People seem to be fundamentally missing the bottom line of this episode and focusing on the more over the top, satirical aspects of it. The final scene sums it up well with a beautiful one-shot through a restaurant staffed by a diverse team of people working in unison with one another -- we're all in this together and we're all going to be alright. No, the black community isn't going to suddenly start coming after everyday white people demanding millions of dollars in reparations, and no it's not an "everyone for themselves" scenario where we all have to either get ours or run for the hills and start praying.
What the writers have presented is a sort of Twilight Zone-esque story that takes all our hopes, tensions and fears about reparations and magnifies them into a tightly written episode focusing on your average, unassuming white man (played by Justin Bartha) as he struggles to reassess his life in the wake of sweeping social change. The writers take the time to establish that Bartha's character is apolitical. He listens to NPR but has no strong opinions on the subject matter they're covering, he's nowhere near as incensed or tribalistic as his fellow white co-workers and he ultimately just wants to live and let live.
His character is clearly meant to be sympathetic, then, when his livelihood is upended by the appearance of an uncompromising and somewhat obnoxious black woman named Shaniqua who demands reparations. We see Bartha's everyman go through a few stages of development over the course of the episode, shifting from apathy to defensiveness to self-pity before finally settling into acceptance and ultimately appearing to be much better off for it. He goes from ignoring and detaching himself from the perspectives of his co-workers (white and black) to genuinely interacting with them, and therein lies the very point of this episode. Bartha's character is only able to find some peace amidst the admittedly dizzying aftershocks of slavery when he learns to stop resisting and hiding from them like his cohorts. Because, ultimately, slavery does still impact us all and denying that impact only serves to further divide us and prevent us from understanding one another. This is further driven home by both the spectacularly acted monologue by Earnest and Bartha's character taking the time to watch a video of Shaniqua playing with her children.
By taking this episode to be black vs white you're ironically missing its entire point, and I think that's underscored by the fact that we're only introduced to characters who are neither black or white in the final scene, discarding the myopic and divisive racial narrative that dominated the rest of the (satirical) episode and showing us that there are shades of grey, in a manner of speaking.
The bottom line is this -- the episode is not meant to be taken at face value. Look a little deeper and you'll see it for what it really is, which is a refreshing standalone that deconstructs a hot social issue that affects us all on some level. I really enjoyed it.
What the writers have presented is a sort of Twilight Zone-esque story that takes all our hopes, tensions and fears about reparations and magnifies them into a tightly written episode focusing on your average, unassuming white man (played by Justin Bartha) as he struggles to reassess his life in the wake of sweeping social change. The writers take the time to establish that Bartha's character is apolitical. He listens to NPR but has no strong opinions on the subject matter they're covering, he's nowhere near as incensed or tribalistic as his fellow white co-workers and he ultimately just wants to live and let live.
His character is clearly meant to be sympathetic, then, when his livelihood is upended by the appearance of an uncompromising and somewhat obnoxious black woman named Shaniqua who demands reparations. We see Bartha's everyman go through a few stages of development over the course of the episode, shifting from apathy to defensiveness to self-pity before finally settling into acceptance and ultimately appearing to be much better off for it. He goes from ignoring and detaching himself from the perspectives of his co-workers (white and black) to genuinely interacting with them, and therein lies the very point of this episode. Bartha's character is only able to find some peace amidst the admittedly dizzying aftershocks of slavery when he learns to stop resisting and hiding from them like his cohorts. Because, ultimately, slavery does still impact us all and denying that impact only serves to further divide us and prevent us from understanding one another. This is further driven home by both the spectacularly acted monologue by Earnest and Bartha's character taking the time to watch a video of Shaniqua playing with her children.
By taking this episode to be black vs white you're ironically missing its entire point, and I think that's underscored by the fact that we're only introduced to characters who are neither black or white in the final scene, discarding the myopic and divisive racial narrative that dominated the rest of the (satirical) episode and showing us that there are shades of grey, in a manner of speaking.
The bottom line is this -- the episode is not meant to be taken at face value. Look a little deeper and you'll see it for what it really is, which is a refreshing standalone that deconstructs a hot social issue that affects us all on some level. I really enjoyed it.