Present at the 2024 Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference (New Orleans, LA)
The third season of Atlanta has been one of the most anticipated in television history. The show returned after a four-year hiatus and offered its audience a change of scenery with episodes set in the European capitals of Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, and London. This felt almost like an invitation to explore issues central to the history of the Black Atlantic, especially in the episodes set in London, Amsterdam, and Paris, which tackled questions of Blackness and anti-Blackness. Nevertheless, this Black Atlantic journey falls short because of the show’s inability to escape the perspectives of its American characters and creators. The Amsterdam episode represents prison as comfortable for the American rapper PaperBoi, even though immigrants (primarily Black African ones) are routinely detained in the Netherlands, and ethnonationalism continues to rise. In Paris, we wonder if Black women exist in France, as the only Black women shown are those from the United States. The only non-Black American woman with extended dialogue in the season appears in ‘White Fashion,’ an episode set in London; she is a performative activist whom the show depicts as using social justice issues for her own political gain.
The space in-between
In Spatializing Blackness, Rashad Shabazz’s use of the concept of “space in-between”1 highlights how carceral power and technology create new ways to manage the “dangerous class.” Those spaces between “freedom and incarceration” (Shabazz 2015, 56) are de facto incarcerated spaces. I want to deploy this concept of space in-between in the case of Atlanta, in reference to the site, not only between two conceptual spaces (freedom/incarceration) or two imaginary spaces (Black space/white space) but also between the embodiment of curated forms of Blackness on screen and the erasure/absence/reductionism of Black people’s emotional complexity and reflexivity. The specific form of space in-between that we see at play in the show’s third season is without question what characterized the process of late-stage gentrification intertwined with liberal/progressive performativity, as seen in Brooklyn or Washington DC2. Atlanta is a display of both iconic Blackness - Black culture references and elements - and stereotypical Blackness, as seen in the show’s depictions of Black parenting, Black women, and Black activists.
Atlanta seems to offer the spectator the possibility of an end to racism that need not pass through violent confrontation, but instead results in the elevation of white people’s role in redressing harm. This proposition of peaceful resolution is very aligned with neo-liberal discourse about the right way to demand justice. Atlanta offers an answer to James Baldwin’s well-known rhetorical question, “How much time do you want for your progress?” –not too long, just long enough for white people to be ready for accountability for the sake of their children. Indeed, this season revolves around the possibilities/capacities of transformation of whiteness, and how whiteness (re)imagined is the key component for any kind of progress.
This represents a proposition that modern history--from the Haitian Revolution to decolonization and civil rights movements--contradicts, but that offers relief and hope to those whose primary goal and focus is to allow the Black middle and upper classes to peacefully perform, live, and love in predominantly white spaces while relying on iconic Blackness as currency. Atlanta was a strange sort of fever dream, but as Joy James states, we cannot “trust dreams that don’t allow the possibility of nightmares.”
Different shades of Misogynoir and colorism
The previous seasons of the show and its creator Daniel Glover have been criticized for misogynoir and colorism, thanks largely to the series’s tendency to portray dark-skinned Black women as stereotypically loud and controlling, and thus worthy of punishment.3 I must admit that I was lured by the show’s own description of episode 4 of the 3rd season, “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga”: “Black and White episode? Yawn. Emmy Bait. Why do they hate black women so much?” Aware of the criticism the show had garnered, I was curious even though I doubted there would be much critical investigation of what Da’Shaun L. Harrison describes in his latest book as the way “[Black fat] lives with the heightened fear of being hypersexualized while simultaneously, never being desired.”4
Even with these lowered expectations, I found myself recalling a line from Dewey’s character in Malcolm in the Middle (2000)–“I expect nothing, and I’m still let down”–as I watched an episode that rendered the few Black girls and women who appeared in it as mere backdrop to a story of Black men’s desire for and proximity to whiteness. In the episode, Black women serve as a mere vessel for projection5, paradoxically playing a crucial role through their erasure and absence. This episode echoed Donald Glover’s 2022 interview with himself for Interview magazine in which he made it a point to ask himself if he “was afraid of Black women”, following the question/allusion to Dr. Umar’s position about interracial marriage. We can note that the sequence of questions/answers and the topics follow a common stereotype against Black women: angry/scary/emasculating Black women. At the same time, the sequence trivializes Black feminist/Black women critics of Glover by implicitly linking those critics to his interracial relationship. As Shamira Ibrahim wrote, Daniel Glover’s “Doesn’t Know What To Do With Black Women” cannot seriously consider their character development nor what bell hooks called Black women’s oppositional gaze.
