Them: Another entry in the lucrative racialist genre wsws.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wsws.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The talented actor behind the show s most controversial character speaks.
By Phil Nobile Jr. · @philnobilejr · April 18, 2021, 11:42 AM EDT
Editor’s note: the following interview contains discussion and depiction of blackface, both historical and as presented in Amazon’s series Them
.
Them has provoked a visceral reaction from critics and audiences.
Them follows a Black family moving from North Carolina to Los Angeles in 1953, and the series does not blink in its depiction of the racist atrocities committed against the family in both the deep south and American suburbia (several of its episodes required additional content warnings at the top of them). The anti-Black violence the series portrays is extreme and difficult to watch, and the show has sparked much conversation about the continued presentation of Black trauma as entertainment, with many saying it’s time storytellers (and the platforms hiring them) move past this facet of Black history. Others maintain the eras
Them Is Pure Degradation Porn msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Screenshot: Amazon
Them, Amazon Prime’s newest horror anthology series, has a lot of potential. The premise escaping violence in the South, a Black family relocates to East Compton in the 1950s when it was still an all-white enclave and horror ensues is intriguing. In the wake of other television shows like
Watchmen and
Lovecraft Country that also took Black history and twisted it with fantastical elements, there was a real opportunity to explore different aspects of racial violence: redlining, white flight, and blockbusting. Unfortunately, Little Marvin, who created
Them and wrote four episodes, fails to live up to the potential of his own premise.
Bites off more than it can chew.
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Amazon s anthology series exploring terror in America kicks off with a season about a Black family that moves into a white neighborhood in 1950s Los Angeles.
Between 1916 and 1970, millions of Black American families moved from the Deep South to cities across the northern and western parts of the United States. They journeyed hundreds of miles in search of jobs, voting rights and safety from the terror of Jim Crow. They left as though they were fleeing some curse, wrote Emmett J. Scott, a Black journalist and scholar, in his 1920 book
Negro Migration During the War. But the curse of American racism paid no mind to geography, and for many Black Americans the greener pastures proved to be sinister.