“Everything that you said about things getting better was a lie!”
“Do we have a compact?” Odin asks Shadow at the end of “Muninn.” “Do we have a compact?” Mad Sweeney asks Baron Samedi (Mustafa Shakir) at their after-hours dinner at Coq Noir’s chef’s table. “Do we have a compact?” Baron Samedi asks Laura Moon just seconds later.
I want to warn you: “The Ways Of The Dead” opens with, and frequently returns to, a lynching. The long, graphic scene details the real-life lynching of Will “Froggie” James (Warren Belle) by a “murder-hungry throng” who tortured him to death, desecrated his corpse, and cut off his extremities as keepsakes. It’s a true American atrocity, and a naked expression of the white supremacy lurking at the heart of the American narrative.
“Do we have a compact?”
For a television show to successfully navigate incendiary contemporary issues, it must first have a compact with its audience. The audience must trust the show—trust its creators, writers, and directors—to be mindful, to be careful, to be earnest in their storytelling. We must trust them not to sensationalize or exploit, but to explore and expose with honesty and measured purpose.
Reader, I hope you and I can have a compact. I will always be truthful, as truthful as my unconscious limitations allow. If I critique a show for its use of exploitative images, I won’t reproduce those images without good reason. You do not have to worry about seeing the (admittedly affecting and strongly staged) images of Will James’ lynching in this review. But it will be necessary to describe it, and below I will include a picture of Shadow sporting the injuries visited upon him in a vision.
The lynching scene opens the episode, starting as Shadow Moon’s dream. It’s echoed when he wakes to see himself in the bathroom mirror, his chest marred by bullet holes, his head engulfed in flame, as he struggles not to slash his own throat with the straight razor he finds on the edge of the sink. When Shadow asks for explanation—of his vision, and of the identical wounds on the corpse of Jamarr Goodchild (Percy Anane-Dwumfour), the other grandchild of the late Lila Goodchild—Mr. Ibis is happy to oblige.
“Froggie was lynched, shot, beheaded, dragged through the streets, and burned with an audience of ten thousand people who were having the time of their lives. Cairo’s dignity reduced to a pool of blood.” Mr. Ibis’s steady, studied tone of sorrow ushers us through the story, and Demore Barnes gives it every drop of the dignity that swims in his honeyed voice. But we’re presented, for the second (but not last) time and in lavish detail, with the atrocities visited upon Will “Froggie” James. “The Ways Of The Dead” can pay all the lip service it likes to the depravity of Cairo’s racist townsfolk and their bloodlust, but it’s delivering a version of their bloodsport to us, too.
The story of William James (“Will,” Mr. Ibis calls him) deserves attention and atonement. It’s a true horror worthy of—burning for—exposure. Writer (and American Gods season-two co-executive producer) Rodney Barnes and director Salli Richardson-Whitfield (whose resumé ranges from Queen Sugar to Black Dynamite to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) are more than capable of telling it with incisive perspective and indelible style.
The story of Will James deserves that. What it doesn’t deserve is this lingering voyeurism, the lurid slo-mo brutality of his many injuries, the camera as avid for blood and flame as the mob rioting in Cairo 110 years ago.
“Memento mori,” rasps Will James to Shadow from the ornate mirror in the funeral parlor’s dim bathroom. “Remember that you must die.” But the camera’s grisly, greedy attention to those wounds doesn’t merely remind Shadow, or the audience, of the inevitability of death. It fetishizes the moment of death, and the gratuitous cruelty of this death in particular. (These deaths, because in addition to the terrible, long focus on Will’s terrible, long death, “The Ways Of The Dead” gets the bonus of a white woman’s corpse—Will’s supposed victim, played like Essie MacGowan by Emily Browning—sprawled in a side street to drool over.)
Will James’ curse is visited not, as we might expect, upon the gleeful crowd of white men and women who murdered him. Instead, he haunts Cairo’s young black men, riddling them with bullets and burning them in illusory flame. “What’s missing from someone’s soul that they can do that to another?” Shadow asks Mr. Ibis of Cairo’s mob violence, then without pause moves on to blame Will James: “Why would he curse his own people?”
As it did in “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” American Gods is reducing racial tensions to tensions between black people, not tensions created and intensified by white supremacy and perpetuated by the blithe indifference of those who benefit. “If you are taking brown bodies from this world, you are taking my worshippers,” Mr. Nancy interrupts, slipping again into the accent of his younger days as he accuses Ibis of complicity in the killing of Cairo’s black community. Mr. Ibis’ vague excuses of Froggie’s curse as a symptom of “a simple absence of solutions” don’t excuse the implications of this episode’s choices.
