If episode 5 was about the spectrum of racism, and how it is applied to black bodies, then episode 6 brings us right back to the Emorys and how their lives are falling apart.

The family move through this episode in some sort of fugue state, one moment bright and vibrant and living life, focused on what they want and in the next at the mercy of some dreamlike event populated by spectres and meaning which elsewhere would be the signs of mental health breakdown.

Are we seeing the entire family, one by one, experiencing their own breakdowns? It would seem a possibility, one driven by experiences they are suffering from every moment of every day. Yet the show is clear there is something deeper happening to them and to their entire neighbourhood.

I wrote in another, earlier, review I feared for the whole neighbourhood and not simply for the Emorys and this episode slowly starts to uncover the toll everyone is going to pay.

Events here, the specific plot of the episode, are coherent in the larger story yet they continue to do the work seen in episode 4. Namely the provocations placed in Lucky and Henry’s way are structured as the kind of reactions we have in our gut when I experience racism.

I have stood in the face of prejudice and wanted to lash out, to destroy that which seeks to belittle me and to make me feel less than human. I have also felt the pressure to be less me, to be more White, on the understanding that if only I was more like the White people around me the more accepted I would be and the less trouble I would have. It is something I struggled with all through my teenage years, Just like Ruby.

When people say “I don’t see colour”, what they are really saying is they don’t want to be in situations where they are forced to acknowledge it. That inevitably puts the pressure on me as a person of colour to be more like them lest I provoke them into seeing what really separates us. Of course it is important to say, what separates us does not necessarily divide us, but when someone says they do not see what is plainly before their face, they are really saying they cannot separate the two, If there are differences then there are divisions and we do not belong together. It is a failure of imagination and compassion, even if in most cases I can spend my time explaining why that doesn’t have to be the case. Yet to do that, I need to have the emotional and intellectual resources available to be able to articulate what I want others to understand. In other words, as a person who is not White, I have to do all the work.

Sometimes it is easier just to become invisible, to try to be as much like those around me as possible even if it means destroying who I am inside.

The show talks a little here about the nature of colourism, that thread within non-White society (and I’ve experienced it Indian culture too) where a community, for numerous reasons, internalises its own prejudice around what colour skin is most desirable. Lo and behold it is nearly always pale skin which is lauded.

The provocation to destroy, to push back, is really the emotional outburst which comes when the space you have in which you can exist gets made smaller and smaller by increments, violent or otherwise, but have you in a tiny little box where you cannot do anything curl up in the foetal position. For any human being living such a life it’s unsustainable. A sudden violent cathartic outburst it’s not only understandable, it is inevitable. The racist, like all abusers and oppressors, understands this trajectory and typically weaponises it against the abused. Using that outburst as a tool by which to further the oppression saying, “See I was right you cannot be trusted, these harsh measures are for your own good because look you have violent tendencies the rest of us do not have.”

Verdict: Episode 6 reminds us there is only so far you can push people before they break and in the breaking push back or simply disappear. It is a lesson abusers know all too well but we, as those who suffer or fight back on behalf of others, need to remember much more clearly than we do. The episode ends with fighting back and although we know there will be hell to pay, we cannot but cheer.  

Rating? 7 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston