Rim Jobs, Simps, And Janet Jackson: Why ‘All My Friends Are Racist’ Should Be On Your Watchlist

To call All My Friends Are Racist bold is an understatement. The ABC short series is both a slap in the face and slap on the knees — a layered comedy that tackles being young, queer, Blak, and everything in between.

It follows messy best friends Casey and Belle as they call out all the “racist dawgs” from their sleepy sharehouse in suburban Queensland. A few caps deep, the duo are forced to try and un-cancel themselves after their wall of shame — postering problematic faves from their inner circles — is leaked to the internet during a house party.

“Us? Cancelled? In the era of Black Is King? They’ve got another thing coming,” the duo decried in the pilot ep, now forced to PR their way out of being social pariahs, and spin ‘wokeness’ to work in their favour.

Not For The Faint Of Heart

All My Friends Are Racist fills the void of content made by and for Zoomer-cusp-Millennial Australians who transitioned from Tumblr to TikTok.

“It’s a very, very young show,” actor Davey Thompson told Junkee. “My mum watched it with subtitles and she didn’t get it — bless her”.

It’s easy to be taken aback by the show’s very early established sex-positivity that quickly weeds out the weak. A raunchy rim job scene to rival The White Lotus stirred controversy on gossip sites, and gave another reason for conservatives to try and defund the national broadcaster.

“That’s when you know you’ve made it, if the Daily Mail cares about your sex scene. Thanks for making me relevant!” Thompson said in response.

He described his character as a bit of a wrecking ball. Bankrolled by his parents, the fashionista quasi-influencer is just trying to make it big and go to Coachella — and he isn’t afraid to step on a few toes to get there. “Casey didn’t really have it rough growing up at all,” Thompson said about his character. “There’s a real sense of entitlement around him. He’s got privilege, which is very, very rare for First Nations people in this country”.

Webbed in between lad culture, justice for Janet Jackson bits, and lunchtime amyl breaks, are wickedly written lines like “it’s not a handout, or a handjob, it’s a hand up” that poke fun at white Australia’s grappling with Indigenous affairs.

“The most brilliant thing is that we had so many First Nations creatives in leading positions,” co-lead Tuuli Narkle told Junkee about representing complex issues with humour and grace. “You don’t have to code-switch.”

Performative activism permeates the plot — from workplace tokenism right through to solidarity simps. “I put my mother on the wall,” budding law student Belle, played by Narkle, admitted about her white saviour parent who appropriates mob culture for experimental art exhibitions.

Posting a black square on Instagram, or re-sharing an infographic with a raised fist emoji with no followup action are some of the many well-intentioned but halfhearted ways that allies continually miss the point. Narkle said the best way for people to meaningfully engage is to simply listen. “Honour the information you’re getting,” she said. “I think a lot of the time you get this parentified version of activism from white people, but it really needs to be led by people of colour”.

Sense Of Self

She described the opportunity to explore dual identities on screen, as an Indigenous and Finnish woman herself, as fulfilling and freeing.

“It’s very rare that you get a character that aligns so heavily with the person that you are,” she said. “Exploring Belle’s anxiety around her mixed-race identity, and how she creates a space for herself that honours being an urban Aboriginal woman who is trying to create change and make her mark — I really resonated with that”.

Despite the characters’ flaws, Belle and Casey truly do want to make the world around them better, but Thompson noted society isn’t quite open to receiving that effort at the moment. In the interim, the best friends in AMFAR focus instead on working on themselves.

“Just him being a real shit for most of the show, seeing that little arc that Casey goes through in the season was huge,” he said of the protagonist. “It wasn’t like Breaking Bad character transformation, but it was really fun.”

“The most beautiful thing is that we can all be our own villains — we all have the opportunity to really, really fuck up,” agreed Narkle. “It’s how you take that, and how you grow from it, that is the telling part of who you are”.

Woke Me Up Inside

In the age of Trisha Paytas, Kevin Rudd, and notes app screenshots, the show examined how saying sorry might not come easily for all, but should be a genuine effort nevertheless.

“I watched so many apology videos getting ready for the role, and then trying to catch up with these people to see if they put money where their mouths are was really interesting,” Thompson said.

“The most beautiful thing is that we can all be our own villains – we all have the opportunity to really, really fuck up.”

One of his favourite research examples was James Charles because of the movie-quality production in his video — only for him to be cancelled again less than a year later. “You’ve got to treat people with respect and dignity otherwise it won’t be tolerated and you’ll be held accountable,” Thompson said about celebrity digital reckonings.

While cancel culture may have had its heyday, redemption is still on the cards for anyone who puts in the work, Narkle believed. “It gave a wider platform to minority cultures to really go ‘hey, this is not okay’ which has been a beautiful stepping stone, because we’ve been able to pull up people on a large scale and demand they do better”.

“The idea of cancelling people and not allowing for growth — I don’t agree with personally. What you do with those moments matters more than the mistakes that you made,” she said.

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Millie Roberts is the Social Justice Reporter at Junkee. She tweets at @milianne_r.