“That which I was has been taken from me,” Will James tells Shadow when they commune. Indeed it has. Though it is not as great an act of violence as Cairo’s mob perpetrated, to repurpose a man’s history—his martyrdom—is a grave responsibility. By repurposing it as as a supernatural version of the specious what about black-on-black crime argument, American Gods shows this is not a responsibility it has earned.
“The Ways Of The Dead” is masterfully acted, well-paced, full of vivid, painfully deployed images and richly detailed sets. If anything, the visuals of the lynching are too striking, too lovingly detailed. It tells a true tale that has long deserved telling. And it’s a disservice both to the history it’s retelling and the audience it’s conning.
I look forward to reading interpretations of “The Ways Of The Dead” from other critics, especially black critics. As The Jinn tells Salim, taking a break from their SIDECAR ADVENTURES to debate the subject of faith, “You’re entitled to your own truth, Salim, but not your own facts.” The facts of Will James’ death are not disputed. The way they’re employed and exploited here? That’s up for dispute. And Rodney Barnes, longtime writer for The Boondocks and Everybody Hates Chris, is no stranger to being misunderstood.
Here is what I am certain of: We do not have a compact, American Gods. Especially after “The Ways Of The Dead,” we do not have a compact. I want to trust your storytelling, but I cannot, because I cannot trust your motives or your methods. I cannot have a compact with a show that I cannot trust on the most volatile, painful questions.
Stray observations
- That’s Glynn Turman as Rev. Hutchins, who is done giving advice to Ruby Goodchild and to all of Cairo.
- “We eat what we want,” Maman Brigitte (Hani Furstenberg) reminds Mad Sweeney, after the most male-gaze-dependent scene I’ve ever reviewed: her thrumming, pumping dance, accompanied by sultry eye contact and backed up by nameless black women mirroring her movements.
- The influence of Bryan Fuller and Michael Green persists in American Gods’ style, but not in its storytelling or execution. The overlapping sex scenes between Laura Moon and Baron Samedi, between Mad Sweeney and Maman Brigitte, and—magically—between Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney conjures memories of a similar Hannibal scene… but without its emotional power or artistic vision.
- I’ve been waiting with some apprehension for the scene, described in the novel, of Laura taking a drink, then disgorging crawling things. This episode’s version is a lot tamer than I expected.
63 Comments
“Better to be pissed off than pissed on.” Nancy gets all the good lines.
Did Mel Brooks get royalties for that line?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xfCJljLHkmw
I just can’t help it, but every time I see Laura get ready to take care of business (be it kick ass or sex up Baron Samedi), I expect Violet Baudelaire to wrap her hair with a ribbon bow and say something like “let’s do this shit.”
her thrumming, pumping dance, accompanied by sultry eye contact and backed up by nameless black women mirroring her movements.
I’m sure the actresses have names, i mean, they weren’t budded in vats
Come on. Obviously it’s the characters who are nameless. Named black women are once again expected to play nameless background bodies.
If they could act, they would’ve gotten the role. But of course, you’re seeing racism everywhere. After the Russia thing, it’s the new thing to get assblasted about.
i am disappointed that your reply got 19 upvotes, compared to one for me. Mine did not deserve more than a single star, but your comment was so damned obvious, explaining my stupid joke, that 19 people said “YEAH”, well, i am disappoint
Well at the risk of further stating the obvious… you made that comment under an article that was whining about how American Gods has not “earned” the right to “depict” a real lynching, plus it included all that self-important bullshit about how the writer wouldn’t SHOW you the lynching, gosh no, but they would describe it… (and then they went and showed Shadow with his head on fire, struggling not to cut his own throat, as if this slightly metaphorical depiction of the mutilation and abuse a real person really suffered in real life, is fine.)So the point is that after reading an article in that tone, your comment didn’t read like a joke. It read like doubling-down on the article’s oblique cries of “inappropriate!”This is the world right now. Where a person makes their Twitter identity about challenging YA authors who dare to write about races not their own in their shitty YA teen angst dystopia novel… and then when they get around to writing their own YA teen angst dystopia novel, they also get torn to shreds for daring to… I dunno, give an Asian character a pet snake or something. SO RACIST.Fuck everything (TM).
