Who are today’s ‘Black’ films and TV shows really for? | Tayo Bero

Works like Them and Two Distant Strangers offer up different brands of Black trauma - and Black audiences are over it

Mainstream media is saturated with Black death and suffering. Between real-time images of Black people being killed by police and the violence that is enacted against them in subsequent protests, Black folk are exhausted. So when the two newest projects dedicated to depicting racial violence in America were first unveiled, Black audiences were, understandably, pissed. In both Netflix's Two Distant Strangers and the Prime Video original series Them, we are subjected to the same gratuitous use of violence that is quickly becoming the norm in Black film and television.

Them, a suburban race horror about a Black family that is confronted with both supernatural resistance and good ol' 50s racism when they move into an all-white Compton neighborhood, fits right in with other civil rights-era works like The Help and Green Book, but is much more violent. Aside from the obvious and hugely problematic connections to Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film Us, viewers will also have to contend with gruesome sexual assault, a drawn-out child murder scene, and a near-lynching that was so agonizing I had to skip through much of it.