I did un-spoiler this bit as it doesn’t describe events in the final episode with any specificity.
I agree that the show uncritically supported the idea of “race” as a real thing–the show confirms that there are White People. And it’s possible to take something from all White People.
If it were merely Leti’s worldview, then the writers could have made that clear. They didn’t.
Of course this development will be greeted with pleasure by those who’ve experienced systemic racism. Of course. It’s a powerful wish—to see those people ground down, after they’ve ground you down. It’s vengeance.
But that vengeance does indeed depend on the idea that there is a defined group with clear characteristics called White People. And by extension there are defined groups with clear characteristics called Black People, etc. And that worldview does support racism.
For me that’s as unhelpful a view as is the theory, also supported by this show’s writing, that violence is a good solution to many problems. Moreover the show promotes the idea that violence should be a first resort.
The writers could have had Leti bind from magic all who are willing to use and exploit others. Or all who are willing to make judgments based only on skin color. Or all who are willing to consider others who are different as sub-human. Or many other constructions that would have stuck it to every one of the white magicians the characters have encountered in the course of this story.
But that wouldn’t have been vindictive.
And this series says ‘being vindictive is a positive good.’
Again, I get that when you are a member of groups other than the group at the top of the status hierarchy (and I am a member of some of those groups), it can feel pleasurable to see something taken from those who are at the top of the status hierarchy.
It’s a vindictive pleasure, but it does exist. I get that.
It falls short as ‘art,’ though. It’s wish-fulfilment, power-fantasy stuff. It takes people down. It’s empty calories.
Did The Sopranos support mafia violence? Or did the show just show us what mmafia violence looks like and let us do our own moralizing?
Did The Game of Thrones support total war in pursuit of hegemony? Or did the show just show us what total war in pursuit of hegemony looks like and let us us do our own moralizing?
I’m really not understanding why Lovecraft Country is being held to a different standard than any other contemporary cable TV series.
Hell yes, I’m glad the show didn’t bend over backwards to remind us that race isn’t real and being vindictive is bad! Because I don’t know how it could have done this without making a fantastical storyline even more fantastical and unrealistic.
Leti didn’t kill Christina. She didn’t rape or murder white folks with her magic. She didn’t drop bombs on their city or enslave them for centuries. She just took magic from their hands, because from her perspective, white people and magic equals bad news for her and everyone else in her life. And this is a totally rational belief, given everything she’s been exposed to.
I’m finding this conversation interesting because it almost feels like we’re talking about the dismantling of white privilege. Dismantling white privilege is often framed as “vindictiveness” and “punishment” rather than what it really is: removing unfair advantages so that everyone has a fair shot.
We don’t know what Leti is going to do with the Book of Names. But we do know that tangling with magic has got her going back to church and relying on more conventional “magic”. It is very possible that she has no intention of using her newly acquired power to seek vengence. Perhaps she is only interested in disarming white folks and it will be others who have more sinister motives. Like Killer Dee. The mere existence of Killer Dee does not mean the show is supporting or legitimizing vengence, ffs. The show is just saying, “Lookit what racism does. It causes an innocent little girl to become full of murderous rage.” It’s up to the viewer to decide whether that’s good or bad.
Like I said upthread, I’m really tired of perfect black characters who exist solely to be a moral conscious for white people. Those characters are boring and unrealistic. I want to see black characters that are just as three-dimensional and flawed as anyone else. “Anyone else” don’t go through what Leti et al. went through only to play patty-cake once they get a little power. They try to take down the whole system out of the belief that the whole system is the ultimately enemy. In Leti’s mind, white people are evil because of all that damn magic. Take magic away from them and black people might have a decent chance against them. She would have been a damn fool not to cast a spell like this. I’d like to think I’d understand this even if I were white, but y’all are making me think this is might be a black thing.
Folks can judge what she did as racist and thus bad, but folks need to remember that there are no good white folks in this story. (Christina isn’t racist, but she’s still not someone who can be trusted.) I get how white folks watching from home might feel a certain way about Leti “punishing” all the white folks, but boo-freakin-hoo. Leti just experienced the evil of the Tulsa Massacre. She just helped resurrect a little girl from a curse put on her by a racist police chief in the wake of Emmitt Till’s murder. I want the white folks who are uncomfortable with her spell to imagine the discomfort of watching these historical events being reenacted, knowing that real people–your own parents and ancestors–were victimized by those events, knowing those those events are still playing out. It’s great that y’all wish the show had ended with a tidy little moral about how vindictiveness is bad and race is just an illusion. But that would have been a horrible ending. Not just because it would have been unrealistic, but also because it would have required the protagonists in the story to be losers even in victory, since the actual villain in the story would have been left untouched.