Some of the problems with the show’s depiction of Black women can be chalked up to colorism. While light-skinned Black women, like Van, can express a varied and complex range of emotions, the dark-skinned Black women appearing in the 3rd season most often spend their limited speaking time either yelling or being physically, verbally or emotionally abusive, aggressive, violent or ingrateful. These include the loquacious mom in the first episode, Sheniqua Johnson in episode 4 (‘The Big Paycheck’), and Sylvia’s daughter, Princess, in episode 7 (‘Trini 2 De Bone’).
Misogynoir also governs the show’s depiction of motherhood. For example, the season premiere, which fictionalizes Sarah and Jennifer Hart’s murder-suicide of themselves and their six adopted Black children--Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah, and Markis-- chooses to give the character Loquacious a happy ending. But it also depicts Loquacious’s mother as a textbook example of abusive parenting, who makes disturbing choices like giving her son away to child services as punishment.
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Likewise, the episode titled “Trini 2 De Bone” depicts the Trinidadian woman Sylvia as a loving and attentive substitute mother for the little white boy of the family she works for, but then has her own daughter describe her, at her funeral, as a neglectful and absent parent, for which she receives the criticism of the assembled mourners. Overall, the show does not offer a very positive depiction of Black parenting. While
Van and Earn travel in Europe, we hear only occassionally about their daughter who remains in the United Stated. And the father of the passing-for-white teenager in ‘Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga’ tells his son , “I love you,” but refuses to contribute financially to his education. These depictions of Black parenting are problematic, not because such parents do not exist but because these depictiosns are the only ones visible for Black panrents in this season, while white parents have different types of representation, un addition to more speaking time, from the evil to the sacrifitionnal. Meanwhile, white parents, including those who are racist (like the mother Bronwyn in “Trini 2 De Bone”) or who initially refuse accountability (like Marshall Johnson in “The Big Paycheck”), are still presented as being decent, emotionally available, communicative, and concerned with the emotional and mental wellbeing of their children. In fact, the only parents in this season who seem willing to compromise or sacrifice for their children are the white parents.
Black parenting, by contrast, is depicted as governed by what bell hooks called a “faulty definition of love,” faulty because “love and abuse cannot coexist.”6 Atlanta‘s descent into misogynoir indicates a general disregard for the complexity of Black women and Black parents. While creators and directors like Ava Duvernay (Queen Sugar), Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale), and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), among others, gave us narratives that engage familial and intra-communal violence, negligence, and abuse, they did so while displaying care and empathy for their characters. Such a task becomes all the more difficult when most of the characters portraying Black mothers in the show are either silent or constantly yelling.
The third season demonstrates a consistent pattern of depicting punishment and abuse as forms of accountability for Black people, while white people are offered opportunities for transformation and self-reflection. While the season offers no path for redemption for the Black women, parents, and activists it depicts as stereotypes, it is generous in handing out opportunities for redemption to white characters.
White Redemption
White tears, white guilt, white narrators, white reflexivity, white redemption.
While the identity of Black voice and narration is in crisis in Atlanta, the show presents whiteness as imperfect but articulate and reflexive. In the midst of white pettiness (for example, in episode 5, which features a white robber cosplaying a Blaccent) or harm, the third season offers redemption to whiteness not only by providing opportunities for self-reflection but also by allowing that self-reflection to extend to actual harm.
