Confederate: The Show We Do Not Need

David Benioff; D.B Weiss (Credit: AP/Vince Bucci)

If there was any doubt that we are not living in a post racial world, surely the election of that orange shit stain should have made it clear to all the doubters by now.  In a world in which many have even dropped the pretense of using coded language to attack Black people, for some ungodly reason, HBO has decided that what we need is a show called Confederate, whose premise is to question what would have happened if the south had won the civil war.  From the imagination of the creators of Game of Thrones, we will be treated to a program in which African-Americans are still slaves.

Understandably, the announcement about Confederate created quite a backlash. Certainly, HBO needs to fill in the gaping hole that Game of Thrones is going to leave but why fill that in with a White supremacists wet dream?  If Confederate is going to aptly depict slavery, it will most certainly come with scenes of absolute brutality and rape, rising to a level of torture porn and broken Black bodies for the sake of entertainment.  It’s bad enough that we have been subjected to the deaths of Philando Castille, Eric Garner, and Alton Sterling on repeat. Thanks to our 24 hour news cycle when African-Americans are murdered by the cops it’s all that seems to be reported on for days on end. In our hyper connected world, social media adds to the trauma with videos automatically playing on Facebook. Black death is now appropriate for the consumption of the masses.  It is absolutely important to recognise the brutality of these deaths yet it’s clear that the very frequency and availability of the footage is already leaving far too many people desensitized to the pain and suffering. Is it any wonder that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss feel emboldened enough to pitch a series about Black suffering?

HBO absolutely could have gone another way if it wanted to share a slave narrative, especially given the fan outcry when Underground was canceled by WGN when the network was purchased by the hyper conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. Certainly, Underground didn't have the audience that Game of Thrones does but it did feature a narrative of Black empowerment.  Rather than focusing solely on Black suffering, Underground showed the courageousness of those who chose to follow ol’ Moses and liberate themselves. Underground fits quite better with Black Lives Matter, and the push to tear down civil war statues. Is it any wonder that Black liberation suddenly doesn’t have a place on television?

Even as Black people are trying to disassemble hallmarks of the former confederacy, White supremacy seems quite determined to not only celebrate it as though it represents a golden era but to return us to it. We don’t need Confederate to tell us how bad slavery was, there are plenty of first hand account slave narratives still in existence.  We don’t need Confederate to create some fantasy about African-American suffering because the extra judicial slaughter of Black men and women, combined with the housing crises which targeted Black people regardless of credit,  the cancelling of television shows with large casts of colour, the prison industrial complex and the lack of generational wealth all tell the story for anyone who has common sense enough to connect the dots.  This isn’t about education, this about subjugation. This is about reminding Black people that we are still very much viewed as second class citizens despite, the vast accomplishments in the face of white oppression.

Does Fear The Walking Dead Have A Race Problem?

We have spoken about race in the Walking Dead world, many many times. Oh so many times. And yet, it keeps serving us up problems that just demand commentary and with the mid-season finale of Fear the Walking Dead we simply have to talk about this again.

When Fear the Walking Dead first begun, there seemed to be a lot of potential for it to have a racially diverse cast - it began in Los Angeles and quickly moved to Mexico: in those circumstances it would be more than slightly ridiculous to have a cast dominated by non-latino White people. This doesn’t mean The Walking Dead ever had an excuse for not being racially diverse - being set in Atlanta and Washington DC, both “minority majority” cities makes a white-dominant cast more than a little dubious - but to move the story to Mexico and still have a non-latino white American dominant cast? That’s an even bigger stretch.

Unfortunately, like so many of these shows, the original potential for racial diversity rapidly began to fizzle out. We already spoke about the early deaths of POC on this show, but since then, it has only gotten worse.

While Madison, Alicia and Nick - the white protagonists - have weathered the storm, we’ve seen the deaths of Travis, Chris and Travis’s first wife, Elizabeth (seriously, this show has surgically extracted the POC from this mixed-race family). Outside of that core family, we’ve seen the early loss of Griselda, Ofelia’s mother and we’ve moved from POC settlement to settlement leaving carnage in their wake. From Daniel burning down Celia Flores’s compound, to the destruction of Alejandro’s settlement, even to the loss of the gang that attacked that settlement: we’ve seen these camps be destroyed one after another. Even when one manages to survive - like the hotel - we quickly get somewhat dubious reasons why it has to be abandoned.

