The Real Jamaican Girls Exposed

I’ll write this one in English for once. May my French readers forgive me.

So back in 2016, I wrote an article about the webseries “The Real Jamaican Girls” on my main blog myinsaeng.com. You can read it here. Google translator isn’t that far off. To sum it up, I talked about how this webseries was far from being perfect. Clearly, they weren’t professional and the storylines were dramatized to fit the reality tv concept. You may not like this kind of entertainment, but it’s still entertainment. This webseries was filled with energy and I enjoyed to see young Caribbean girls being in the limelight for once. If you listen to my podcast in English, I keep mentionning how meaningful films with Caribbean teenage girls in the lead role are to me. And in my French article, I asked if The Real Jamaican Girls could become a franchise and spread throughout the Caribbean. Well, it has yet to happened, but I still think it could become a thing. But that’s just me.

When I opened karukerament.com two months ago, I moved a couple of articles and I was debating reuploading the one I wrote about “The Real Jamaican Girls”. I decided not to because I felt the article was too “old”, but I’m currently brainstorming for my YA novel/script, so this webseries kept popping back up in my mind. I was wondering how the girls were. It turns out that Anthony Tracey gave us a cute update a few days ago. This video takes you behind the scenes of this project that started out as a fun way for a brother and his sister to spend time together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjDPfezdB0w&t=52s

Time flies by. About that YA spin-off/sequel people keep asking now that all the girls are out of high school, I’ll give my 2cents no one asked. I’m not sure I’d be interested in watching them with the same concept today. They’re young women and I do think seeing young women getting into fights would unecessarily feed negative stereotypes when there’s no strong positive stereotypes to create the balance. Young Black girls are barely represented together in cinema and television. The token Black girl isn’t allowed to spend time with other Black girls (I dare you to name two films or TV shows with a group of Black girls having fun together). This webseries shows the opposite. That’s why I believe the reality TV concept works here. You get to see young Black girls expressing themselves, standing up for themselves. Like Anthony Tracey says, they have a strong personality and the storylines are a dramatized version of what could happen in real life. You can’t do it so easily with young women because Mona Scott-Young already got this concept on lock with the Love and hip-hop franchise. Having adults getting into verbal or/and physical fights just make them look immature, or you’d have to give real valid reasons.… I’d be fine with it IF we had positive images for Caribbean young women. But that’s just my opinion. Again, this webseries is a cute memory that I’m glad to have. And I’d always recommend it.

The official site is still up. You can follow Anthony Tracey on Twitter.