The most striking example occurs in episode 8, when guest Liam Neeson plays himself as a patron of the fictitious Cancel Club. At first, Neeson displays remorse, which proves to be short-lived, as he proceeds to admit that Black people “tried to ruin [his] career” and therefore, he has gained a new animus against them. Facing Al’s reaction, he continues his self-reflection: “I also learned the best and worst part of being white is, you never have to learn anything if you don’t want to.” For Liam Neeson, who openly admitted that he once had a plan to randomly brutalize Black people, playing a non-repentant version of himself in a Black show is the ultimate act of white violence reproducing its impunity by disguising itself in auto-derision and the pretense of accountability. We find a similar dynamic in “Trini 2 De Bone,” where Chet Hanks — known for his constant cultural appropriation and acts of minstrelsy — plays a white character with a fake Trinidadian accent. Is the joke on Hanks, or on viewers and Black people more generally?
Arguably, Atlanta fails in its criticism of whiteness and white supremacy due to its investment in resolution. Unlike P-Valley (2020) and Abbott Elementary (2021), two shows that succeed in addressing the systemic violence of white supremacy, Atlanta puts whiteness on trial but allows it to defend itself using auto-derision, reflexivity, and performative sincerity—a move that, from a narrative standpoint, ends up centering whiteness as a protagonist. Compare the anthology series Roar (2022)), which failed in many regards but at least succeeded in focusing on women’s narratives, voices, and personhood—rather than those of men--while addressing patriarchy.
This redemptive approach to whiteness is the flip side of Atlanta’s cynicism about Black people's attempts at justice. In episode 6, for instance, Black activists are deeply dishonest and act to advance their own careers. This episode, like episodes 4 and 9, seems to offer a complicated exploration of identity politics, but doesn’t give the viewer any sense of why Black people might wish to pursue restorative justice, or how they might do so in less self-serving ways. In a similar manner, episode 8 materializes the debate around “cancel culture” but only offers us the perspective of a celebrity perceived as its victim. In this hallucinogenic episode, Atlanta revamped the magical Black character trope by casting Lorraine, a trans woman (played by Ava Grey), as a spiritual/tourist/emotional guide helping Al navigate his existential crisis. Maybe we can consider this as a positive evolution compared to the blatant transphobic scene in the police station, season 1, episode 2. Nevertheless, all Black women, cis or trans, are often reduced to mere talking points; they never speak to the audience and only speak through archetypes.
The concept of identity politics was coined in the United States in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization. In their statement, the concept is clearly mobilized not around the individual recognition of identity, but around the ways in which domination shapes identity as a socially-constructed category. Their version of identity politics, that is to say, differs considerably from the process of demanding the individual recognition of suffering or instrumentalization of identity in a political context, a phenomenon they describe as identity reductionism. What is interesting is that this deformation of the concept came initially from reactionary right-wing groups. Gradually, Black movements came to be cast in a negative light by the radical and liberal white left as well. This convergence between the reactionary so-called radical left and liberals is part of a particular form of anti-Blackness, one embodied in efforts to politically and intellectually discredit terms created by Black movements, such as ” intersectionality,” “woke,” and “self-care.”
Even with the show being heavily saturated with social commentary on race and global Blackness, the third season fails to engage in relevant discourse and reflection on its own racial and sexual politics. It puts the ingredients on display, one might say, but it doesn’t cook something with them. Despite the fantastic cinematographic quality and talented cast, especially LaKeith Stanfield (Darius) and Zazie Beetz (Van), this season’s attempts to embrace the question of identity crisis fall short and left me reeling from a sense of mise en abyme as a Black woman viewer trapped in a Black show crafted to fit the white liberal gaze.
Shabazz, Rashad. Spatializing blackness: Architectures of confinement and black masculinity in Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 2015.p54
Summers, Brandi Thompson. Black in place: The spatial aesthetics of race in a post-chocolate city. UNC
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Black feminist thought in the matrix of domination.” Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment 138, no. 1990 (1990): 221-238
Da’Shaun, L. Harrison. Belly of the beast: The politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness. North Atlantic Books, 2021. P.24
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. WW Norton & Company, 2022
hooks, bell. All about love: New visions. Harper Perennial, 2001. p.6