blacknerdproblems: I finally binge-watched the first season of Atlanta this past weekend for the sam
blacknerdproblems: I finally binge-watched the first season of Atlanta this past weekend for the same reason most folks do most things: to talk to a pretty person about it. I met my brother’s best friend’s sister for coffee recently. She was gorgeous and tall, and I mentioned that I was reading Donald Glover’s New Yorker interview. She told me that she loved Atlanta, and asked me if I’d seen the latest episode. No, I said, but I’ll watch it and let you know what I think. I started watching the series the next day. The Streisand Effect In the time between the premiere of Atlanta and my binge session, a lot has happened. The show won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series. The second season has premiered to universal acclaim again. In the broader entertainment zeitgeist, Black Panther has made over a billion dollars, Sterling K. Brown won a Golden Globe for This is Us, Ava DuVernay directed a $100 million movie, Lena Waithe won an Emmy for best comedy writing for Master of None. All good things, right? But it’s 2018. Two Thousand Fucking Eighteen. We’re talking about firsts for honors which have been awarded annually for decades. That same thread of pessimism is woven throughout Glover’s New Yorker interview. It’s an exploration of a psyche ground down by racism in spite of his apparent success. He describes the hoops that he had to jump through to get his show made, and then the compromises he had to make during its production. Even with Glover’s clear level of talent, he still has to please white people. Take the episode “The Streisand Effect.” Earn and Darius have a conversation towards the end of the episode about the money Earn thought he would be earning. After learning that he wouldn’t be paid until September, Earn says: “See, I’m poor Darius. Okay? And poor people don’t have time for investments because poor people are too busy trying not to be poor, okay? I need to eat today, not in September.” Earn is obviously not talking to Darius in that scene, because Darius knows what it’s like to be in that situation. That’s why he responds with, “Right, I asked you in the pawn shop, if you needed the money, take the money.” Earn is not talking to his Black audience either, which can relate to Earn’s situation either through firsthand experience or knowing someone in that predicament right now. That scene is Donald Glover talking to his white audience, trying to make sure their dumbasses know what’s going on and why Earn is upset. The Lando Situation Success also brings a new kind of white person to deal with — the self-effacing liberal who knows all of the talking points of liberation, yet is still there to make sure that even if you somehow overcome hundreds of years of shit being shoveled at you, you don’t get too uppity. You don’t fly too high. That you still know which side your bread is buttered on. Lena Duhnam, Chevy Chase, the executives at FX — perpetrators of a crime which we’ve all experienced. Glover says: “The system is set up so only white people can change things… If I gave a dog an iPhone, it couldn’t use it, because a dog doesn’t have an opposable thumb — that’s true of everything made for white people. I can say there’s a problem, you can all laugh at it, but it has to be a group of you guys who change it, because it was made by and for you.” The tragedy is that Donald Glover is infinitely (and I mean that literally, as in “limitless or endless in space, extent, or size; impossible to measure or calculate”) more talented than Alden Ehrenreich, yet he’s not getting top billing in the Han Solo movie. The tragedy is that the movie is about Han Solo at all; there’s a far better story waiting to be told about Lando Calrissian and how he transitioned from a scoundrel to the respected leader of an entire city. But that movie will never get made, because it’s still more likely that a green puppet monster will get a star vehicle than a Black character. WHO ARE YOU?!Read on here. [x] -- source link