A flashback to when the Emorys leave North Carolina.

Episode 5 is a watershed. None of the events shown here take place in the current timeline even if they do involve Lucky and Henry. The show discusses red lining; a real life process by which White Americans, Financiers, Insurers, Healthcare and just about every kind of public institution moved to isolate, impoverish and demonise Black families as they tried to become homeowners like their White neighbours.

It is one of the most disgusting and repulsive strategies used by White people and the authorities representing them to deliberately target non-White people for suppression and suffering. It is also 100% real and its legacy haunts us through today with ample evidence that despite laws designed to make these kinds of activity illegal, they continue to be used to exploit the black community.

The show dramatizes a meeting in which financiers discuss how they are going to exploit the desire of working Black families to make new lives for themselves with the end result that they explicitly hope these people become impoverished. What is startling is this entire cycle ran itself again through the American sub-prime mortgage scandal in which just about exactly the same drivers and prejudices were used to disproportionately exploit the Black working and middle-class. Although post-2008 the banks were heavily fined, and these kinds of loans made illegal, no one went to prison because this wasn’t seen as systemic prejudice at work but a failure of markets instead. Which is a very different type of crime.

We see how it takes an entire web of people to deliver on this kind of racism –including sales agents, police officers, financiers, service providers and public officials. How many of these people were deliberately racist is difficult to say; many of them were trying to do their own jobs according to the rules they’d been given even if that meant they knew other people would suffer as a result. This is the problem with institutional racism, not that it is deliberately trying to oppress, but that it can turn people who are not racist or malicious into agents who act racist because that is what the rules make them do. I come across people who fail to understand this frequently – believing that it requires racist people to create institutional racism rather than seeing that ordinary people can do bad things if the rules say to do them.

Alongside this presentation of institutional racism, a kind of prejudice which cannot easily be exposed dramatically because of its corporate nature, we have an extended flashback in which we learn what really happened to the Emorys.

It is one of the most harrowing and grim sequences I have ever seen, and I do not know how I feel afterwards. Make no mistake this is horrible. I am not even sure it is horror but it is certainly horrible.

Which raises the question, can such a sickening sequence of events presented in all their nastiness be anything but a type of pornography, designed to titillate us in the turning of our stomachs?

Is this just Black suffering as entertainment?

And if it is, should we reject it wholesale?

The evil in this episode is humanity. There is no reason given beyond perverse joy at watching others suffer and suffer they do.

One cannot watch them without having already engaged with the fact this is the story of a Black family and their suffering both at the hands of ordinary people and a supernatural agent.

Yet episode  coming halfway through the series feels like a culmination, like a point beyond which things cannot get worse, but we know there’s more to come and it is this as much as the horror on screen which is left me feeling like I needed to have a wash.

The argument against this just being black suffering as entertainment is the truth behind these events. Not that these specific events occurred but that others so close as to be indistinguishable really did happen. Are we to turn our heads away and pretend they did not happen because it is too difficult to watch?

Should this really be the way we become educated about the truth of these kinds of persecution happening in a country such as the United States?

What is the relevance to us today where many such forms of institutional racism continue to be protected and nurtured (just see voter suppression bills being legislated right now)?

It must be said – the show is not titillating. There are no scantily clad blonde teenagers being hunted by dei ex machina. There is no joy here, no delight in suffering except by those carrying it out on screen. We see this from the victim’s point of view and it is harrowing.

You leave episode 5 knowing that whatever Betty and her cohort do they will not be able to deliver something as bad as what the Emorys have already survived.

I remain uncertain, left floundering by this episode. I am deeply moved in ways I do not want to articulate because of the feelings they provoke. In that sense this is proper horror.

It is going to stay with me for a long time. Not just the events but the cast of them, of how it was White upon Black violence, designed to destroy, to break, and seen here in contrast to the corporate evil of institutional racism as seen through red lining.

Black lives in America, oppressed at both the individual level and by the system itself, and the willingness of White people to partake both in individual acts of racism and to support a system like the one presented here remains a canker and a sore which this show perfectly illustrates.

Verdict: It is not quite seamless, as the structure of two threaded flashbacks shows, but I am struggling to think of a more perfectly distilled presentation of the evil of racism at all levels in society.

Rating? 10 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston

Them is streaming now on Amazon Prime.

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