This comment deserves the 19 likes…lolThese reviews are getting me tired. Should we discuss the story? Explain all those gods and interactions, to those viewers that need (me included)? No, lets pretend to be a race warrior and waste a lot of words.
Excellent Gibson reference! (for a show that is itself a Gibson reference.)
Between Bast and the Loa, it seems AG’s unique sexuality from S1 is gone. No more lingering, artful shots appreciating the human body or the beauty of sex… like Bilquis lounging in her bed before cutting to her sculpture, or the overhead shot of Salim and the Jinn.Now AG has blurry closeups, usually with tits in frame, and leaves anything remotely male or gyrating out of view cause god forbid love scenes be beautiful. Seems to have been pretty much cable-ified.
No one wants to see that shit.
My friend you hit nail on the head . This season has water down since Green and Fuller walk
“Now AG has blurry closeups, usually with tits in frame, and leaves anything remotely male or gyrating out of view cause god forbid love scenes be beautiful. Seems to have been pretty much cable-ified.”
This is a perfect description, unfortunately, of every sex scene this year.
LOL “If anything, the visuals of the lynching are too striking, too lovingly detailed.” This is a problem across all these platforms. Poor word choice and run on sentences. Use a period. Start another thought. Punchy writing can set up longer, more detailed sentences that provide some detail to flesh out a thought. Then it gets to the point. Write less overly contrived sentences.
There is definitely a difference between s1 and s2 that I’m not really a fan of. Still love the book though and rereading it will make me forget about the show if it keeps being disappointing
“What it doesn’t deserve is this lingering voyeurism, the lurid slo-mo brutality of his many injuries”
I haven’t been watching Season 2 of this show – everything I hear is negative – but this kind of lurid gore is what I hated in the first episode of the first season. When it dialed it back in later episodes (that is to say “when it employed it with purpose as opposed to just being gory throughout”) I really fell in love with the show.
Honestly, pornographic, lurid hyperviolece fuels much of my loathing of Game of Thrones and Westworld, shows that claim to be deep and adult but so often feel like seedy, juvenile guro doujinshi stumbled across on early-aughts image boards for the shock value. I take a very dim view of any work that claims to be feminist while turning such a masturbatory, male-gazey camera on the abuse and mutilation of women. That they oft-get equally violent revenge feels not like the triumphant catharsis of strong female characters and more the inevitable, orgiastic conclusion of the gore fetish. You could have had the revenge without such an intimate, lengthy scene of the crime, show.
I think the show was reflecting the fetishization of violence as visited upon the original victims by the original perpetrators. If it is repellent to modern viewers, it should be. Acts so brutal and so dismissive of a person’s humanity should not be depicted otherwise.
I would say that’s not an unreasonable point – if the show existed in a vacuum, instead of in the long shadow of True Blood, Game of Thrones, Westworld et al. which have a history of masturbatory violence. Also, the show has been to this gory well before for equally salacious reasons: the lynching scene in the first season could make the same argument, but it literally rained blood and viscera – at some point sober reflections on historical validity have to stand down in the face of cinematography that’s far more interested in glorification.
Precisely. Any show that needs to scream how adult and deep it is is neither.
After Westworl came out there were all these posts talking about its “philosophy” – what philosophy? “Humans are intrinsically bad and violent” is about the extent of it – it has the same philosophical depth of your average 17 year old who just skimmed Niezche and now thinks he’s super-smart for being so cynical. Westworld has the same level of moral sophistication as the Teletubbies, simply from the other side – the world is actually far more nuanced than its worldview allows. Individuals can even be good AND bad, and if you leave someone in the room with a mannequin not all of them will default to fucking it.
American Gods always felt stronger than this gore-focussed worldview .- the book especially, which loves humanity even as it feels weighed down by its failings. The show seemed to stray from this whenever it got too violent on screen for too long – and from the sound of things the entire season has been a long wander away from values it once seemed to cherish.
I imagine with this extra violence the ratings will still be high, because the sort of people who think its meaningful are lapping it up and telling all their friends.
People are complicated.
The beetle monologue from GOT also comes to mind. Everything that’s annoying as prestige television wrapped up in one little scene.
*about*
As you can see from my anecdata, all of life is terrible and people only ever struggle to survive. There. Wasn’t that entertaining. Art: it Is Challenging.