Agreeing with @monstro here mostly: that would not be consistent with who the writers set Leti up to be. Even though she is the closest to being there.
Early on there was some discussion in this thread about how this show subverted some trope and made every Black character heroic and every white one malign. IF the writers did do that in the first eps they quickly subverted their own subversion. Given power Black characters in this universe are as malignant as white ones; female characters as malignant as male ones. In the show’s universe the oppressed oppresses just fine and is often as racist and sexist and hateful when given the chance.
It’s not. Game of Thrones was—rightly, I think—criticized for its portrayal of rape. And GoT wasn’t a show that billed itself as being especially misogyny-aware.
Besides, ‘others do it too’ is never that great a legitimization.
No. That I criticize a show’s writing for the handling of a sensitive topic does not make me a closet White Supremacist afraid to lose my privilege.
Is Lovecraft Country billing itself as “racism-aware” (whatever that means)? Or does it bill itself as a show about racism and human nature under the influence of magic–a show with a slate of three-dimensional, potentially flawed black characters who are capable of making very human, morally questionable decisions so that the viewers at home can draw their own judgments, without any ham-fisted, afterschool special moral tacked onto it just like any other cable TV program?
Forcing the protagonists to act as 2020 “woke” heroes rather than 1950s black American heroes denies these characters of both their humanity and their literary destiny. It turns them into magical negroes who are kind and forgiving enough to spare white people’s fee fees, rather than magical negroes who (potentially) seek the same thing that every fucking else in the show was scrambling for: power by any means necessary.
Well, it’s very widely quoted as ‘anti-racist’, so for it to endorse—as opposed to merely portray—a racist myth is surely grounds for criticism.
And I do mean ‘endorse’ here. After all, for all we’re told, within the show, there’s now black people, who can use magic, and white people, who can’t. That is, what the show—not Leti’s character, but the show—is telling us is, here’s white people, there’s black people, and here’s the bright red line separating one from the other. And that’s simply a stupid thing to say.
I repeat, albeit with little hope it’ll do any good this time, my issue is not with the behavior of the characters, but with the show’s narrative and its implications. These are different things.
I’m on record on this site as being a non-fan of Game of Thrones, as well as of Westworld–two shows that may have contained some characters-of-color, but that were, on the whole, mostly-white-created shows aimed, for the most part, at white audiences.
I see both shows as cartoonish power-fantasies that promote questionable values, as well as shows that do not display any admirable level of effort at consistent characterizations (to name but one failing).
Does that make me anti-white?
My assessment of the first season of Lovecraft Country is very close to those I just posted about GoT and Ww.
Does that make me anti-black?
Seriously.
monstro, I’ve been reading the J. K. Rowling thread over in IMHO for several weeks–and I’m incredibly impressed by your passionate and well-argued posts. In this thread, I do think you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It’s perfectly possible to make critical remarks about various aspects of Lovecraft Country without being either racist, or someone anxious about losing their white privilege.
I didn’t accuse anyone of being racist or anxious. I just said the conversation is reminding me of how the dismantling of white privilege is framed. You can be totally nonracist and nonanxious and still (incorrectly) see efforts to dismantle white privilege as “treating race like it is real” and “vindictiveness”.
I am unable to grok either your or @Half_Man_Half_Wit’s specific criticisms with this show. I have my own list of complaints, but how it handles race and racism are nowhere on the list. I respect your respective POVs, but I just can’t relate to what y’all are saying.
Huh. My first read of your comment was that you were referencing the show’s take. I could see how binding whites from magic could be seen as a metaphor about restricting white privilege.
Meanwhile yeah yeah white and Black are cultural concepts but the viewer and magic, being about intent and all, knows who a 1950s Leti means.
I think a season two will be heavy into how having power can result in abuse of such. Color of skin, gender, past victimhood notwithstanding. Not sure if I’ll watch though.
I believe it is. So that’s why I’m finding the criticism over the show having Leti cast the kind of spell that she did to be reminiscent of the criticism that folks have of anything that dismantles white privilege. Folks seem to want Leti to be woke enough to come up with a spell that is completely race-neutral. But it is impossible to dismantle racism and its fruits with race-neutral solutions.
