In James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, a fictional story unfolds about an unnamed mixed-race Black man from a small Georgia city who decides to “go” for white after witnessing a lynching. Dwelling as a white man, he retains demise at bay, turns into a mean businessman, marries a white lady, and raises his youngsters to consider they’re unquestionably white. And although this life is unglamorous, it’s with out the gratuitous violence he knew of Black life within the South. Nonetheless, as he considers his life in previous age, The Ex-Coloured Man can not shake his deep sorrow and loss at his sacrifice, which his youngsters won’t ever know of. On the novel’s finish, Blackness reemerges, even because it has been disavowed, because the “nice secret” of his life — a confidence that in preserving assured he’d be free to reside on this planet while his interiority turned to rot.

This week on Atlanta, in an episode shot completely in black-and-white à la Rebecca Corridor’s latest Netflix adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, the determine of the white-passing Black protagonist seems as soon as extra, this time, on much less eloquent (or attention-grabbing) phrases. Enter Aaron, a pale-skinned, straight-haired teen with a Poster Malone poster and Logan Paul signed shirt on his bed room partitions. Regardless of appearances, Aaron is Black. He has a Black father (his mom is absent and by no means talked about). By way of emotional vary, Aaron is notably quick-tempered, insecure, and resentful, all of which he manages by means of a basic posture of cool detachment. Although Aaron is canonically a Black boy, he expresses his frustrations, not in contrast to a caricature of a racist white teen (he resorts to utilizing racial epithets whereas enjoying a online game with two different Black gamers).

Because the episode unfolds, Aaron’s relationship to his id is put to the take a look at when his dis-identification with Blackness turns into an impediment to, fairly than a chance for, the longer term he’s dreamed of — going to Arizona State College along with his very white girlfriend Kate and his “shut” white associates. Aaron is beginning to sweat as his father’s unwillingness to fill out FAFSA varieties bars him from accessing the monetary help he would want to afford to attend. When a visitor alumni speaker by the title of Robert S. Lee — who’s performed by Youtuber Kevin Samuels (I’ll handle this casting beneath) — pledges to donate 1,000,000 {dollars} to the college, to vary the establishment’s title from that of a “degenerate slave proprietor” to his personal, and to pay the school tuition of the college’s graduating class if they’re Black, all of the Black children rejoice (besides our resident incognegro, after all!).

After sitting by means of his associates’ anti-Black feedback (“You’re not presupposed to say it out loud, however it’s tremendous simple to go to highschool should you’re Black”), Aaron goes to gather the scholarship. He’s shocked to find that the grant requires an audition of Black authenticity fairly than familial ties. When Aaron is beckoned into the audition room by a panelist who calls him a “redbone” (a title which arguably felt like a stretch to me given his undertones, however I digress!), he finds himself in a darkish room standing below a lone stage gentle earlier than a jury of three middle-aged Black males smoking cigars. In a lightning spherical of questions, he fields the whole lot from “Why did The 5 Heartbeats break up?” to a request that he make a beat on the desk with a pencil (this was no less than a welcome diversion from the opposite racial historical past of the “pencil take a look at”). Ultimately, they conclude that he received’t obtain the scholarship. “How lengthy you been coasting in your whiteness, son?” a panelist asks him.

As one would possibly anticipate, the scholarship rejection means he can’t accumulate assets reserved for Black college students to help in his efforts to proceed residing as a white one. “I received’t get to go to school trigger this man is racist or colorist or no matter,” Aaron whines to his dad. Laughing frivolously below his breath, Aaron’s father tries to calm his son. “Chill out, that’s a part of being Black; generally you don’t get the issues you already know you deserve,” he says. As soon as Aaron sees one other (presumably) Black man commenting on his girlfriend’s Instagram, they get into an argument and she or he finally dumps him in preparation for the transition to ASC with out him. This break-up sends Aaron over the sting and onto Google, the place he learns to make an newbie flamethrower that he proceeds to take to highschool to burn it to the bottom.

When Aaron arrives at what’s now Robert S. Lee Excessive, he meets a (visibly) Black child named Felix who was additionally rejected for the scholarship as a result of he’s Nigerian. “I’m bout to burn this motherfucker down,” Felix proclaims. What at first would possibly seem to be a chance for comradery shortly devolves into drained anti-Black takes you’d count on to see throughout a Twitter “diaspora warfare.” Aaron sides with the panel on the choice to reject Felix as a result of he has “a complete tradition to drag from” and “a rustic to go residence to.” Although Aaron himself was simply examined (nevertheless messily) on a subset of Black American cultural narratives or the truth that some Black immigrants, specifically refugees and asylum seekers, don’t even have a spot to return to, Atlanta makes use of the character as a voice field for framing Blackness on probably the most unintellectual and ahistorical phrases. This scene is much more troubling coming from a protagonist who’s extraordinarily colorist and who, in Felix’s estimation, resembles Frankie Muniz greater than, say, Frankie Beverly.