Instead, it’s an overwhelmingly white ranch that remains the base of operations.

But death is not the contribution to Minority Decay - focus is clearly another. Madison, Alicia and Nick have managed to be reunited and stay together - even when they are apart, it’s unusual for an episode to happen where they’re not referred to - and we certainly won’t see a long chain of episodes where they do not appear.

When season 3 started, we actually thought Daniel and Ofelia were dead and Strand had been all but written out. All of them had been banished to the plot box - Ofelia for so long I didn’t even recognise her when she reappeared. Even now, Strand and Daniel are separated from the main cast, reduced to cameos if that- and Ofelia only got to step out of the plot box because Luciana stepped into it. Two female latina characters is simply too much, one has to be banished to the plot box.

We move from this minority decay to season 3s big-bad, a Native American tribe attacking the poor rugged white pioneers.

There was never a chance of this being done well, so I think the writers didn’t even try.

From the moment Qaletaqa Walker appeared we were treated to endless “savage” brutality intermingled with a heavy dose of woo-woo and superstition. Qaletaqa is literally scalping people (something white colonists did to Native Americans to collect bounties during the genocide), burning people alive, employing biological warfare and otherwise taking the fight to an extreme level all the while the ranchers call them “savages” and “barbarians”. This is the story told by so many 1950s westerns - savage “injuns” attacking poor innocent white pioneers - that we finally stopped portraying when even Hollywood realised how disgusting it was (we moved to white people saving those poor Native Americans so we didn’t exactly move far).

When not brutally slaughtering people, Qaletaqa is something of a mess of stereotypes more than personality - a mix of “noble savage” (freeing Madison despite her being his main opposition because she’s “more of a man” than Jeremiah; speaking of the “first people” and sacred artefacts) mixed in with a strong dose of woo-woo (he even quoted prophecy to Madison and his horse sensed Ofelia’s “spirit”. Really?). This was… lacking in terms of any kind of humanising portrayal or development and certainly not balancing the brutality and torture.

Star Trek Inclusion & the Presumed SJW Narrative

When Star Trek first hit the airwaves, there was nothing like it on television. Sure, they had shows about aliens in space but until Gene Roddenberry’s creation, no one had envisioned a future for humanity based upon the principles of equality. Star Trek’s first episode aired on September 8, 1966 right in the midst of the civil rights movements while cold war tensions were running high. In this time of great turbulence and social upheaval it would have been far easier to picture a dystopian future for humanity rather than a global government where all people and cultures are united in a common purpose. Roddenberry dared to dream that the better angels of our nature would assert itself and present a far more hopeful future for humanity, one where a Black woman, a Japanese man, a Russian and an alien from Vulcan could all serve on the bridge of the same ship. One where they would sacrifice for each other and form a bond of friendship so strong that it would last all the days of their lives. This is the world that Roddenberry created and it is without doubt beautiful.

Like many fans, I’ve been waiting for Star Trek to return to television since the cancellation of Enterprise. Sure we’ve had movies for the first time in a long time but they seemed to play more to special effects than the heart of the Star Trek franchise. And yes, I blame J. J. Abrams, just as any loyal Trekkie would. Star Trek Discovery promises a return to the Roddenberry’s vision with Star Trek introducing its first gay character (which is reported as something Gene Roddenberry did want even if the franchise has grossly and shamefully erased LGBT people up until this very belated moment). Michelle Yeoh is the first Asian-American captain and the second female captain and Sonequa Martin-Green is the first female African-American first officer. This new Star Trek looks like North America because it reflects its diversity.  Unlike many shows which are content to white wash, straight wash and simply erase, Star Trek Discovery is placing marginalised people front and center because without diversity, there is no Star Trek.