At any rate, I don’t think anyone should have been shocked by Leti’s spell. All the magical stuff is occurring against a very specific backdrop. That backdrop isn’t accidental. White people as a class are the villain in all ten episodes. Not just the few magical ones that we see, but all of them are evil. So it would have been very unliterary (and thus unsatisfying for me, at least) for Leti not to have cast some kind of race-based spell. To do otherwise would be to render all the graphic historical reeanctments pointless.
I agree with you that season 2 will most likely show us how power corrupts regardless who holds it. I don’t think it will be Leti who will be corrupted, though. People seem to think her spell was harsh and vindictive, but I think the opposite. I think it was very fair given the historical and current events she had lived through. She showed a lot of restraint. Plus, spells can be reversed quite easily (she is a testament to this). But Montrose and Dee are both killers who haven’t found a way to channel their wounded psyche into something good. There are signs that Leti has found some comfort in religion. Soon she’ll be preoccupied by a kid. Hippolyta is all about putting her 200 years of knowledge and skill to work. But what hobbies and special interests do Montrose and Dee have to fill the void and distract them from grudges? None.
My objection wasn’t that the ‘bind white people from magic’ spell was harsh or vindictive. I do see the show’s valorization of vindictiveness as a positive pursuit as less-than-admirable, but that wasn’t my objection to the spell.
My objection to the spell was the show-runners’ idea that “white people” is a valid category into which humans can be placed.
What’s a white person? Someone with no African heritage? No such thing, according to science.
Someone whose African heritage can be validated as having come after some particular year? Okay, which year?
Is a white person someone with a particular skin tone? If so, how do you measure that skin tone? How do you deal with families in which a variety of skin tones manifest?
Is a white person someone with hateful ideas? If so, why not just bind-from-magic those who hold hateful ideas?
The show tries to make “white people” a thing. I can see making ‘people who exploit and abuse others’ a thing. But “white people”? The definition is fraught with difficulties. It’s a stupid enterprise.
Do you think a 1950s Leti would have been at all intending any definition of whiteness that depended on biology?
The intent of the spell was the class of people privileged by the social construct of whiteness based on their superficial appearance, who in the show are, as a class, oppressive. That social construct does exist. And the belief that they are, as a class, oppressive also exists. The show runners have made it clear that they do not believe that it is the whiteness per se that leads to the potential for monstrousness, but the power imbalance, and that even a literal monster can choose to behave otherwise.
Agreed with @monstro, the show ends up very flawed in many ways to me, and I felt the last episode was a bit of a mess, but the complaint you have I also just don’t see.
The show tries to make white people a thing? This is seriously where you lose me, @Sherrerd.
We have had eleventy billion threads on the SDMB about white people and black people. We can talk about these things as if they are things because they ARE things. They are things because they are concepts. Just like Christians and Jews and men and women are concepts. If magic can’t understand basic human concepts, then magic is pretty darn worthless, IMHO.
If Leti had cast a spell binding all blondes or all Christians or all Americans, would you find it problematic? How is “blonde” or “American” any more valid a category than “white people”?
Christina mentions that intention is one of the key ingredients of a spell. I took this to mean that a spell relies heavily on the beliefs of the person casting the spell. Leti has a specific construct in mind when she says “white people”. So the spell presumably will rely on this construct when it seeks out the people to bind.
I could understand your criticism if we were talking about Leti being a scientist who has developed a poison that only hurts white people–since there’s nothing scientific about that. But magic isn’t scientific. It’s all about intention.
Because other than albinos, no one actually has white skin. People have skin tones and complexions that are perceived as markers of race, but they’re neither absolutes nor useful for objective classification.
Are Hispanics “white”? Amerinds? Pacific Islanders? Arabs? Berbers? Central Asians? There are literal Caucasians (from the Caucasus region) that have darker complexions than many African-Americans.
Is Rob Schneider “white”? His father was an American Jew of Ashkenazi descent, but his mother was Filipina. Early in his career, he mostly presented as “white”, but later in his career he often presented as Austronesian. And there are plenty of folks that don’t consider Ashkenazi Jews to be “white”.
Is Vin Diesel “white”? Dwayne Johnson? You could say they’re “mixed race”, but by that standard, so are most American “blacks”. They’ve both got darker complexions than many African Americans, with what some perceive as non-“white” features, while still being well within the range of complexions and features that most Americans would consider “white.”
Hell, with the right hairdo and makeup, Leti could almost certainly “pass” as “white”. And, especially in the 1950s, there were significant numbers of African Americans “passing”. Would her spell bind them as well?
