When Aisha Taylor joined the Friends cast in as Charlie Wheeler, she crossed a prime-time boundary—the segregation of American television shows by race. At the same time, Charlie had to be co-opted into the show’s gender dynamics. This article argues that Charlie epitomizes the ongoing postracial politics of respectability and hyper-class mobility that construct black women’s limited entry into postfeminist womanhood, as well as into the, still, rarefied white world of the “mainstream” American sitcom. Charlie seems to trouble, if temporarily, these racial limits by being both Ross’s equal in terms of education and employment and by being a temporary part of the group through her relationships with Joey and Ross. Comparing her with Ross’s previous girlfriend Julie, this article will also consider the ways that the problematic representation of Ross’s girlfriends of color structure the postfeminist tropes of fate and retreatism central to Ross and Rachel’s happy ending.
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