Unfortunately there are those who claim to be Trekkies but seem to have conveniently forgotten Roddenberry’s original vision. The news of two women of colour leading the charge - one of them with a non-American accent - has brought out a rash of white male fragility.  How can humanity possibly function in space without a white male leading the charge?  Are we really supposed to believe that women of colour could be competent or have the strength of will to make the hard decisions? Yes, all of this is possible and so much more.  In Roddenberry’s vision, neither gender nor race were factors which would have limited someone’s potential. And those who object so strenuously to Michelle Yeoh’s accent have clearly forgotten Chekhov. Anthony Rapp plays Lt. Stamets (which has the added bonus of being one of the few times we actually have a gay man play a gay character), an “astromycologist,” fungus expert, and Starfleet Science Officer aboard the Starship Discovery. Stamets’s Whiteness cannot be denied but because of his sexuality, the snowflakes are emasculating him. Since when does being gay, erase one’s race? Oh the logic of homophobes. There have been no shortage of straight white male characters on Star Trek, particularly when it comes to leadership positions so the very idea that this new incarnation represents a sort of race and gender based genocide on straight, het, men in space is beyond nonsense. It’s an affront to everything that Star Trek is, to everything Roddenberry envisioned and to everything it hopes to be. Bigotry and intolerance have no place on any star ship and any real fan would know that.

The Walking Dead: Rick and his Fan Club

There's never been any doubt that Rick is the protagonist of this show.  There are times that for whatever reason, the writers seem determined to drive home the White, cis, het able bodied male will save the world narrative and Hostiles and Calamities is just one such occasion. The white man will save us was laid on so heavily and enforced by one of the four black male characters that I found myself wanting to simply turn off this episode.  The racial dynamics at play seem lost on the writers who are determined at all cost to set Rick up for victory.

The Walking Dead has essentially erased race from the conversation as though a dystopian setting would suddenly bring up about the equality that is so sadly missing in our civilised world. In seven seasons, there have been two conversations about race. The first occurred between T Dog and Dale in the second season.  T Dog expressed his concern about travelling with two white police officers only to be quickly shut down by an incredulous Dale as though police officers abusing their authority to actively harm Black men isn’t a historical fact. This conversation only existed to affirm the goodness of Rick and, at the time, Shane.  T Dog’s legitimate fears were deemed meaningless because the purpose of shows like The Walking Dead is to have power coalesce into the hands of white men as though their leadership guarantees success for all. This is an abject negation of the fact that men like Rick have been the primary cause of violence, rape, starvation, physical brutality of communities of colour since First Contact.  

The second conversation was between Daryl and his older brother Meryl. After leaving the group for a time to be with brother, Daryl decides to return. Meryl makes it clear that he cannot go with Daryl because he “damn could have killed that black bitch and damn near killed the Chinese kid”.  Daryl simply replies to Meryl, “he’s Korean”, in reference to Glenn, before walking away. This moment is meant to stand out because it represents Daryl’s redemption train. By turning his back on Meryl and going back to Rick and the group he is signalling that he is choosing to live in a community rather than relying upon comradery based solely on a homogenous identity of whiteness. Darryl’s redemption train is short  because it is assumed that his racist beliefs are a victimless crime and that having seen the light that he should be afforded the benefit of the doubt. That this approach simply doubles down on the white supremacist attitude that the writers are trying to divorce Darryl from seems lost in the desire to offer a redemption to allow a popular character to not only rise in the ranks but to fully integrate as a trusted member of the group. It is a subtle dismissal of white supremacist beliefs by having them dismissed and ignored so easily

Darryl has made no apologies for his former belief system, there was barely even a nod towards them. It has simply been erased as though it didn’t permeate his formative years thus greatly affect his sense of self. Darryl’s moment of epiphany isn’t based on the morality as much as it is based in a need to survive in this new dystopian world. That it comes with a reward of increased status and the ability to be seen as valued is simply glossed over. It’s a convenient change of ideology that is both self serving and disturbing in its ability to erase the harm of white supremacy on communities of colour. Glenn is a friend and coupled with a need to survive, it now costs Darryl nothing to admit his humanity.

At very least it’s a rather waste of a storyline - actually having Darryl grow, change, confront his beliefs and understand the full impact of how terrible they were and trying to move on from that would have been an interesting, developed, character building and respectful way of not just adding flesh to some rather dull seasons AND respectfully addressing racism.

