Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Orion
Some of the past decade’s best racial satires have explored the politics of sounding Black or, conversely, sounding white. In the 2018 Boots Riley film Sorry To Bother You, a Black telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) finds success at his workplace—if only to discover the pitfalls of capitalism—when he adopts a stereotypically “white” voice. There’s also the FX show Atlanta, which devoted much of its comedy to this idea of race as performance. In a particularly funny scene from Season 2, a white radio DJ implores Al (a.ka. Paper Boi, played by Brian Tyree Henry) to sound more “cool” while recording an advertisement. On his second take, the vexed rapper reads the script the exact same way but adds a forceful “n—a” at the end, to the DJ’s approval.
Five years later, this phenomenon, broadly referred to as code-switching, takes center stage in the new Oscar-buzzy film American Fiction. Directed and written by Emmy-winning TV creator Cord Jefferson, the film is a sendup of the Black trauma-porn industrial complex and the stereotypical images of Black people (criminal, downtrodden, inarticulate, etc.)
American Fiction (now in select theaters) has already won many prizes, including the People’s Choice Award at this year’s Toronto Film Festival where it premiered. Critics have called it “scathing,” “searing,” “biting,” and “sharp,” as they have with many recent films indicting white liberals. However, I failed to understand what was so supposedly brilliant about this movie, or how it moves a decades-long conversation about racial commodification forward. Is American Fiction really a revelatory work about being pigeon-holed as a Black artist, or is it an apologetic statement aimed at the ignorant, white consumers it attempts to lambast?