Is the message of the episode good or bad? It gives vibes of “wealth = success” and “I can’t help it if I’m rich” which is kind of shitty.
The episode ends with an explicit question: “When are we gonna stop doing this to each other?” which seems to imply that it is the black community that is holding itself back.
Did this episode age like milk, or is it a valid perspective within the black/POC community?
Also thoughts on the show in general?
I don't like it. It's a thing within American media to mock cultural nationalists and diasporic people who try to connect to their roots. Black cultural nationalists get caricatured as unserious people walking around with dashikis and African continent necklaces. There's a push towards assimilation within white settler society, whether it's getting the POC character to lament how they're forever "too white among POCs but too POC among white people" or POC actors being forced to put on a minstrel performance for the amusement of a white audience. You rarely see a culturally connected POC character who isn't also a walking stereotype show up and put the banana/oreo/coconut in their place.
This clip is basically the "too white for Black people, too Black for white people" Black character putting the Black character who's definitely not too white for Black people in his place.
Thanks, good points.
It rubbed me the wrong way too. The message seems to be: The aspiration for POC, the solution to their problems is to become white / become bourgeois. That racial struggle is essentially a positive struggle to become bourgeois, not a negative struggle against a racist class society.
The goal of bourgeois society is to make wealth appear accidental. Being rich is then seen as a natural attribute on the same level as having dark skin. So to criticize someone for being rich can then be seen as equal to racial discrimination. Never mind that wealth is directly tied to the conditions of society itself, and that in capitalist society, the capitalists' wealth is causally tied to the poverty of the masses.