You get it.
Thank you. More than anything I’m just tired of grim and gritty.
Same. That’s why my favorite shows will always be those that are a bit more nuanced than that. They can showcase humanity’s flaws, but also its strengths. I can handle bleakness, with a purpose or with exceptional writing like in The Wire or The Leftovers (and they’ll still never be my favorites). But edgy nihilism for the sake of it with so-so writing? No thanks. Black Mirror, Westworld, and Mr. Robot all fall into that category for me. That is why Westworld will never be as good as Jonah Nolan’s other show. There’s no compelling story-just prestige tropes masquerading as one. Rant over.
As far as I’m concerned, one of the most interesting and thought-provoking takes on human morality I’ve seen on TV is ‘The Good Place’, a half-hour sitcom which describes time paradoxes with the words ‘Jeremy Bearimy’. It’s also a more hopeful take, which suggests that people tend towards the good as often as not, especially when provided with the time and space to explore their better natures.
The Good Place – along with a few other shows – is a hopeful sign that certain segments of creators have realize how limiting cynicism ultimately is as a format for adult television.
I enjoyed it.
I’m getting tired of their bullshit political commentary.
“It’s a true American atrocity, and a naked expression of the white supremacy lurking at the heart of the American narrative”
Though the fact that the same mob also lynched Henry Salzner, a white man, that same day might seem to complicate The Narrative.
No it doesn’t.
Man it sounds like this show has really strayed from the point of the novel…
Considering that I reread the novel and half of it is Shadow driving around and not having any clue what is going on while the interesting characters do things off-camera….I’d say it’s doing a great job of capturing how this is easily the dullest thing Neil Gaiman ever wrote.
Translation: The show offends my social justice warrior mentality and fails to conform to my leftist ideology, so the show is bad. Bad show! No treat for you!
It is always good to provide context. Lynchings of people in jail in the river towns of Illinois was at one point over 100 per year. This included black and white victims. “After James was dead, the mob returned to the jail and kidnapped Henry Salzner, a white photographer who was charged with murdering his wife with an ax. Salzner’s sentencing was scheduled to be held later that month, but the mob decided to serve their own justice first. Salzner was lynched and shot in the public square similarly to James. After the second lynching, shouting matches and minor looting gripped Cairo until the next morning when the Illinois National Guard implemented martial law and restoring order in the town.”
This episode was about Truth. The Baron asks Laura to give him a truth as payment, she has sex with him. The hidden Truth about the town is memorialized on the bodies of dead black men. The Truth is Laura doesn’t love Shadow Wednesday told her as much last episode she misses being alive. The Truth is exactly what happened between her and Sweeny was always going to happen it’s been simmering between them since they met. The Truth is Laura only loves Laura and she misses being alive because it’s the only thing she can miss because she’s actually had more life dead than she’s had while she was alive.
I would like to simply add that Orlando Jones is killin’ it this season. That guy can really weave a monologue with panache.
He’s come a long way fromMake 7Up Yours.
Now it’s make 7 – up yours, White Devil.
Dead wife and Mad Sweeney are just so completely uninteresting, I don’t understand what the point of the characters are. I know that Ian McShane and Orlando Jones are single-handedly keeping this show afloat via great acting, but I feel that there are better uses for the time they two characters take up.
I found this episode asking the hard question “Are black folk cursed by white ENVY?”. Centuries of white supremacist indoctrination have produced particularly women who will participate in white men’s fear of being ‘blacked’. I loved every minute of it
I was just curious what an ibis sounded like (considering the one of this show has a tendency to hoot like an owl) and I’m sorry I found this.
My home town is full of ibises, and I don’t think anyone ever refers to them as anything other than “bin chickens”.
According to the article “Illinois Mob Lynches Two Men” (see the link in the review), Froggy was just the first victim of that mob. This episode ignores a later, white victim (and another, black man) as well as the militia that must be called to restore the peace. It could have been interesting to compare and contrast the mob’s treatment of Froggy versus its treatment of the white victim or to explore more fully the intense energy of the mob run amok.
Mad Sweeney is quite pretty to behold.