Race as an issue on The Walking Dead is either silenced or simply a part of the elevation of White supremacy.  The Walking Dead routinely divorces its characters of colour from any distinct cultural markers.  They don’t congregate at anytime to discuss how their experiences or situation might well differ from that of the white characters; there is no closeness based in difference, they barely interact at all. Surviving the threat that zombies pose along with the threat from out group individuals is used to tie people together.  Whatever disagreements may occur between individuals never come down to racial disharmony, they are always about something else.

Most recently, we’ve seen tension between Sasha and Rosita who represent fifty percent of the women of colour on this show.  It’s telling that the source of the antagonism between these two women is the very white and now dead Abraham. In Rock in the Road, Rosita makes it clear that she and Sasha aren’t friends and only slept with the same dead man.  Keep in mind that there are several men of colour on The Walking dead currently and yet 50% of the female cast of colour are grieving the death of a White man.  That these men weren’t even considered to be viable love interest goes a long way in The Walking Dead’s narrative purpose of setting up White men as the epitome of masculinity and desirability. Masculinity in The Walking Dead’s work is always hyper aggressive and is continually rewarded.

The Awful Racism of the House of Night Series

It’s time to look again into the abyss that is the House of Night series, grab your gun and set your sights on those barrels and shoot those fish.

Like… well… everything, the House of Night Series doesn’t exactly do well when it comes to race, despite having several POC. Or perhaps because it has several POC as the way these characters are treated is, well, typical for the House of Night series

Firstly there’s Shaunee and perhaps the most annoying element of this “character” is how little character there is there. She’s a member of the Nerdherd and like the rest of the that little gang, she exists to serve Zoey, love Zoey, and be Zoey’s minion. She is a member of Zoey’s circle. She is a sycophant, she isn’t really a character. In fact, most of the time she’s only half of a character since the authors got tired of this writing stuff and decided to just share a personality with two characters.

Let’s be clear here, Shaunee appeared in the very first book and was present in all 12 of the main books to some degree. And in all that time the closest thing she had to an actual storyline is to not keep finishing Erin’s sentences. That’s the closest Shaunee ever comes to actually being a human being. 12 books. 12. She’s supposed to be a major character and she has no real storylines or presence

What she does have is sassy quips, because that’s what her role is - to be the sassy Black friend with the witty dialogue. This is exacerbated by Erin - Shaunee’s white “twin” who basically has identical mannerisms to Shaunee. And no, this is not ok. A stereotypical sassy Black woman is a problem, a White woman who ACTS like a stereotypical sassy Black woman just adds an extra level of cringeworthiness to the whole proceedings.

It doesn’t help that the author also loves to put severely problematic speech in the voice of her minority characters. So Shaunee will outright praise some really gross fetishistic description (honestly, every single time Shaunee is described it sounds like someone quoting a Starbucks menu with the “cappucino mocha chocolate”), even commenting on one nasty fetihistic line with “thank you for appreciating my Blackness”.

Just because a white author puts her awful racial descriptions in the mouth of a Black character doesn’t make it ok. Especially since if you’re also going to make comments about “good” (straight) hair or “obvious weave” when deciding to degrade designated evil Black women. Your straw Black characters don’t make your racist fetishism acceptable.

This also brings us to Kramisha, the other prominent Black character (and, beyond Zoey and her grandmother, which I will get to, the only other really prominent POC, certainly prominent ones who live. We have some vague background POC red fledglings - who just basically appear to have some dubious descriptions but then fade into obscurity) who is introduced in Hunted. Kramisha is an oracle - which basically means she exists as one of the many many many sources of terrible cryptic prophecy for precious Zoey.

And that’s it. She has no storyline. She has no real character. She also speaks in African American Vernacular English. Or what the author thinks is African-American Vernacular English which is very very different and pretty cringeworthy to read:

My mama told me don't trust no white boy, even a pretty one. I'm thinkin' a pretty white boy with wings explodin' up from the ground in a mess of blood and ugly-ass bird things is double trouble.

