Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  You may get tired of me saying this, but you guessed it! There’s an example of this in the Green Lantern comics as well! A Green Lantern named Thaal Sinestro was considered the greatest of all time until it was discovered he used his power to act as a dictator on his home world Korugar. When the Korugarian citizens revolted, Sinestro was found out and punished by the Guardians of the Universe. A rebel leader named Katma Tui was chosen as the replacement Green Lantern for Sinestro. However, the damage was already done. The Korugarians had spent so long under Sinestro’s rule that now, for them, the Green Lantern symbol was akin to a Nazi swastika. They didn’t want Katma there as a Green Lantern. Katma left her planet, essentially abolishing Green Lanterns as a presence there for more than forty years till her replacement was selected. She became a legend in the Green Lantern Corps, but to her people she’s called Katma Tui, “the Lost.”

  We’ve seen in real-life history how one person, Hitler, corrupted a peaceful symbol used across many cultures, especially in India, for thousands of years and turned it into a symbol that inflicts terror toward a group of people. The symbol’s original meaning doesn’t change, but for the Jewish community, the bastardized version will always represent a symbol of terror. In regard to policing, when you’re Black and hear that woop-woop siren call and see them flashing red and blue lights, your body hits that fight-or-flight response waiting for the officer to come up to your car window, and based on their mood, you don’t know if you’re going to make it to your destination or a jail cell alive. With Katma Tui’s tale, we see that even when people try to change the image of an institution and that institution employs one of the folks that called for a change, the communities and people harassed by the institution aren’t going to just forgive that shit.

  Whew, I’ve been shitting on copaganda and cops for a good minute now. I will say that there is media out there aside from Green Lantern comics that to an extent does the work of social commentary on police as well. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a TV show about a diverse cast of cops at a fictional precinct set in Brooklyn. Throughout the show we see the officers of the Nine-Nine being both police in a comedy as well as providing commentary on police and police issues. The show addresses the shortcomings of the law, the officers, or even society through humor. It’s usually in quick beats and happened more so later on into the series. The show is still copaganda, but this shit is legit funny as fuck but can flip the switch when necessary for the more serious moments. There’s one episode where one of the main characters, Lieutenant Terry Jeffords, is out of uniform and gets racially profiled by an officer near his home. When he goes to file a complaint, it gets denied by his superior, Captain Raymond Holt, who is also Black. Holt tells Terry he wants him to pick his battles. This complaint could alter Terry’s career as an officer, which would inhibit him from getting promoted to a position where he could change things. Terry ain’t trying to hear that. Later on, Holt apologizes to Terry after coming to the realization that as a Black gay officer in the ’80s, the advice he offered was how he had to do things. Now Holt was in a position to be the change he wanted to see in the police force and would stand by Terry’s complaint.

  There’s a bunch of serious scenes like this mixed into Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s comedy. As of now, the show has been renewed for an eighth season. The problem is how will it address what’s happened with police brutality, numerous protests, and calls for the abolishment of police that have occurred in 2020? It has to touch on these topics without the show leaning even more into copaganda and being apologetic/sympathetic to cops’ perspective. It’s not an easy task, but the show positioned itself in this lane of being woke cops. Not tackling it would be a disservice to its fan base. Members of the cast have been vocal that they must find a way to address today’s climate in their upcoming season as well. I gotta give ’em credit for being ’bout keeping the same energy for social commentary that they came in with. I fuck with the Green Lantern comics series because they’ve kept the same energy providing commentary on social issues for years.

  The stories and tales of the Green Lantern Corps give me the escapism I look for without any heavy copaganda or police sympathy. Reading about this intergalactic peacekeeping organization that abides by the rules of respecting every alien’s culture, religion, and customs when they step into communities foreign to them provides comfort in fiction. I don’t get or see that comfort when I think of the police in the real world due to their actions, track record in Black communities, and murder rate of Black and Brown people. I’ve said it repeatedly, I can’t fathom an institution with these racist practices getting reformed when they don’t even hold officers that abuse their power accountable. Accountability is such an easy thing in these Green Lantern works of fiction. There’s no reason it can’t be as applicable in the real world in regard to cops, but it isn’t. Maybe that’s what actually kept me reading the series for so long. In these Green Lantern stories, I get to see the accountability and justice of these peacekeepers sworn to protect their section of a galaxy. Whereas in the United States of America, a person sworn to protect a community abuses their power on video and gets to punch in to work the next day to do it again.

