How I Met Your Mother and racism

How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom in which we follow a group of New Yorker friends.

Even if New York is considered as the most representative city of the melting pot, Ted, Lilly, Marshal, Robin and Barney are all Caucasian. It show that even if people try to be more equal in the tv shows or movies, the most recurrent African American man who appear more than once in the sitcom is Barney’s brother: James. This is a kind of racism and exclusion, because this group of friends is supposed to represent an average group of friends in New York and it seems that the average New Yorker is not African American. 

Even we think that the most know racism is toward foreigners, it also “works” with people in your country. Because the USA is composed of multiple states, each one can be considered as a small country. In How I Met Your Mother, we can see that with Marshall and the representations of citizens of Minnesota. If you look at how people from Minnesota are this sitcom, it’s a perfect representation of stereotypes. They are all 6.6, they are strong, they like violent games (as we see in an episode where we learn that Marshall and his brothers use to do free fight in the living room when they were young). In one episode, we also see that they like bad food: the special meal of the Eriksen family is made of mayonnaise, chips and candies. And there are also stereotypes we think are good but not obviously. In Minnesota it seems that people like tailgating a lot, they also love the Vikings and they are friendly with everybody. It seems to be “good” racism but in fact it can be analyzed this way: people from Minnesota are weak-minded because they act like children. They love everybody and they like sports, like hockey, as children do. 

In fact even people don’t think that this a also bad stereotypes, it can be considered like that from the people represented like that.