Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sunday, I will be reviewing the Canadian series, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which aired from 2001 to 2015!  The series can be streamed on YouTube and Tubi.

Degrassi goes there!

Episode 2.11 “Don’t Believe The Hype”

(Dir by Anais Granofsky, originally aired on December 23rd, 2002)

“A hate crime has been committed here,” Snake declares in this episode.  He declares it very seriously.  In fact, he’s a little bit too serious.  His voice and his expression are so grim that the line actually has the opposite effect of what it intended.  The same can be said of this episode itself.  Degrassi was always political but, up until its final seasons, it was usually smart enough to understand that encouraging audiences to look between the lines was preferable to hitting them over the head.  Occasionally, though, this show did give us an episode like this one.

As for the hate crime, it’s the vandalization of a display about Iraq.  It’s International Day and Fareeza (Jessica Rose) made the display to inform people about her home country.  Fareeza is sure that her display was vandalized by Hazel because, earlier, Hazel give Fareeza a fashion ticket because her hijab was judged to be “terrorist chic.”  Hazel also said that Fareeza needed to back off before “Jamaica declared war on Iraq.”

Fareeza replies that Hazel’s last name — Aden — doesn’t sound Jamaican.  (It doesn’t?  Really?)  “You look Somalian,” Fareeza says.

Anyway, it turns out that the displays was vandalized by two unnamed students.  But Mr. Raditch still tells Hazel that she committed a hate crime by joking about declaring war on Iraq.  At first, Hazel is defensive but then she becomes so overwhelmed with guilt that she admits that she isn’t Jamaican.  She actually is Somalian!  Of course, I think one could argue that Fareeza committed a hate crime with her “You look Somalian” comment.  I mean, talk about stereotyping!  It’s like telling me I look Irish just because I have red hair and I’m half-Irish.

(At this point, I should mention that Andea Lewis, who played Hazel, was not Somalian.  In fact, in real life, she’s half-Jamaican.  But then again, Jessica Rose, who played Fareeza, was not from Iraq.)

Now, needless to say, Hazel being a Somalian refugee is one of those plot points that will hardly ever be mentioned again.  And Fareeza will never appear in another episode of Degrassi.  Fareeza showed up.  She taught everyone a lesson.  Having fulfilled her plot obligations, her character is never seen again.

Hazel later gives a presentation about her Somalian heritage and the school loves her.  (We don’t see the presentation that Fareeza gave about Iraq.  Sorry, Fareeza, this is Hazel’s episode.)  Meanwhile, JT’s friends discover that he’s good at sewing and everyone, except for Liberty, makes fun of him.  It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at Liberty’s crush on JT until you remember that JT is destined to end dying on Liberty’s birthday.  But that’s far in the future.  For now, JT is an adorable scamp who has no idea that he’s going to be literally stabbed in the back.

There’s nothing subtle about this episode and the end result is that it feels almost more like a parody of Degrassi than anything else.