Sticking to the same narrative?

American Fiction (2023)

Screenplay & Direction: Cord Jefferson

It seems that we have not changed much since our days as cavemen. Imagine living exposed in a world so hostile we would have tried to understand the unusual things around us. We continued compartmentalising the living and non-living things amongst us even when we became hunter-gatherers, farmers or city dwellers. By compartmentalising everyone in boxes, we thought we had our defences up to remind us which one of them was friends and which were potentially harmful. Gone are club-carrying or sabre-rattling days, but these classifications helped somewhat.

The Chinese viewed anyone non-Huns as barbaric. So did the Greeks, Persians and Arabs. During the mercantile era, the dark-skinned were labelled as God-sanctioned slaves. 

In the USA, post-Civil War America assumed that the emancipated slaves were ill-prepared to fit into modern society. They expected them to remain the subservient ones. They were prevented from getting into mainstream business, education and even usage of common public amnesties. In their own stride, the Blacks did prosper. Records showed the presence of significant numbers of black entrepreneurs and millionaires all through the late 19th century. There were pockets of prosperous descendants of slaves. Such a vicinity was Tulsa in Oklahoma. Like the Osage Nation, there were abundant automobile-owning, well-suited professionals there. Tulsa was fondly called ‘The Black Wall Street’ because of the burgeoning business activity there. 

Resentment was building up there. They could not fathom a subjugated community doing well. So when a white shop assistant cried foul when a black man allegedly pulled her hand. There were many versions of what transpired there, from a lover’s quarrel to miscommunication. Before the due legal process could take its course, the mob decided that he should be lynched and the black residents needed to be torched. It resulted in much property damage and about 600 lives lost. 

It is a cognitive dissonance. The majority wants to continually stereotypically paint the marginalised as the downtrodden, irreparable group of people forever trapped in the loop of melancholy, tragedy and hopelessness. They assume the marginalised groups will be stuck in the muck forever without recourse for improvement. Well, there is news for them. Collectively, many have leapfrogged from their Sisyphus-like struggles and bootstrapped themselves to prosperity. 

But the world is stuck in its own ways. By adhering to their old narratives, the non-marginalised ones give a pat to themselves, thinking that they are serving the marginalised by bringing their plight to the fore. The truth is that that is a fiction, The American Fiction. The liberals believe that representation among minorities is only valid if the narrative follows a preset traditional stereotype. Any deviation from this would nullify the voice of the majority. The reality is that the world has changed, but not the thinking of some. 

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