There are several things wrong with this quote.  First off, the author of this series is White and she is invoking what is clearly a family conversation to which she would have little to no access to in the first damn place.  It’s never as simple as just don’t trust white people.  There’s no context to this commentary and there’s no nuance whatsoever.  Secondly, the attempt to use a pattern of speech that Cast is clearly not familiar tokenizes and reduces said speech. It reads wrong because it is wrong.  The sentences feel half finished and unformed without any sort of depth.  Juxtaposing Cast’s work to authors like Alice Walker, Sapphire, and Zora Neal Hurston who legitimately utilized African-American Vernacular only serves to show how badly Cast failed to capture the spirit of the communication she was attempting to co-opt for the purposes of characterisation. There are just some things you have to live and breathe to be able to give life to them on the page.  Cast was clearly out of her depth when she decided to turn African-American Vernacular into her tourist destination.

Look not every character has to or even should speak the Queen’s English (though if your characters are saying “bullpoopie” then yes yes they should) and definitely marginalised communities have their own accents and dialects that shouldn’t be erased. But this is all this character is - the oracle who also throws in sassy, neck rolling, snapping caricature who speaks and acts like this because the author has decided to just throw a “sassy Black woman template” over her oracle without having any actual personality or character (or any respect or research for the actual speech pattern). A minority character behaving in a stereotypical manner can be problematic (often it is a problem because of the very narrow ways that minorities are portrayed than the character itself being inherently bad) - but they can still be a character besides that. But when all they are is a stereotype? Then that’s just a tool, a shell, a racist caricature taking up space that you can’t be bothered to fill with a real character

Penny Dreadful and Race

Penny Dreadful is easily the most visually beautiful show that we are watching currently. It’s easy to get caught up in the gothic aspects and brilliant acting and ignore the many problematic elements which have come to fore from almost the beginning.  The Victorian Era was rife with thoughts of empire, colonisation and racism and yet Penny Dreadful is being aired in 2016 - a time far removed from what it’s attempting to portray.  Simply saying that this was the way the Victorian Era was does not give one carte blanche to continue the racist portrayal without any sort of nuance.  Race on Penny Dreadful is portrayed in the most hackneyed fashion without any thought or care about the message being sent.

In Season three of Penny Dreadful we have really reached a pinnacle of terrible tropes - perhaps most glaringly with the introduction of Kaetenay;  an Apache character.  As we know, during this time in history, the United States was busy slaughtering and placing its indigenous peoples on reservations in what would centuries later be understood to be an act of near genocide.   One by one tribes fought back against the white invaders only to ultimately be overwhelmed.  Penny Dreadful takes the time to talk about an incident in which Ethan along with his unit slaughtered an unsuspecting village including women and children.  We’ve known for some time that Ethan, like most characters on Penny Dreadful, is tortured but to discover that this comes from the guilt of a mass murder should make Ethan a less sympathetic character - but never underestimate the power of White Manpain.  How can this man be the shining knight who comes to Vanessa’s rescue, pure of heart and intention?

Penny Dreadful deals with the horror of Ethan’s actions by having Kaetenay claim him as son and by so doing washes away the evil of what Ethan participated in.  It absolutely sanitises Ethan’s actions as simply a thing he did in his past without meaning.  I often wonder how it is that Wes Studi can stomach to say the lines that Penny Dreadful assigns him because essentially, Penny Dreadful has Kaetenay not only take ownership of Ethan but elevates him into the saviour of the world (and totally and Apache, honest).  Ethan is the walking embodiment of the White Man’s burden and it’s being celebrated as though the slaughtering of the Apache is simply a stepping stone to greatness, thus justifying the crushing oppression of the Victorian Era upon Indigenous peoples. There’s no doubt that the colonisation of the Apache is a historical fact and needed to be addressed once the show crossed the Atlantic; however, at no time does this justify Penny Dreadful’s treatment of it.

This attempt to sanitise history through Ethan’s eyes is followed by the way he refers to Kaetenay and Ethan - and even the amount of time we spend describing the Apache attack on Ethan’s family (a very personalised and brutal description compared to the distant, impersonal report of Ethan’s massacre of the Apache). The context of who is the aggressor and who is fighting to survive is brushed quickly over in the recitation, with Ethan seeming to view his father and Kaetenay as almost equally culpable.

