HBO’s planned drama series, Confederate sparked a fierce backlash organized by April Reign, creator of the Twitter campaign #OscarsSoWhite. During a recent tweetstorm, I, well, tweeted up a storm. This tweet got the most response.

Some draw a comparison between HBO’s alternate-history and Amazon Studio’s Black America. But that’s like comparing apples and oranges. The differences between the two creative teams are more than skin deep.

The creators of Confederate, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, are in thrall with an evergreen racist fantasy that the South won the Civil War. Their “vision” is ripped from the headlines.

Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members rallied in Charlottesville to “take America back.” They were protesting the planned removal of a statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park. For HBO, reality bites. The audience for its “alternate” history was on full display this weekend.

In the unrepentant South, black bodies were used and abused. For HBO showrunners, that’s entertainment.

In contrast, the creators of Black America, Will Packer and Aaron McGruder, envision an alternate history in which emancipated slaves received reparations in the form of their own sovereign states. From Deadline:
It envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny. The sovereign nation they formed, New Colonia, has had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with its looming “Big Neighbor,” both ally and foe, the United States. The past 150 years have been witness to military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc. Today, after two decades of peace with the U.S. and unprecedented growth, an ascendant New Colonia joins the ranks of major industrialized nations on the world stage as America slides into rapid decline. Inexorably tied together, the fate of two nations, indivisible, hangs in the balance.
Black Americans have sought reparations since Reconstruction. At the start of every Congress since 1989, Congressman John Conyers Jr. has introduced H.R. 40 which calls for a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans. The bill number recognizes the unfulfilled promise to give freed slaves 40 acres and a mule.
When I was a student, I met civil rights leader Floyd McKissick, the founder of Soul City.

Soul City was a multi-racial community in Warren County, North Carolina developed and managed by African Americans. The project was supported by then-President Richard Nixon and financed by $14 million in loans guaranteed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a 2016 story, The Guardian reported:
Soul City was born under the federal government’s Model Cities programme, which began in 1966. A plank in President Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts, it funded housing, employment, infrastructure and planning. Of the programme’s 14 new developments, Soul City was the only one to be built from scratch, with no pre-existing infrastructure – and the only one by a black developer.
Although Soul City failed, McKissisk’s vision was about “the freedom to shape their own destiny.” HBO’s Confederate is destined to fail. In the name of a resurgent Confederacy, an American was killed and 19 injured. Charlottesville was White Privilege literally run amok. #NoConfederate
Like this:
Like Loading...