The Freedom to Leave

HBO’s August 14th statement doubling down on the creation of Confederate

I was watching a Cinemax show called Strikeback in 2013. The show features two white male actors who are spies or agents traversing through Africa and the Middle East on an array of missions to defeat the bad (typically brown) guys. George Zimmerman’s trial was ongoing at the time.

There was an episode that both struck and gutted me. It opened with an African woman who had just miraculously had a baby, aided by the help of medics in the field. She was sleeping in a tent, and the evening after her triumph had occurred, a group of bandits had come and lit her tent on fire. I remember the image of her charred body holding the charred body of her baby. She had been introduced, to be saved, to then be lit aflame. I don’t remember if she had even been named. I quit. It was the last episode I watched. I thought of Trayvon Martin. I thought of the trial, then ongoing, in which his final cries were being claimed by his murderer and I quit.

I was watching Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt in 2016. The show’s first season was panned for racial insensitivities and in an episode attempting to respond and laugh off the controversies, they turned Eric Garner’s final words into a punch line. I quit. In an effort to save face, to defend themselves, to have the last laugh, they leveraged the final cries of a man who continues to be denied justice beyond the grave to make a careless, flippant, unfunny joke. I quit.

To me, it’s simple. Freedom of speech is a powerful, necessary, and sacred right. I do not in anyway question, reject, or attempt to dilute that. Artistic freedom and honesty is not only a right but a sacred opportunity. We need people to tell the truth, to tell their truths, to push us into uncomfortable spaces so as to help us know ourselves and the world better. That being said, freedom of speech is inextricably linked with the just as powerful and necessary freedom to leave. The power to remove yourself from a situation that does not serve you. The power to evaluate a piece of work on whether it brings value to your life and to either reward it with your attention or deny it the privilege of your presence. The power to leverage your personal, political and spending power to influence what gets made and distributed and prioritized. The power to decide whether you want to judge a piece of work based on the creators’ best of intentions, or on if it harms your spirit and insults your sensibilities to engage.

No doubt, such a position may garner allegations of censorship. Yet the truth is that the freedom to leave is a right that doesn’t get equally exercised. You cannot view the way we engage with art and commerce divorced from the fact that we reside in a white supremacist patriarchal society. The freedom to leave is a right used sparingly by those of us who would most benefit from it’s power. If it was fully and consistently exercised, who knows what the world would look like.

We tolerate what we’re given, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. Further, it’s hard to quit all the time. Especially when something is objectively good. So time and again, you find yourself engaging with a world (even an imaginary one) in which people that look like you simply don’t exist, or only exist to wear chains or be destroyed and dismissed.

I’ve been tolerating problematic racial undertones on Game of Thrones for four years. The fictional world of Westeros is a world made by white people, with white people imaginations, for white audiences.

That’s not a critique. It’s an acknowledgement of what these creators have been taught to do.

Their imaginations are influenced by whiteness as a social construct, and by extension, the impulse to center white people in the story and the audience.

White people as the heroes. White people as the villains. White people in the audience who won’t notice that in seven whole kingdoms, only one is ruled by nonwhite people. Game of Thrones actors are supremely talented (and likable!), so we tolerate it. But as a nonwhite viewer it doesn’t feel good.

When white imaginations monopolize the stories that get told; your own imagination is challenged to center yourself in the story of your own life, to dream of a future for yourself in which you’re allowed to be the hero.

Doing so is hard when most of the Black and Brown people you engage with on screen only exist to be in chains, to be saved by white people, or to further a storyline. There’s no reason for these dynamics other than the fact that a creative choice was made. A choice undoubtedly influenced by the world that we live in and the ways that this world conditions us to be.

So when I heard that these same show runners — David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — concocted a new series that follows an alternative history of the United States in which the South doesn’t get defeated, I wasn’t surprised. They have white people imaginations! I’m sure they suspected the idea was controversial, but it’s not particularly challenging for them. With this show, they will continue to perpetuate a world in which black and brown people are in chains, because that’s what they know to do. Even if the show doesn’t ultimately center whiteness (both Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman are partners of the project), it centers white supremacy.

The premise of the show triggered me but it wasn’t until I read the interview justifying it that I felt compelled to quit. I absolutely quit. Since Confederate isn’t out yet I’m choosing to quit Game of Thrones a show that for all of its issues, I’ve largely enjoyed watching up until now. This isn’t an easy thing to quit, but I quit. So long as Confederate is greenlit by HBO, I will not watch another episode of Game of Thrones. If Confederate airs, I will cease to watch all HBO programming so long as it is on air. That’s not a threat, it’s a boundary. The premise of Confederate harms my spirit and offends my sensibilities and exercising my own freedom of speech compels me to say as much.

For all that I could take issue with, for me, the thing that I find most insulting is the implication of what the show both states and denies. A show in which slavery continues to exist implies a people that never managed to rise above their chains. It erases a people, WE the people, who actively seek to decimate what’s left of those chains, continuing the tireless work of those who came before us.