  The 2000s and 2010s Golden Era of TV Gave Us a Lot of Great Television and Made Me So Damn Tired

  WILLIAM EVANS, aka DJ Tony Baritone

  IF WE’RE KEEPING it buck, this era kind of started in the late ’90s when Oz dropped on HBO. Oz was different, yo. Oz didn’t adopt the darkness, it was born into it. Molded by it. Whatever show you thought was gritty before Oz, head to the back of the line and try again. If you don’t know the origin story, Oz was the nickname for the Oswald State Correctional Facility. This was a level 4 maximum (read: the “worst of the worst”) prison where your boy Ernie Hudson, who never got his real Ghostbusters shine, is the warden. In a plot that must keep prison reform activists up at night if they ever watched this, we spend time in “Emerald City”: a ward of the prison where the unit manager Tim McManus tries to focus much more on rehabilitation and reform over punishment and retribution. In a very cynical way, that shit is an abject failure in the end. Folks getting murdered ayeday. Racial groups get more entrenched instead of harmonization (everyone’s beloved J. K. Simmons was a neo-Nazi leader, y’all), the prison guards become compromised in the most outsized way (what up, Edie Falco!), and they gotta shut the whole thing down.

  Oz is important for a number of reasons, not just limited to a crazy lineup of “before they were mega TV stars” performers on the show, but in showing how far and grown-up TV was ready to be. Yeah, we’ve had premium channel programming for a long time, but this was appointment TV where they encountered (often messily) real moral dilemmas that weren’t very black-and-white. We can debate the quality of the show (actually, the end of the show is an absolute train wreck, debate ya family on that), but the influence is undeniable. Oz’s questioning of morality and never really having a moral center made The Sopranos, which started two years later, possible on the network. Oz is the first show I can remember that had the “time check” test, where so much wild and crazy-ass shit would happen, with the drama on twelve, and I’d look at the clock and be like, “Wait, we still have another half hour of this?! Impossible.”

  Oz may have laid the groundwork, but The Sopranos built the damn house with a bunch of rooms and a long-ass winding driveway down from a hill in New Jersey. Now we’re talking about prestige TV and, specifically, starting the HBO drama dynasty that lasted for more than a decade. The Sopranos set a standard for so many things like the black hat protagonist in Tony Soprano, the mega spotlight on the auteur showrunner in David Chase, and finally the investment and opinion of everyone in how to best stick the landing of your show. The Sopranos still stands up, by the way, watching parts of that series more than twenty years later. Gandolfini is still a marvel. The world is still full and fleshed out. And Black folks are still called “mulignan.” Wait, what? Yeah…

  There’s a throughput of this golden era of TV so many of us fell
in love with. It starts with a man. A white man. A wonderfully acted white man. He has a compromised moral compass. He might just be a bad guy, but he’s our bad guy. But that guy, that white guy, is the sun with which everyone is stuck in his gravitational pull. It’s not a bad way to make a TV show. But during that decade plus, it was damn near the only way.

  There’s a whole discourse about legions of white dudes taking the “wrong lessons” from Tony Soprano and Walter White and Don Draper, but yo… I’m bored with that take. You’re bored with that take. Cuz like, an entitled dude that thinks being an asshole is how to make people love you didn’t need someone with superior genetics like Jon Hamm to affirm that for him. But what’s interesting is how this formula wasn’t really explored outside of white men during this time. They all had white wives that were their foils most often.

