Livre d'Or

Thank you, this is a really interesting comment and I think it helps me sort out my thinking about this. Explicitly pointing up that Whedon is playing on much earlier B movie horror tropes makes sense of a lot of the stuff that I'm cringing at, even though it obviously doesn't justify the racism.

Your comment about protecting white-America from scary foreigners is really on-point. I started watching Buffy at all, having been mostly put off by what I'd heard about it, because I watched and really enjoyed Firefly. But that, with its Wild West in Space setting, is even more blatant in the setting of protecting this nice white community from scary, all-too-often racialized, foreigners. At least Firefly has Zoe and Book as major characters, but that doesn't help as much as you might think.