HBO’s Confederate

I love Game of Thrones.

Everything about it gives me life.

And I love HBO.

I feel like they have one of the best platforms in the media. Like they just create environment for great shows.

But White Supremacy is real.

Yesterday, the two Executive Producers of Game of Thrones which airs on HBO revealed that they have already inked a deal with HBO to produce a new show once the final season of GOT is completed.

I’m like, yasssssss, what will this be?

 

This new show is called Confederate.

Hmmph. Ok, tell me more.

See this is the type of bullshit WHITE PEOPLE BE FUCKING ON. This took me from zero to 100 real fucking quick. This is why you can’t trust white people. This is why all white people are racist. This is why Get Out is real and why Black people always gotta watch White people out the corners of our eyes. This is why we gotta be so damn extra Black and have extra Black pride and be like I’m Black y’all. I’m Black y’all. Im Blackity Blackity Blackity y’all. It’s a fact y’all. I’m Black.

Ok, (deep breath) I’m sorry for this outburst. Let me pull myself back together (deep breath).

What I meant to say is Why? Why are two white men writing a show about the South winning the Civil War and Black people being enslaved right now, in 2017. I’m telling you, as I write this post my eyes are filled with water. I go back and forth between feelings of deep rage and deep sorrow.

Why White People gotta be so fucking White?

And see the little White man in my head, the one who lives in all of our heads is like, wait Khalilah, you might be over reacting. Maybe this will be great because in some weird way this will show the world that the horrors of slavery really sins the souls of White folks. It may be this really beautifully written, visually stunning piece that condemns White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness. Maybe these two White men will show our humanity.

Then the God voice is me says, gtfoh with this dumb shit.

Y’all’s President is a racist, sexist, mysogynistic prick, who is hell bent on destroying the nation, the KKK aka Nationalists are on the rise, Black men and women are being killed by police (slave patrol) with impunity, the Supreme Court is ruling that jobs can discriminate against Black people with locs because they do not have professional hair, Betsy Devos is the Secretary of Education, Black boys and girls have the highest suspension rates in the country. The school to prison pipeline, or like my colleague calls it, the prison to prison pipeline, is booming, the private industrial complex is a billion dollar industry filled with Black bodies, the polar ice caps are melting, climate change is real and we’re suffering, ALL LIVES MATTER and these two men are producing a show with the premise that the South won the Civil War.

These TWO White men.

As an educator, this show scares me. We already have a sanitized history of slavery in this country. We collectively have not wrapped our brains around the horrors that came out of the hearts and minds of White folks, a lot of them good Christian White folks and now they’re going to create a reality where we are modern day…dare I say futuristic enslaved niggers.

Ummmm, ok.

But wait all hope isn’t lost because…

they hired these two to be writers and executive producers on the series also.

       CRICKETS.

I just want to know when HBO will start production on the show written and executive produced by two Black men who have rewritten Hitler’s story, with him succeeding in murdering all the Jewish people in Germany with two Jewish writers and executive producers supporting said show titled; Mein Kempf?

You know what HBO could have signed up to bring to life?

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower:

Set in the 2020s where society has largely collapsed due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Parable of the Sower centers on a young woman named Lauren Oya Olamina who possesses what Butler dubbed hyperempathy or “sharing” – the ability to feel pain and other sensations she witnesses. As a teenager growing up in the remnants of a gated community near Los Angeles, she begins to develop a new belief system, which she comes to call Earthseed. When the community’s security is compromised, her home is destroyed and her family is murdered, and she travels north with other survivors. Society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty, and mixed race relationships are stigmatized amid attacks against religious and ethnic minorities. Lauren believes that humankind’s destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets, forcing humankind into its adulthood, and that Earthseed is preparation for this destiny. She gathers followers along her journey north and founds the first Earthseed community, Acorn, in Northern California.

Or Butler’s Parable of the Talents:

Parable of the Talents (1998) (the sequel to Parable of the Sower) tells the story of how, as the U.S. continues to fall apart, the protagonist’s community is attacked and taken over by a bloc of religious fanatics who inflict brutal atrocities.

Or if they were truly feeling reminiscent of the good ole times in the antebellum South they could have given life to Butler’s novel Kindred:

The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a spoiled, self-destructive white slave owner and the proud black free woman he has forced into slavery and concubinage. As her stays in the past become longer, Dana becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community, making hard compromises to survive slavery and to ensure her existence in her own time.

Written to underscore the courageous endurance of people perceived as chattel, Kindred examines the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery as well as its legacy in present American society. Through the two interracial couples that form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism.

   

But maybe, her books are just too real and representative of a real possibility of our lives.

Instead, they’ll make America great, again, by bringing to the screen, a story that shows what life would be like in America if Blacks were enslaved in the 21st century.

I’m just gonna leave you with this:

“But stay woke
Niggas creepin’
They gon’ find you
Gon’ catch you sleepin’ (oh)
Now stay woke
Niggas creepin’
Now don’t you close your eyes”

Thanks Childish Gambino.

In solidarity and today, in full disgust.