After burning the brand new college signal, the boys proceed to take turns burning one another (Was this presupposed to be an allegory for intraracial infighting? In that case, it’s not in in the least revelatory!). Their fiery feud involves an finish when the cops arrive, instantly capturing Felix while telling Aaron to “freeze.” Lee arrives on the scene and grants Felix a scholarship as he’s put into the ambulance. “Getting shot by the police is the blackest factor anyone can do,” he tells the boy. If the title, “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga,” wasn’t a transparent sufficient indicator, the heavy-handedness on this episode is the best of the season. Aaron is arrested and appears out from the cop automotive on the ambulance, nearly as if he’s jealous of Felix.

One yr later, Aaron is a brand new man with a job at an electronics retailer. With a recent shape-up, diamond studs, a sequence, and a P.O. in addition, he’s taken up a brand new (learn: Blacker) aesthetic. His ex Kate walks into the shop and is surprised by his look and demeanor. “Can I be trustworthy with you?” Aaron asks her. “I’ve by no means been extra drawn to you in my life,” he says earlier than breaking the fourth wall by trying knowingly on the viewers.

On the stage of cinematography and narrative, this episode relishes distinction. At first, our Black protagonist “regarded” white and leaned into the whole lot that being white affords a teen (white privilege, the unlikelihood of being racially profiled) by “appearing” and “sounding” white and surrounding himself with white associates. But when defeated, he resorts to a different efficiency that depends on Black aesthetics to capitalize on the “coolness” and twisted desirability it affords him.

On this method, our ex-ex-colored man proves to be much less of a personality and extra a puppet possessed by the present’s racial unconscious. As a mouthpiece, Aaron offers voice to an anti-Blackness unparalleled and unstated by some other Black characters within the season to this point. And by the top of his story, he doesn’t embrace his Blackness on the premise of delight, development, or political schooling however fairly as a way of clarifying his relationship to want and desirability. This is the reason his ultimate gaze within the episode is a understanding one. Via Aaron’s closing look, the present anticipates an viewers who understands the implications of the worth of racial want. His gaze presumes a shared information of interracial fantasies predicated on racial efficiency.

Given this episode’s concern with the connection between want and visuality, it’s becoming that it contains a outstanding cameo from the now-deceased Samuels, a person who, within the phrases of The New York Instances, “styl[ed] himself as a picture guide” and loved virality largely for movies wherein he verbally degraded the appears to be like, courting prospects, and social worth of Black girls (and to a lesser extent, Black males). Who higher than him to bridge the episode’s curiosity in race, violence, optics, and want? Definitely, the selection was deliberately made, however that intention reads as an eagerness to impress Black girls viewers particularly from whom the episode’s quippy description enthusiastically anticipates what we’ll ask ourselves, “Why do they hate black girls a lot?” (This can be a well-documented stress because the present’s creator and star Donald Glover felt compelled in a self-interview to ask himself if he was “afraid” of Black girls. He dodges his personal query). As a Black lady with a dedication to cultural criticism, I’m not inclined to take the bait on the present’s relationship with Black girls (Van has mentioned like ten phrases this complete season, lol the jokes write themselves). Nonetheless, I do see this episode as an important pattern of the present’s marrow, and the outcomes present that provocation is the most cancers within the lifeblood of the sequence.

The place this season’s appearances of Chet Hanks and Liam Neeson generated famous controversy, the present’s Samuels cameo goes a step additional, understanding nicely his polarizing popularity, in an effort to steadiness pushing the buttons of heated intraracial discourse whereas sustaining a gradual curiosity within the interracial. As a metaphor for these advanced commitments and wishes, Aaron — whose racial innovation within the face of insecurity proves to be each the Blackest and the whitest factor about him — embodies the contradiction and the chaos on the core of the present’s surrealist self-fashioning. Thus, in trying to this character’s narrative predecessors, we’re reminded that the shock-and-awe instincts that make up the cells of the present’s tumor-sized id disaster will not be unprecedented in Black artwork. In spite of everything, as Johnson’s protagonist wrote in Autobiography over a century in the past, “I do know that I’m enjoying with fireplace, and I really feel the fun which accompanies that almost all fascinating pastime; and, again of all of it, I feel I discover a form of savage and diabolical want to assemble up all of the little tragedies of my life and switch them right into a sensible joke on society.”