![]() ![]() #UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STORY ANSWERR SERIES#This series is a specific story about the treatment of one specific group of humans in one specific country. The Underground Railroad made me feel things about my own life and personal pain very deeply, while never letting me forget that while I could relate to aspects of this story, it is not my own. In no way should it be hailed as a story anyone can see themselves in.īut director Barry Jenkins (who won an Oscar in 2017 for his screenplay for Moonlight) finds a way to encompass all of humanity in his work without so much as hinting at easy forgiveness for those who either do great evil or are complicit in great evil. In its portrayal of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave running less toward freedom than she is running away from slavery, the series tells a story about systemic racism and the perniciousness of white supremacy, offering an uncompromising look at the lasting and ongoing burdens of white America’s inhumane treatment of Black Americans. So I want to tread carefully in discussing The Underground Railroad, a 10-episode adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel. Rom-coms, family dramas, and superhero stories that center on Black characters and are less focused on Black trauma certainly exist, but the easiest way for a Black-centric project to win acclaim from the mainstream white critics who dominate our cultural landscape (including, again, myself) is to offer up some sort of trenchant social commentary, to focus on the horrific. I love both Do the Right Thing and 12 Years a Slave, but both films ask us to look unflinchingly at the horrible ways America treats Black citizens. ![]() I may have dark stuff in my past, but I am not living beneath the same crushing weight of centuries of slavery and systemic racism.Ī further complication: The art by Black artists most roundly celebrated is often about Black trauma. But many such projects also ask these viewers to examine their own complicity in discrimination against Black people in America. Great art tells universal stories out of specific experiences, and it is possible and even desirable for white viewers to find personal resonance in the experiences of protagonists in movies like Do the Right Thing or 12 Years a Slave. There’s a risk of coming off as patronizing at best and appropriative at worst, of seemingly trying to relate the pain, trauma, and horror that often rests on Black Americans to the personal pains white viewers may face in day-to-day life. It is inevitably fraught for a white critic like me to discuss a work of art specifically about the Black American experience. ![]()
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