When Bridgerton Divorces Class From Race, It Ruins The Fantasy

The opening scenes of Bridgerton Season 4 make its intentions clear. The family’s loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, descends from the polished upstairs rooms, where staff dust pianos and fluff pillows, to the chaotic underbelly of the estate, where cooks, maids, and footmen rush around seasoning raw chicken and discarding dead flowers. The foreshadowing isn’t subtle: this season is about class.

As a student of intersectional feminist theorists like Angela Davis, this both excited and perplexed me. We live in a world in which race and class are interwoven in a societal tapestry, one thread only becoming free if the other is undone simultaneously. And while Bridgerton takes place in a reimagined post-racial representation of Regency England, the historical British Empire shared a similar fabric. As I was watching this season, I kept going back to this question:  why is it easier for us to imagine Regency England without racial hierarchy than without class hierarchy?

The class divide came into sharper focus through the season’s central romance, which follows aristocrat Benedict Bridgerton as he falls in love with his younger sister’s lady’s maid, Sophie Baek. Their romance is in some ways sanctioned, but only as man and mistress rather than man and wife, revealing the limits of social mobility within this fictional world. 

But as I watched their fairytale play out, I was also watching two real-life dramas about the peculiar and messy relationship between race, class, and representation unfold. The day before the season premiere, Nicki Minaj joined President Trump on stage at the U.S. Treasury Summit, and the weeks following led to think-pieces and podcasts about her proximity to whiteness through wealth. Weeks after this, FBI Director Kash Patel was filmed partying in the U.S. men's national hockey team locker room after their gold medal win, followed by scrutiny about the use of tax payer dollars for private jets and spraying champagne.

This gave my viewership a new lens and in turn a new question. If the show can reimagine who belongs at the top of systems of power without dismantling those systems themselves, is this fantastical representation of the past actually a glimpse into our future?

Bridgerton doesn’t take place in a world where race simply doesn’t exist, but instead one in which the racial integration of nobility occurred decades earlier when Queen Charlotte, a Black woman, and King George, a white man, married. But in Netflix’s prequel series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, the explanation of race comes untethered from its use as a weapon for exploitation. The vast majority of Black people in historical Regency England were valets, footmen, and domestic servants, as these were some of the only options for the formerly enslaved and their children.

In Bridgerton’s fantastical retelling, while there are elements of bigotry and hints at social stratification, even before the “Great Experiment” of integration, people of color could be well off if not noble — and there were enough wealthy POC to fill half the church for the Queen’s wedding with only hours notice. For the most part, racial tension in the Bridgerton Cinematic Universe boils down to simply “one group thinks they’re better than another because they are different looking” and that was solved through a monarch with some melanin. 

While that is still how some see race, this analysis is devoid of the economic reasons for which race, and particularly whiteness, exists today. 

While watching Bridgerton, we are only able to suspend disbelief about race while maintaining the visual opulence that defines the genre because the creation of that wealth relied on a racial hierarchy that happened so far off screen: outside the grand halls, beyond London and England, across oceans and deserts in Asia, Africa and the Americas. In real life, the British Empire's arms spanned 24% of the globe, pillaging and coercing both raw goods and labor from their colonies. Yes, Bridgerton is a fantasy, but since it’s pulling from real-life historical events (Queen Charlotte may have really been Black), it’s hard not to think of the context in which its characters would exist.  

Before Violet Bridgerton carefully oversees the placement of pastries on tiered platters, the sugar dusted on top of them is produced through a brutal plantation economy in the Caribbean. Before Daphne or Francesca visit the modiste for new dresses in which they will make their debut in society, the flowing empire-waist gown traveled through global textile networks stretching from Indian cotton fields. Up until this season, the extravagance has just been a backdrop but now that class has become the focus, the real world implications of the Bridgerton family wealth (and whiteness) is hard to ignore.

And it is for this luxury that whiteness was invented by European imperialists in the first place. At the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and quest for global domination, they were able to defend their enslavement and exploitation of other human beings because those people were heathens. But as more of the exploited Black and brown populations that upheld European empires converted to Christianity, another reason needed to be formed to justify this abuse. So while Bridgerton may exist in a post-racial world, its chandeliers, pearl necklaces and horse drawn carriages, very much do not. They are the material comforts that allow someone like Benedict Bridgerton to drift through life as an artist and romantic, buffered from the labor that makes such leisure possible.

