The Young and The Restless Storylines - The Barbers and The Winters

The Barbers and The Winters

The Young and the Restless is also one of the few soaps to have successfully integrated a number of African American actors into its cast. In the mid-1980s The Young and the Restless created a storyline which revolved around Tyrone Jackson (Phil Morris), a young black man, being made up in whiteface to bring down a mafia kingpin, but most of the characters were written out within a few years. In 1989, the program Generations earned critical acclaim for casting an entire African American family from the show's inception. Established hits like The Young and the Restless were criticized as the show had a low number of minorities.

As a response, Tonya Lee Williams and Victoria Rowell joined The Young and the Restless in the early 1990s as the Barber sisters, Olivia and Drucilla, nieces of the Abbott's maid Mamie Johnson (Veronica Redd). They proved to be very successful and they interacted fairly well with the established characters. Nathan Hastings (Nathan Purdee/Randy Brooks/Adam Lazarre-White), the only other remaining black character on the show before 1990, was married off to Olivia, before dying in a hit and run car accident in 1996. Two more black characters, Neil Winters, played by former Generations alum Kristoff St. John and his brother Malcolm played by Shemar Moore, would be introduced in 1991 and 1994 respectively.

However, the core black characters largely interacted with themselves only; they would most often act as bit parts in scenes with the other characters. In the case of the Winters brother and the Barber sisters, they were shown to usually just swap each other's partners when a "shake-up" was needed in the romantic scheme of the story. This led to a seemingly never-ending love quadrangle between the four characters. Later actions have proven that this choice was due to the supposition that it was ostensibly "too controversial" to have an interracial pairing. Indeed, a pairing in the late 1990s between Neil Winters and Victoria Newman was axed by CBS executives, who were rumored to have received many angry phone calls and letters by viewers in the South. In 2004, a love affair between Phyllis Summers (Michelle Stafford) and chemist Damon Porter (Keith Hamilton Cobb) was prominently featured, despite concerns that the interracial pairing would be scrapped just like the one that was written before. While the romance between Phyllis and Damon did eventually come to an end, the writers followed up by having Phyllis' son Daniel (Michael Graziadei) become involved with Drucilla and Malcolm's daughter Lily (Christel Khalil). Daniel and Lily married in 2006.

Lily and Daniel's marriage was short-lived. After they divorced, Lily moved on with Cane (the man pretending to be Jill's son). Lily and Cane tried to have a family but complications, including a suffering through an ectopic pregnancy and thinking that Cane had fathered a child with another woman, Chloe. Despite these events, the two married in 2009. Lily was diagnosed with cancer. She and Cane asked Mackenzie to act as a surrogate to help them start a family despite Lily's medical condition.