Sleepy Hollow: The Intolerable Treatment of Abbie Milles

It has been nearly impossible this week to miss the outpouring of outrage on social media over the season finale of Sleepy Hollow. Yes, in a month where even the usual death rate among marginalised people has grown to even more vomit-inducing levels than we’ve become used to (and it’s always been nauseating), Sleepy Hollow decided to kill off their Black, female protagonist. The heart of the show and one of the main reasons so many people were following it - especially after the second season.

Which is, of course, the background to this appalling death - Sleepy Hollow, despite being, on the face of it, a racially diverse show has shown a shocking level of contempt to those Black characters and the fandom they gathered in season one that was so invested in the surprising diversity (it is, of course, an important but different issue that a show with a Black female protagonist is so rare as to be surprising and to gain such an investment from minority fandom). It seemed that someone in charge of this show simply had no clue at all as to why this show was so popular or why so many people were invested in it - and were so enraged by the hot mess that was Cranewreck, and the sidelining of Captain Irving before killing him off after pretty much ignoring his character for most of the season (plot box now comes in mental institution).

The writers of Sleepy Hollow has earned absolutely no benefit of the doubt from its furious fandom. It entered season 3 with a lot of their fans having turned their back on the Cranewreck and much of the rest watching with narrowed eyes and waiting for this show to dig itself out of that hole. Or bury itself.

And they killed Abbie.

That’s not so much burying yourself as making a spirited attempt to reach the centre of the Earth and digging until you drown in molten lava. Killing her not just showed that they didn’t understand their fandom (or didn’t care about their fandom), and that they had learned nothing after the backlash of the Cranewreck - but also that they didn’t seem to realise what Abbie was to their show or what the death of Abbie revealed about how they thought of Sleepy Hollow.

This was her show. This wasn’t even a story that was about a world setting or particular plot line. This was a show about the WITNESSES. This whole show wasn’t about fighting the Headless Horseman or Henry or the Hidden One (the mere fact the antagonists changes every season established that). This was a show about Abbie and Ichabod, the Witnesses, working together and pooling their expertise and wider circle of friends to defeat the evil and fulfill their destiny

This was Sleepy Hollow the story of the Witnesses. The story of these two excellent characters and how they bounced off each other. Every funny exchange, every touching moment, every time they truly knew each other, every joke they shared and, yes, even the constant possibility they would take the next step and turn their epic friendship into a romance.

In the eyes of us and a huge amount of the fandom, this was the Witnesses show, the show of Ichabod and Abbie, co-protagonists.

While, in the eyes of the writers, it was clearly Ichabod’s show - and his sidekick. All the Cranewreck outrage of season 2 clearly hasn’t changed that - in their eyes this was a show about Ichabod Cane, man out of time and his little band of followers. It showed in season two where we had to endure agonisingly dull episodes with Katrina while Abbie was banished to the plot box and, despite initial indications to the contrary, Abbie sacrificing herself for the sake of Ichabod et al has sealed the deal.

The writers just made this Ichabod’s story. The writers degraded Abbie into becoming a sidekick, a fridged woman to give Ichabod eternal emotional angst and Manpain, another figure in HIS story, rather than the awesome, excellent character who was an equal partner and co-protagonist in the Witnesses story.

Just in case you didn’t catch that insult, look at one of Abbie’s last lines to Ichabod:

“My job was to carry you forwards.”

Are we clear? Abbie existed to further Ichabod’s storyline. This was the sole point of her character, her existence. This Black, female, apparent co-protagonist existed entirely to further the story of the white male ACTUAL protagonist.

“My job was to carry you forwards.”

Seriously, how Nicole Beharie didn’t just stab the writer who gave her that line to speak I do not know. Ye gods, I am in AWE of her restraint.

“My job was to carry you forwards.”

How she managed to choke that out. I just can’t even imagine. And smile? Damn, that’s some incredible acting. Let’s repeat it again:

“My job was to carry you forwards.”

No, I don’t think this will ever sink in. How anyone thought that line was ok boggles the mind.

I am also making a demand now to know where Abbie’s plot armour is. Seriously, I have watched so many damn shows in this genre where a white protagonist will do the most epically self-destructive, ridiculous things borderline suicidal things and somehow survive. Look at Shadowhunters, the whole PLOT of that show is based on Clary making ridiculous decisions, having Jace follow and, for some unknown reason, neither of them ever being killed.