Sophie and Benedict exist at the other end of this system of exploitation. While one side of the violence that generated that wealth often happened far from England’s drawing rooms the other existed inside of them. Unlike colonial exploitation, domestic labor is immediate, visible and intimate. Servants lived inside aristocratic households. They dressed the elite, cooked their meals, and maintained the everyday rituals of wealth. 

Benedict Bridgerton, the second oldest Bridgerton son, meets Sophie Baek, the illegitimate child of a nobleman and a maid, two times. They first meet through a Cinderella-esque plotline at a masquerade ball in which Sophie is impersonating nobility, after which Benedict searches for the mysterious lady to no avail. The second time, he finds her outside of a country estate where she is defending her colleague from the harassment of wasted noblemen. In other words, Benedict falls for Sophie twice: once as fantasy, and once as labor. Yet even after meeting the real Sophie, he is hung up on the masked noblewoman. Why? Because the latter fits neatly into the culturally constructed frameworks of caste, while the former exposes the framework itself.

After grappling with this, Benedict then makes two attempts at integrating Sophie into his life, first by asking her to be his mistress, and then by proposing a somewhat hidden marriage and life on his country estate. Still, Sophie is ultimately always required to absorb more risk, because, like the Black and brown youth that continue to get sent to fight wars for old rich white men, risk absorption is one of the roles of the lower class. 

While for Sophie, discovery of their relationship threatens her livelihood and security, for Benedict the dangers are largely emotional rather than material. And even when he gestures toward defying convention, he never seriously considers surrendering the privileges that define his place in society. While he doesn’t want Sophie to be a maid, he still wants maids. He does not want economic precarity for the woman he loves because to some degree he sees her as an extension of himself. But he does want this insecurity for others because his way of life depends on it. As men of privilege are apt to do, he is not functioning from a mindset of equity but rather exceptionalism. And as a society, we operate similarly.

So while this end of systemic exploitation cannot be pulled at too hard without revealing racial colonialism and thus disrupting a post-racial fantasy, it also cannot be erased on screen as it is part of the aesthetic of affluence that we crave. Because even as a culture that claims to value equality, we are also one of temporarily embarrassed billionaires, a working class that identifies with nobility over servants despite our bank accounts saying otherwise. 

It is for this reason that part of our enjoyment in shows like Bridgerton is that we enjoy seeing the wealth inequality of the time. 

Because we see ourselves as Bridgertons, not as Baeks.

When we say we want equality, too often we really mean we want equal freedom to exploit. And this is why we are witnessing the rise of multicultural MAGA with people like Nicki Minaj and Kash Patel. On the surface, it may not be immediately clear how this connects to a show like Bridgerton. But think of it this way: the show presents a world in which Black and brown people are represented at the top of society, yet the systems that produce wealth and maintain hierarchy remain untouched. Kathani “Kate” Bridgerton, née Sharma, hails from India — a country whose labor, taxes, and resources fueled the grandeur of the British Empire, from cotton and spice plantations to the looted sapphires that decorated aristocratic wardrobes. What does it mean to celebrate an Indian character joining the nobility of the largest empire on earth while the real historical wealth a family like hers would have enjoyed also would have forced her countrymen into poverty? Similarly, Minaj and Patel operate within powerful cultural and political systems. They are visible, celebrated, and sometimes emulated, but their prominence does not challenge the structures that allow exploitation to persist. 

Their prominence demonstrates how racialized figures can be welcomed into proximity with power so long as they endorse the system that produces it. Whiteness, after all, has never been a fixed biological category so much as a flexible political one, expanding and contracting to accommodate those who can help stabilize existing hierarchies. Wealth and status may not grant full entry into that category, but they can bring someone close enough to benefit from its protections.

Take Minaj, a Trinidadian immigrant in the U.S. with lyrics ranging from “I’m a Republican, voting for Mitt Romney” in 2013’s Mercy to "Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home" in her 2018 song Black Barbies. For most of her long career she has kept her political views opaque, leaving her ability to play both sides open. That changed when her shift to the right was solidified at Turning Point U.S.A. AmericaFest conference last year, where she regurgitated right wing talking points, no doubt for a large sum of cash but likely more so for winning favor of the fascist regime in power.

