force people of colour into the minds of (mostly) white people through their (and our) favorite shows," he told BuzzFeed.
A racist hashtag about Star Wars trended on Twitter this week, which pushed Salgado to do the TV show reimaginations.
"We recently heard about that hashtag were white Star Wars fans were dying because POC characters were included in the latest movie. Now, I don't know shit about Star Wars, but I know racism when it's slapping us in the interwebs. So I took the liberty (because, I mean, white people be doing that shit when it comes to making POC characters into white characters) to include us into some of my favorite shows and sitcoms. Maybe some of these will be re-made with us in them," he further told BuzzFeed.
The artist told BuzzFeed he will be adding more pieces to this series.