  [Side note: Can we get a fucking apology to folks like Anna Gunn (Skyler White) and January Jones (Betty Draper) who took so much internet abuse because they were the omega to sometimes legit evil dudes? Like the projection was strong with that one, fellas. Remember that episode of Justice League Unlimited when Lex Luthor and the Flash body swapped and the Flash (in Luthor’s body) left the bathroom without washing his hands and justified not exercising basic hygiene by saying, “Because I’m EEEEVIL”? That, Skyler White haters, that’s what y’all sound like. Anyways…]

  While it can be argued that the success of Oz made HBO a concrete landing spot for The Sopranos, the true spiritual successor for Oz would have to be The Wire. With some of the overlapping characters (Lance Reddick DA GAWD and J. D. Williams most notably) and a plot featuring the street warfare of Baltimore’s drug trade, the shows, although tonally different, feel like they could exist in the same universe. The other notable reason they are similar? Black people. Of the golden age shows that followed Oz, The Wire was one of the few ensemble cast shows where the perspective changed depending on the plot and that fought hard not to center a character. Season one of The Wire begins with Detective Jimmy McNulty’s crusade to take down the drug trade in the city but quickly expands to show how he is just a cog in the machine. Both within the world of the show and as a performer on the show itself. Because of its structure, there is the Wire effect now, where folks are on the lookout for Wire cast alums, because so many were given time to shine. A lot of actors on high-profile shows find work after their big show ends, but the reverence and following that the actors on The Wire draw are a testament to the screen time they were allotted.

  This is how I came to define that era of TV once I had a little distance, the success of shows that mostly left Black folks off the roster. Where Black people were props and story arcs but rarely part of the overall importance of the show. There’s an argument to be made for Boardwalk Empire, specifically season four, which might have been the Blackest season of television that year, but even then, we’re talking about well into the 2010s. And even more glaring in the popular format of shows at the time, where were the single Black protagonist dramas? Where was the Black antihero with their own orbit, where they manipulated the world around them for their own selfish desires with a spouse that became hated by the viewing public because they possessed some semblance of a moral compass?

  [You’ll notice my gender neutrality here, because the lack of Black protagonists in this genre of TV making was barely represented more by women. For HBO’s part, Sex and the City was still running, but you also had Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Alias, Desperate Housewives… okay, maybe we’re not talking about prestige TV as much with those last couple, but still… The 2010s would give a much larger rise to Black women protagonists—not overwhelmingly, but substantially more racially diverse than the previous decade had been.]

  Looking back on those shows, what further exacerbates the lack of Black inclusion is the way Black characters are subjected in the narrative. Basically to show how great or shitty the protagonist is. Dr. House making racially insensitive remarks shows you how edgy or against societal niceties he is. Which means he’s a great doctor because he doesn’t think like other people. Charlie, the “body man” for the president in The West Wing, is given about five minutes of screen time to discuss the fact that he’s Black, but the president being oblivious to that as a possible issue generously projects his acceptance of a diverse coalition. Or most pessimistically shows he “doesn’t see color.” And I guess Battlestar Galactica just showed us that there are very few Black people in the future. Past. Whatever, Galactica pissed itself in the end.

  The 2000s and 2010s are still my favorite era of straight up TV making. The stories were unique. The acting often top notch. But I was a spectator a lot more than a participant. When folks showed up that looked like me, they were often a means to an end, or the ridicule they had to endure was the point of their existence. The golden era isn’t as golden when you realize how little the best shows diverged from themselves. But in the words of Omar Little, you with it because “it’s all in the game, yo. It’s all in the game.”

  Craig of the Creek: When We See Us

  OMAR HOLMON, aka Running Round the House Smelling Like Outside

  I WITNESSED A milestone life moment while watching WWE programming one night. I was in my sister’s living room, casually viewing the cruiserweight division dubbed 205 Live as T. J. Perkins was wrestling. Perkins was doing an array of lucha libre moves before stopping to do his signature taunt where he holsters his hands as if they were guns. Shit looked so smooth as the camera zoomed in on him. I’d seen him do this hundreds of times, but what made this time special was when I heard, “Hey, he looks like me,” out of nowhere. I moved the ottoman toward me to see my nephew, who was seven at the time, looking up from his Beyblades to TJP on the television. I told him, “That’s ’cause he’s Filipino.”