Similarly, Kash Patel has risen to prominence within the conservative movement as one of its most loyal and aggressive defenders. As an Indian American figure operating at the highest levels of a political project that has often trafficked in nativist rhetoric, Patel embodies a similar paradox: his presence signals diversity while the policies he champions reinforce systems that disproportionately harm racialized communities. 

These are two people of color who used representation to their advantage only to support the anti-DEI platforms of the Trump administration. Patel, for example, participated in the American Bar Association’s Judicial Intern Opportunity Program at Pace University in 2003, a diversity initiative aimed at underrepresented groups in law. Minaj, meanwhile, undoubtedly rose to fame through her lyrical talent and musical versatility, but also by utilizing the aesthetics of Black beauty culture through her fashion, style, and persona to dominate cultural space. Yet in a recent interview with Erika Kirk she framed the growing celebration of Black beauty as unfair to white women, suggesting it amounted to a kind of reverse discrimination rather than progress toward racial equity. In doing so, she transformed representation into both personal power and political leverage, without challenging the systems that produce inequality.

This is not to say that representation is not important. In fact, Bridgerton’s ability to lull me into a sweet dream in which women of color are so vibrantly represented has, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, healed parts of my younger self. As a child of the ’90s, who, like Minaj, immigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad, I saw few reflections of myself in the media. Being of South Asian, East Asian and West African descent, I found kinship in all the Black and brown characters I saw on screen, most of which were not usually the main characters, but instead their sidekicks. It was from this that I too learned to be a sidekick to the blonde girls in the schoolyard, the Miranda Sanchez to the Lizzie McGuires, to shrink in my own life in order to fill a role that was written for me. Part of my deconstruction of racial hierarchy has been in an effort to deprogram that learned part of myself, too. Seeing women like Yerin Ha (Sophie Baek), Simone Ashley (Kate Bridgerton) and India Amarteifio (young Queen Charlotte) as lead love interests in these series, and Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte) and Adjoa Andoh (Lady Danbury) reach the highest levels of influence in its world, is something I wish I had as a child. 

But for those of us who have longed to be represented, it can also be a blind spot. Representation can play a pivotal role in helping marginalized people see ourselves in roles of greater agency, notoriety and freedom. It can help us dream. But if we don’t utilize the power it bolsters us to achieve to challenge the systems that oppress us in the first place, then it actually becomes a tool for the oppressor. We are living in a time of greater wealth inequality than the Gilded Age, and representation alone does little to address the living conditions of racialized people within the United States, and certainly not much for those outside of the U.S. Empire. 

Similar to how we can ignore the off screen realities of Regency England in order to accept the post-racial premise, we are still able to ignore the exploitation occurring in the very same regions that make our comforts possible today. We can look away from the Cambodian sweatshops in which our fast fashion is made, and the Chilean clothing deserts to which they will end up, but, like the Bridgerton staff, it’s harder to divert our eyes from the shift workers at our local Big Box store who are unable to afford healthcare and whose employers find every loophole not to give it to them. We see the less viscerally cruel end of this system, while the more vicious side stays out of sight, easing our continued participation in it.

So while Bridgerton is a fictional representation of the past, maybe it is actually an accurate depiction of our current and our future, one in which people of color are both represented and continue to be exploited. In which celebrities like Minaj speak loudly in white supremacist spaces but don’t utter a word on behalf of the Trinidadian fishermen extrajudicially bombed by the U.S. as part of a greater ploy for Venezuelan oil. Where Kash Patel is probably shotgunning a beer somewhere with Logan Paul while women in India watch hundreds of hours of violent imagery in order to train AI so we don’t have to.

The Bridgertons ultimately decide to do something similar: circumvent social rules rather than dismantling them. Though Mrs. Mondrich, new lady in waiting to the Queen, makes a passionate plea for Her Highness to accept Sophie as Benedict's betrothed even though she is of the lower classes, Bridgerton matriarch Violet has another plan. She blackmails Sophie’s stepmother, Lady Araminta, into falsely testifying that Sophie is nobility, and thus gaining the Queen’s approval. In this way, the Bridgertons make no real sacrifice to their social standing, and Sophie is now forced to live a lie. And while an unsatisfying resolution, I realize now that there was no other way the story could have ended. The class barriers in Bridgerton cannot be destroyed without destroying the show itself.