I have answered a few asks about TADC because I know how important transfem Jax has been to a lot of people, and I don’t want to take that away from anyone, but I am very critical of the use of the song “Isn’t She Lovely?” being reclaimed as a coming out scene, when the original song was written by a Black man about the birth of his Black daughter. Keeping in mind the racism from some of the voice actors, and the lukewarm apology from the creator, it is very insidious to me to take a Black-specific song and reclaim it as something else. It very much feels like “taking Black art without caring about the bodies that made it.”
Obviously, this has already been pointed out by Black people in the fandom, but I wanted to bring it up because I’ve had a few asks about that song specifically that I’m not comfortable with answering. I am extremely happy that Jax is canonically transfem because even though I’ve never watched the show, I’ve witnessed people’s excitement about it, and I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but I’m also not going to pretend like the racism doesn’t exist because that’s not the kind of blog I’m running here. Any other song could’ve been used, and perhaps there wasn’t much thought put into its choice; I’m sure it wasn’t a deliberate act of malice, because from an outsider perspective that song seems to fit perfectly, but that ultimately doesn’t make it any less harmful, especially given the context surrounding the production.
I feel similarly about how United In Grief by Kendrick Lamar became a popular TikTok sound for people to make funny jokes about something going wrong when the original lyrics are specifically about Black grief. Or about the new trend of “the saxaphones are getting louder” taken from Boyz N The Hood, which is a movie about Black-American experiences that a lot of (white) people using this sound likely haven’t even seen.
I’m not saying it’s inherently bad to use these songs in different contexts, but it’s a pattern that keeps repeating of Black-specific art being taken by white people without the original context in mind and being used for their own experiences instead. It’s important to at least notice this pattern.
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