Personally, I think you’re misreading the intention of this episode. My takeaway was not that of, “but what about black-on-black crime” as you put it, but one asking a group of people to remain silent no longer. It was showing how fear and position can cause complicity, and by not standing up against all those evil acts perpetrated upon those like you, that you risk becoming just another perpetrator. Maybe my experiences show me a different way to look at things, but this is not advice for any one race but all; the moment we turn a blind eye to the suffering of others we become part and parcel with those who would cause that suffering. With that in mind I think the purpose of the lynching scenes was clear as well; you were supposed to feel uncomfortable. You were suppose to feel unease at it’s length and gratuity. What ShadowMoon asked “Mr. Ibis” came with another silent question meant for those in the story, and the viewer watching from outside— it’s not just about the souls who are capable of enacting such violence on one another, but those who can stand by, watch, and do nothing.
I read the book (albeit a couple of years back) and loved the first series. But I’m really struggling to get a grip on the S2 narrative. The visuals and the acting are really all that’s keeping engaged. Shout out for Salim who quietly steals every scene he’s in.The theme of the lynching and the black community turning on itself is well, if violently done, but seems alien to my recall of the book. Also as a middle-aged white Brit, most of the social and historical nuance is probably flying straight over my pointy little head. One question: What was the missing ingredient from Baron Samedi’s ‘potion’ for Laura? and if she gets it (it seems as much metaphorical as tangible) will she I’ve again, or is the being scammed?I’m confused as fuck to be honest.
This British government propaganda movie falsely called “American Gods” is a British antiAmerican disarmament and depopulation propaganda movie with a fake promotional Wikipedia page falsely proclaiming it to be an American production made by Americans in America, one of many of these such antiAmerican movies coming out of Britain over the last several years, more than their usual British propaganda attacks on America. Fortunately, this British garbage junk filth export was never released, seen or heard of in America. Any sneaky surreptitious allies that the Britshit think they have in American media are being executed. This British propaganda movie garbage junk has no connection or relevance to anything American or to America, where the filthy lying pansy British placed the story and called it after. THE REAL AMERICAN GODS, along with THE REAL AMERICANS, will never watch it or hear of it. The British lose again, the only thing they know how to do.
I’m still not entirely sure what I thought of this episode. I thought like most, the acting is great, the effects pretty cool, etc. I wasn’t bored, but it’s really the first time I thought the show was running in place and not advancing anywhere. Odin, the Ifrit and Salim are, I suppose, since they took Gungnir to be fixed. That’s a next step in fighting the war, I imagine.I didn’t feel like the violence was fetishized, but maybe I’m wrong. It was gory, but then a lynching would be. As for the body of the white woman being sprawled, what else would it be? I suppose it could have been dumped in a trash can or something, but I didn’t think the pose was particularly wrong. The men who found the body would have seen what they wanted to no matter how she was positioned, because they simply wanted to kill Froggy and this gave them an excuse. (And if it’s a true story, maybe that is how she was found.)
I’m not sure I care for Mad Sweeney having feelings for Laura, but maybe it’s not that simple. She keeps saying she wants Shadow, but she doesn’t. I think she wants an ideal — loving someone, being loved back in a wholesome way — that she is not emotionally suited for or capable of. Maybe Sweeney is the same. Maybe he sees her single-minded devotion to Shadow and wishes someone felt like that about him.But I’ll always watch Mr. Nancy delivery a monologue in a snazzy suit.
So, now Emily is complaining that the show is showing violence? I dont know what else will she be complaining next week. really.By her pic, I assume she is not black, so I dont believe she knows whats she’s talking about. Maybe let other people be the herald of racism, people with real knowledge about this (I might be wrong).
Plus the comment section seems to be getting filled with complaints from people who aren’t even watching this show. I lost track of how many of the above were basically:“Sounds like the show is x and here’s why I’m above that”
I know this discussion is probably already dead, but I was catching up.
I think these points are important to make. One thing I don’t see mentioned though is that the episode was written by Rodney Barnes, a black man, and directed by Salli Richardson, a black woman. Does/should that make a difference? Certainly they had to follow story points mapped out for them (from the book I imagine—I’ve not read it—and from whoever was kinda sorta showrunner at the time they started this episode?) That said, I’m sure Richardson at anyway had *some* say in how graphically the lynching was depicted. Again, does her race make a difference? (I’m asking because… I really don’t know, but I think it must be relevant to the discussion).
Anyway I will say I did see episode 6, the “burlesque” episode (and with Broadway star Laura Bell Bundy singing Cole Porter!), and it was the first episode in a while that didn’t have me confused and/or bored. I’m not saying it was great, and maybe it was just all of the semi male and female nudity and burlesque routines, as well as focusing almost entirely on just a few characters, but, while perhaps faint praise, it actually was a fun episode for once, so there’s that I guess for those who haven’t seen it yet.