To green-light such a show at a point when we are being bombarded with incidents of Black people falling victim to police violence; of immigrants being terrorized and deported by the current administration; of Islamaphobia being litigated by that same administration; and of Indigenous Americans trying to reclaim sacred land simply to protect it, begs the question: why are white people so mean?

In saying that I’m not pointing at you — singular white person who no doubt has a complex life with complex concerns, triumphs, challenges- I mean white people. The groups of individual white persons who gather to come up with this shit and then try to convince us that our hearts are wrong for being sick of this shit. Despite their own complexities, they continue to simplify us into one dimensional caricatures. The only Universes we get to exist in, are ones that tighten our chains.

The show runners claim to be history buffs and state that their intention is to use this show to illuminate present day racism. They claim that we can’t run from our racist history, we need to face it. And yet they do so, while ignoring the fact that slavery hasn’t ended its simply evolved into mass incarceration. And yet they do so by erasing every single triumph that emerged in the presence of such a history.

You can make the case that a show like this would necessarily be void of all the things that we presently enjoy as a result of free Black people. A South of slaves would not be home to the blues. It would not give birth to Sister Rosetta Tharpe who sang those blues to make a way for something else to be born. Without her and Odetta and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and the Chitlin’ Circuit that ran through the south and gave Jimi Hendrix a trail to his chops — there would be no Johnny Cash or Janis Joplin or The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or Kurt Cobain or every single white artist that was influenced and credited with the music that those Black artists birthed first.

To their credit, I’ve heard all the white artists I just mentioned actively acknowledged the influence of Black music on their own craft, but that hasn’t stopped history from rewriting itself. Without Black people there would be no rock and roll, and yet present day rock and roll manages to exist with little mention of their contributions.

You don’t need to create an alternative history to find evidence of alternative facts masquerading as history. Welcome to our right now.

I think of all the history that we don’t even know, we don’t know. Present day America already erases the contributions of Black people, so what is your alternative history really going to prove?

I think of the slaves who well before the Civil War sung songs of freedom to each other, risking their lives for freedom and each other and I wonder, what kind of imagination wants to take that away? I close my eyes and see the images of the courageous protesters who looked Jim Crowe in the eye and said absofuckingloutely not and I wonder, what kind of imagination wants to take that away? I think of us. Trying to make a way for more decency, and love, and space, and life, and joy, and triumph, in the presence of so much pain and uncertainty and I wonder what kind of imagination wants to take that away?

Why would you erase all the beauty, and resilience, and spirit birthed in the presence of so much ugly? I’m at a loss to understand. Yet my heart unquestionably knows that if you try to, if Confederate stays greenlit, you will lose the privilege of my presence.

There are no set of circumstances in which I will engage with Confederate. I don’t care if Viola Davis, Denzel Washington, Cicely Tyson and Mahershala Ali are ALL in the cast, this is a hard NO and a line crossed. If this was some small art house project, or one show among many, it’d be one thing but this is HBO’s follow up to Game of Thrones!? This green light sends the message that a show like Confederate is culturally aligned with where we’re at — it’s not and you need to know that.

Accordingly, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss; if you really want to use your post Game of Thrones clout to do something meaningful, and powerful and transformative then sit with Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman and give them a chance to devise a show that you will partner with them on without your imaginations interfering. Be the partner that follows their lead, that steps back so that collectively we can all step forward. Use your power to tell stories you might not even think to dream of yet. If you want to fight racism with your art, then don’t center yourself in the art you create or at least be conscious of the fact that you do so. Collaborate, defer, decide to do better.

In the interview I shared above a commenter suggested making an alternative history where Nate Turner’s rebellion won and the South was ruled by free Black people. Such a show would decenter whiteness and so I suspect such a show won’t get made. And yet that’s a premise that’s controversial because it challenges racism by imagining Black people as something other than slaves — not because it harms people spirits and insults their sensibilities by reminding them that no matter what whiteness will applaud and center itself in the name of artistic freedom your feelings be damned.

We’re talking about fiction but images have power. Words have power. Art is power. The power to help us dream. To comfort us in our moments of weakness. Or to kick us when we’re down. To confuse us. To challenge us to rise or to drop boulders on the path towards our healing and throw pebbles at us while we try to make away. When I see Confederate get greenlit, it reminds me that no matter how well intentioned, these white people aren’t going to give us a damn thing unless we tell them and show them and remind them who we are, what we want, and what we will not tolerate. If we want power, if we want space, if we want our stories told in a way that nurtures our spirits we have to go get it. We have to demand it. We have to create it.

Accordingly, my sentiments on the freedom to leave apply to my own work. If you don’t resonate with what I’ve written- that’s okay!- I invite you to exercise your freedom to leave.

It’s not for you.