Magic in Lovecraft Country is clearly a metaphor for white power and white privilege and institutional racism. It makes sense, in terms of character, narrative, and themes, that Leti thinks of “white” in absolute, metaphysical terms, that Leti would want to bind “white” people from using magic, that Leti would try to do that. What’s very, very problematic is that in the metaphysics of the universe in the show, apparently “white” is in fact an objective category.
Now, maybe the magic is just responding to Leti, and following her intent, and the result is a Monkey’s Paw spell that doesn’t actually work the way Leti wants it to or thinks it will. Maybe a Season 2 will examine that. But, from what I’ve seen and read, all of the internal evidence from the show itself indicates that Leti’s spell does work to bind magic from “white” people, and, as pointed out ad nauseum upthread, that both plays off of and plays into toxic real-life narratives and beliefs about race being an objective biological reality.
You know, if every bad person I knew just happened to bow-legged and I stumbled across the Book of Names, I might be tempted to cast a spell against bow-legged people and not worry so much that the spell might also bind pigeon-toed people or people with hyperreflexive knee joints. Maybe that’s just me.
Maybe Leti is well aware that her spell will bind albinos and white-passing BIPOC folks. But she’s not worried about the collateral damage of her spell because she’s not fucking killing anyone. She’s just making them non-magical.
This is put much more clearly than I’ve succeeded in putting it, so far. The problem is not so much that a character in the show has done something that ignores the actual human condition and human psychology, but that the showrunners present it without a particle of context, nuance, or even just discussion.
Of course it’s understandable that the character Leti would grab at any chance for payback against ‘white people.’ It’s plausible that the character wouldn’t understand any of the difficulties inherent in deciding that the world contains discrete and disconnected categories called “white people” and “black people.”
But the showrunners should have understood that this is not only a scientifically and culturally unsupported way of looking at the world, but a potentially destructive one.
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Again, the issue is not what the character does or believes; it’s that the writers presented the concept without any nuance or commentary–they presented it as if it were, unquestionably, legitimate.
On the larger topic of whether it’s reasonable to accuse critics of a fictional work of bigotry or bias: I think the answer is ‘sometimes it is, but not always, and therefore it’s reasonable to look at the particulars, rather than automatically assuming a critic is biased.’
When a work is solely or largely made by members of a group that’s not at the top of the status hierarchy, emotions about criticisms can run high.
For example, the 2018 movie Crazy Rich Asians, though generally very highly rated by many outlets, did receive some criticism for its materialism:
and
[both from the wikipedia article on the movie, cited below]
Do these criticisms of the movie indicate anti-Asian bias?
Do they indicate a bigoted wish that the movie had adhered to stereotypes (an accusation leveled earlier in the thread against critics of Lovecraft Country)?
Or is it possible, instead, that someone could post criticisms of “Crazy Rich Asians” without being bigoted or biased against Asians?
Obviously if someone said ‘my problem with CRA is that there are too many Asians in it,’ then an accusation of bias or bigotry would be justified.
It seems less clear to me, however, that a criticism of CRA based on an objection to the materialism depicted, indicates anti-Asian bias. If, hypothetically, the person posting the criticism had previously objected to glorifications of materialism in other movies (for example, the “50 Shades of” series or the 1977 “Fun with Dick and Jane”), then it would be much harder to make the case that the critic’s remarks indicate bias against Asians.
The point: it’s possible to criticize a work that is made by members of a group not at the top of the power hierarchy without being biased against that group. Those who prefer to believe that bias is widespread will disagree, but that doesn’t change the facts. Subjectivity will always be a part of these discussions; they aren’t math.
Is there any internal evidence within the show to indicate otherwise? Is there even any external evidence otherwise? Interviews with writers or producers or the episode director or the actors that indicate the intention was to communicate ambiguity to the audience? I may be entirely wrong. Maybe Leti’s using the category of “white” was supposed to be problematic. Again, though, all of the evidence I’ve seen is that within the universe of the show, “white” is being treated as an objective, metaphysical category.
She could be giving them all pancakes. Again, the problem isn’t what she’s trying to do, the problem is how the show is presenting the concept of “white”.
This show is taking a very fraught issue, race in the contemporary U.S.A., and trying to say something meaningful about about it, and hamfisting it. To all appearances, the show is accepting real-world toxic myths about race as an objective, categorical reality.
I don’t know. Again, maybe I’m misreading the whole situation. Do you honestly believe the takeaway the writers and producers intend is for the audience to think that, in the universe of the show, “white” isn’t an objective, categorical reality?