In actual fact, very little of this episode is from the book. There’s no mention of Froggie James in the novel, we never see any of Lila Goodchild’s family except her husband, Bilquis and Nancy are never in Cairo. Hard to say where this subplot came from, but it’s possible Barnes and Richardson introduced it. I do know that the real Cairo is, last I heard, pretty much a dying town, and it’s possible two black creatives took the opportunity of it being a location in the book to tell a story about collapsing black communities and the legacies of violence and oppression they deal with. (Then again, maybe not; I’m not here to put words into anyone’s mouths.)
Interesting. Then I think the issues in this review (which, it seemed to me, assumed that these depictions of violence and blacks were created by white people) gets more complex.
Yeah, I think that the episode writers were Black definitely adds a level of complexity, but the fact remains that the depiction of lynchings in this episode only cheapens the real life story from which it was inspired. You need a damn good reason to depict that type of violence in such graphic detail when its based on actual history, especially when that history is one that is widely misunderstood and regularly undermined.
At the risk of being that cranky guy always talking about the book, it keeps grating on me that scenes from the novel are continually taken and recontextualised in such baffling ways. In the novel, Shadow does indeed put a cut-throat razor to his neck, but he does it calmly, and in the context of being tired of all the weird shit that’s come into his life. There’s an implication that he’s not 100% in control of his actions, but also that he’s seriously – and dispassionately – considering suicide as a way out. Then Bast (as a cat) comes into the bathroom, even though Shadow was sure the door was closed, and he snaps out of it, choosing to just continue shaving. It’s an unsettling but quiet moment, and I’m not sure anything is added by turning it into a vengeful ghost encounter.
Don’t worry, all you black actors and black people working on the show, here comes the white woman reviewer to save you from yourselves! She knows far better than you if the show is racist or not. Whatever would us poor PeaOhSees do without the social justice of the White Feminist(tm) who writes about “gender” for a living!? Perhaps you should stick to cake, m’dear. It’s less triggering. (tho from your pic, looks like you should take that in a bit more moderation.)
This was a good goddamn recap. I just tuned in to the second season after excitedly devouring the first and suspected something was lost with the change in director. And you’ve hit the nail on the fucking head—this season has lost its conviction, a fact most evident in this egregiously staged episode.Compare this episode to Orlando Jones’s introduction as Anansi, inciting rebellion aboard a slave ship, and it becomes very clear how much integrity this series lost between the first season and the second.I literally searched for reviews of this particular episode looking for validation that the series had taken a deeply misguided turn. Thanks for confirming.
One thought I had (aside from how many Nazis are in these comment sections since Kinja happened) is that the Froggie James stuff makes a lot of sense if you think about him as another god. He’s the god of “black people getting murdered by racism” – the more often that happens, the more attention/worship/power he gets. Of course it’s fucked up and selfish, but he’s a god, that’s what they do. And the whole “it’s black on black violence, ‘Why would he curse his own people?’” thing isn’t mostly about black people or Froggie James – it’s a thematic thing. It’s about somebody besides Froggie James, a group of people besides black people.
Now whether or not it’s a good idea to use something horrific like a lynching as an analogy something else is a different question – is this Godwin’s Law? I dunno – I think I agree with the reviewer that it could be done fairly, but I’m not sure that I trust the showrunners to do so. On the other hand, the climax of the book involves something akin to a lynching, so maybe it’s a good decision to start talking about that in a serious, respectful manner now in order to lay the groundwork, and this is a good story decision in that sense.
This article reeks of white fragility. Lynchings, as you mentioned, are a painful facet of our past in America. They are also a painful facet of our present. In modern times, black Americans face police brutality and otherwise racially motivated acts of violence every. Single. Day. These acts are gory, they are barbaric, they happen to innocent people, and they are typically not brought to justice. Thus is born the spirit of fear that haunts black Americans. In this episode, the very real spirit of the fear of violence against black bodies is personified. A spirit we must live with every waking moment of our American lives. It was real, it was recognizable, and it might seem overblown or fetishized if it is only something you hear about in the news versus seeing it happen in your own community. If it makes you uncomfortable to watch for 45 minutes, imagine the very real terror that black Americans feel at all times. That’s the point of this episode.