  My nephew said, “So, he’s Asian like me?”

  “Yep. You know there’s a wrestler here named Mustafa Ali, he’s Pakistani but also Indian like you. He looks even more like you. His friend Cedric Alexander is on this show too, he’s Black like me and like you are too.”

  I could see the gears turning in my nephew’s mind. He grew up in Singapore with my sister, who is Black, Indian, and light-skinned, and a father who is Sri Lankan and dark-skinned. When he was a baby, I made up a song to sing him called “Ethnically Ambiguous Baby” as a joke, knowing that he was going to be this Brown biracial kid hearing “So, what are you?” throughout life. Here we were six years later where he’s a Brown kid seeing this wrestler that doesn’t have his exact complexion but instantly recognizing that they share similar features and hearing about these other wrestlers that are the same race as him. While he was contemplating all this information, the first thing I thought was “Lemme see if I can get him interested in New Japan Pro Wrestling wrestlers as well so I can have someone to watch this stuff with.” My second thought was “How fortunate is my nephew, in 2017, to be able to see himself on television at seven years old.” Looking back, I realized that growing up, I never had this moment that my nephew was experiencing. It wasn’t until 2018, where at thirty-three years old I saw this show on Cartoon Network called Craig of the Creek and truly saw a Black character that I instantly resonated with on sight.

  If you’re not up on Craig of the Creek, lemme learn you real quick. It’s an animated show that follows Craig Williams, a nine-year-old Black boy middle child living his life in the Maryland suburbs of Herkleton with his all-Black everything family and playing with his friends Kelsey and J.P. at a creek near where they live. Craig enjoys exploring uncharted areas of the creek, Kelsey sees herself as a warrior and carries a sword made out of PVC pipe, and J.P. is the optimistic, imaginative, unpredictable member of the trio. Craig’s family and friends are the main focus and then there’s the creek. The creek is broken up into different territories where different types of kids hang out. There’s a group of kids with bikes called the 10 Speeds that hangs out at Ramp City, an area of man-made hills of the creek. The horse girls, a bunch of girls that act like horses, hang out i
n the meadow of the creek. The sewer kids are in pool and beach attire running round in the sewer labyrinth. There’s an area for everyone from the anime kids to the paintball kids. They’re all mapped out by Craig, he’s essentially the cartographer of the creek or “Map Boy,” as he calls himself. There is either a kid or a group of kids for everyone watching the show to relate to. What I love the most is when you see a group of children or people on the show, there’s always a Black person or person of color. Before Craig of the Creek even got a second season, I knew this show would be the greatest cartoon of all time.

  That’s some bold shit to say, but lemme break it down. When we talk “greatest of all time,” for me, I do it by eras. In this case, there are cartoons we will always look back at fondly ’cause of nostalgia, but when we talking GOAT tier, it’s only fair they ranked within their time and there are some exceptions to the rule. Craig of the Creek will be an exception to that rule because of three key animated GOATs that came before it: Adventure Time, a fantasy-genre cartoon that had elements of role-playing video games; Steven Universe, a space-adventure-type show where a majority of main and supporting characters were either women or coded as women; and We Bare Bears, a story about three anthropomorphic bears as adoptive brothers trying to fit into human society. These shows really paved the way in a big way for these cartoons disguised as kid shows that are actually for adults too. Adventure Time tackled trauma, consent, and friendship. Steven Universe took that baton and tackled gender issues, had nonbinary gender–conforming representations, showed women in power, and wrote the book on handling queer-coded characters. We Bare Bears said, “Bet. What we gon’ do is have this show about bears but the majority of humans you see in the background will be people of color. We gon’ draw Black men and women with actual detailed Black hair and features and we gon’ showcase Asian folks accurate as fuck, as well as other cultures too.” Craig of the Creek is god-tier status, because the shows that preceded it raised the bar, and by going the extra mile to really represent different cultures, backgrounds, and identities like the shows before it, and by adding its own personality into the mix, Craig of the Creek been doing salmon ladder pull-ups with that bar ever since. This show is an amalgam of all that these shows tackled and broke down for the point of view of kids.