‘Atlanta’ Reminds White Audiences The Scariest Part Of Reparations Is Knowing Why They’re Owed
The episode asks the question: What would white people do if they finally had to pay the rent?
Season 3 of the award-winning series Atlanta is here and it’s once again reminding viewers why it’s one of the best shows on television.
The latest episode, titled ‘The Big Payback’, tells its own contained short story rather than following the series’ main characters. Written by Francesca Sloane, the episode imagines how society might change if Black people could sue white people for reparations relating to slavery.
Activists in the United States have been advocating for slavery reparations for many decades, and only recently have made some steps forward. A landmark task force was assembled in January of this year to recommend reparations payment schemes after a bill was passed through the California state government in 2020. Reparations put so-called Australia in world news over the last few years too: in 2021, a fund of $280 million dollars was set up to be established to compensate Mob affected by the Stolen Generations.
It’s in this slow, very recent trickle of social reckoning with colonial injustices against Black folks that Atlanta‘s latest episode establishes itself. The episode centres on Marshall Johnson (Justin Bartha), a working middle-class white man on the verge of divorce. When we meet him he’s listening to an NPR podcast, detailing a recent case in which a wealthy Tesla investor has been successfully sued out of millions by a Black man whose ancestors were enslaved by the investor’s ancestors. We hear on the podcast that the man won by arguing the investor’s wealth was a direct result of the enslavement of his ancestors.
Our protagonist Marshall shrugs off the news and its potential social ramifications, and even waves away his daughter’s anxiety over being called a racist at school. But the new reality catches up with him. A Black woman named Shaniqua Johnson (Melissa Youngblood) issues Marshall with a court document proving that his ancestors enslaved her own, and is now seeking compensation. It’s worth noting here that her last name being the same as his reflects the real phenomena of Black families sharing the surnames of their ancestor’s owners. Marshall refutes the claim, but it’s a brave new persistent world.
Shaniqua persues Marshall, camping outside his workplace and taking over his house. It’s over the top maybe, but a satirical nod to how a lot of people imagine reparations involve hostile homewrecking. Marshall’s wife divorces him to save her personal finances from taking a hit along with Marshall’s. “I’m Peruvian! This never would have happened to me!” she says as justification, but Marshall baulks at this. “You were white yesterday!” he shouts. It’s a great gag throughout the episode, white people scrambling to know their exact ethnicity as if it somehow makes them less complicit in enjoying the benefits of a society built on chattel slavery.
The episode comes to a climax as we find Marshall dejectedly drinking away his sorrows in the lobby of a cheap hotel. There he meets a fellow white man called Earnest who admits he’s “in the same boat”. It’s a meta sort of comment, as Earnest appears in the cold open of the season’s first episode as a fisherman. “Turns out [my grandad] had a lot of help and a lot of kids,” Earnest says to Marshall, explaining how the reparations shed light on the lie that his family was self-made. “Maybe it’s only right,” he says.
We talkin’ reparations? The Big Payback episode was incredible. There’s so much to unpack and the nuances made the story even more compelling. I love this show! #AtlantaFX pic.twitter.com/vnCZc5LzxS
— Rodney Coursey (@RodGSHH) April 10, 2022
But Marshall doesn’t agree. “I’m being fucked by some shit I didn’t even do,” he insists, saying neither of them deserves this. “What do they deserve?” Earnest replies. “For them, slavery is not past… It is not a mystery. It is not a historical curiosity. It is a cruel unavoidable ghost,” he says, and it’s here that the central tenet of the episode is made clear.
It would be easy to write off the episode as an oversimplified thought experiment. In the final sequence, Marshall is working as a waiter and paying a portion of his wage to restitution taxes, which doesn’t offer acknowledgement of how mass individual reparations claims would complicate existing systems of debt. Indeed it would be almost unreasonable for any episode to achieve such an explanation in 30ish minutes.
Instead, ‘The Big Payback’ very specifically illustrates the white reactionary pushback against reparations.
Instead, ‘The Big Payback’ very specifically illustrates the white reactionary pushback against reparations. And most importantly, the episode uses the voices of white people to explain exactly why such pushback is just another example of entitlement. When Earnest combats Marshall’s resentment at having to pay Shoniqua with the simple question, “and what do they deserve?” he reminds Marshall and the Atlanta audience that reparations are compensation for unimaginable undeserved harm and ongoing disenfranchisement of Black people.
Atlanta has a large audience that includes white folks like Marshall Jackson who don’t think of themselves as racist on a day-to-day basis. People who, nevertheless, would still likely baulk at the prospect of paying reparations and actually reckoning with the ramifications of slavery. This episode of Atlanta is for those people. It is taking the hands of those who believe they’re removed from a nebulous history and shows them that, regardless of their day-to-day beliefs, those hands are bloodied.
‘The Big Payback’ makes a show of white guilt, fragility and entitlement, portraying almost bombastically how Black folks claiming reparations would feel like horror for white people. But then, from white people’s own mouths, reminds audiences that the real horror is why reparations are owed in the first place.
Atlanta is streaming on SBS on Demand.
Merryana Salem (they/them) is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster on most social media as @akajustmerry. If you want, check out their podcast, GayV Club where they yarn about LGBTIQ media. Either way, they hope you ate something nice today.