Racism and horror fantasy bleed into each other
In an episode of Lovecraft Country (an HBO series that blurs the line between classic horror fantasy and the reality of white supremacy in the United States), Leti, who is pregnant, travels back in time to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921. Once there, Leti witnesses the destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” by a white mob that beat and murdered hundreds of African American residents and destroyed property worth tens of millions of dollars in what was, at the time, the country’s wealthiest Black community.
In one of the most striking film portrayals of empathy that I have ever seen, Leti, who is protected from harm by a magic spell, stays with the woman who will be (or already is) the great-grandmother of Leti’s baby, holding her hand as she perishes in agony in the fire set by the mob. A young African American from 1950s Chicago, Leti already knows all she needs to know about the horrors that racism and white supremacy daily visit on Black people and Black communities. She does not need the further education that bearing witness to the Tulsa Massacre provides. After all, she has already seen the brutalized body of Emmett Till laying in an open casket in a Chicago church, survived repeated confrontations with a racist police commander who is one of the leaders of a secret order, and imagined or dreamed nightmarish visions of lynchings and murderous assaults.
Arguably for African Americans, it is no more possible to hide from empathy than it is to hide from the deliberate and casual brutalities of life in a racist society. Black folks do not need to watch Lovecraft Country to learn lessons that they already know. But white folks need to watch Lovecraft Country and open their hearts to everything it teaches.
