Donald Glover Can’t Save You By Tad Friend ℅ The New Yorker

Photographs by Awol Erizku

Key Insights

On the responsibility of white privilege and the apathy of Black vision:

I asked Glover if there was a possibility, given his belief that the black experience was more interesting—albeit far more painful—than the white experience, that White Donald wouldn’t have ended up where Black Donald has. Very softly, he said, “Would you rather be a person who has all the opportunities but can’t see them? Or a person who can see all the opportunities but can’t have them?” Probably the latter, I said. You? “Yeah, there’s something beautiful about being able to see it all.”

“If I gave a dog an iPhone, it couldn’t use it, because a dog doesn’t have an opposable thumb—that’s true of everything made for white people. I can say there’s a problem, you can all laugh at it, but it has to be a group of you guys who change it, because it was made by and for you.” He went on, “In a weird way, I feel bad for white people. You guys have put yourselves in the adult position, but you refuse to see it—you’re so lazy. Paying reparations is realistic, but you just don’t want to do it, so you don’t let yourself see how things are. So, yeah, I can’t help you anymore.”

On commodifying Blackness and white approval of Black experiences:

I asked Glover how our conversations would be different if I were black. He gave me a considering look. “We’d have a language we both understood, and you’d know me better,” he said. “But as Black Tad you’d only be in a position of talking to me because you were good at placating a white audience. As a black person, you have to sell the black culture to succeed. So I’d try to trust Black Tad, but it’s really up to him whether he’d sell us out.”

For the moment, he suggested, white America likes seeing itself through a black lens. “Right now, black is up, and so white America is looking to us to know what’s funny.” In “Get Out,” a blind white art dealer tells Chris, a black photographer whose body has been auctioned off for use by whites, “I want your eye, man—I want those things you see through.”

Glover nodded. “If black people had made that movie [12 years a slave],” he said, “they wouldn’t focus on the evil white dude, Michael Fassbender, but on Cumberbatch, who knows slavery is wrong, but who still takes advantage of it—which makes him the more painful, horrible monster. On our show, we sometimes have a problem with white actors playing what they think we want them to be: the villain. But it’s more painful if you think you’re not the villain.” Returning to the film, he said, “And there definitely wouldn’t be a Brad Pitt character who comes in and saves the black guy and makes white people feel good about themselves.” A low murmur came from the den. Didn’t black people actually make “Twelve Years a Slave”? “Yeah,” Glover said. “But in the white system.”

Even before the first season aired, he declared, “The second season of ‘Atlanta’ will be a classic.” But he’d also told me, “A lot of this season is me proving to people that I didn’t get those Emmys just because of affirmative action.” At Glover’s birthday party, in September, he and Brian Tyree Henry had a loud exchange about the topic. “It was just rage,” Henry told me. “Because at the end of the day, after we win all these Emmys and get all this love, as soon as the show is over we’re just niggas to you.”

Glover said, “To Brian, the basic fact that white people don’t want their feelings hurt so we have to make everything palatable to them is really upsetting.”

“Blackness is always seen through a lens of whiteness—the lens of what white people can profit from at that moment. That hasn’t changed through slavery and Jim Crow and civil-rights marches and housing laws and ‘We’ll shoot you.’Whiteness is equally liquid, but you get to decide your narrative.”

He’d lost the key to his superpower: the invisibility suit that allowed him to be black in black settings and white enough in white settings, to be the unseen seer. “You walk into the party and realize you are the party,” he said. “It’s ‘The only reason I invited all these people is because I hoped you’d come.’ So then it’s just work for me—and, if it’s work, you should pay me. Loyalty becomes math: Does this person live and die by how much money I make? Does this person have children with me and do they care about those children? The equation hasn’t been proved wrong yet. I can count on two fingers the people who actually love me.

On cognitive diversity and multi-disciplinary creativity:

Comedy didn’t allow him to express the sadness he’d begun to feel—about race, about fame, about simply being human—so he turned to music.

Glover explained his periodic career changes by saying, “Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.”

“I am complicated, though. People expect me to be one thing—‘You’re a musician!’ ‘You’re a comedian!’ ‘You’re a coon!’—and I was just feeling high and pinned down.” He feels constantly watched but rarely seen.

On poverty and the Black experience:

Referring to a moment when one old friend robs another, Glover said, “That scene is so sad to me. That’s what it is when you’re at the bottom—there’s a knife between you, and whoever doesn’t pick up the knife is going to die.”

“Atlanta” is oddly akin to “Black Mirror”: both shows suggest that life is out of control. On “Atlanta,” it’s not technology that’s the catalytic element, the intensifier of our predilection for self-delusion and misery—it’s racism and poverty.

On the psychology of workplace diversity:

Zazie Beetz had told me that she’s often cast for her light skin, as “a pop of color” in a role that could go to a white actress, and that she knew some fans of “Atlanta” had wanted Van to be darker-skinned. “I don’t know if I was cast off of talent instead of look,” she said. “That’s my insecurity.” Glover said that it was talent. “But I was also, like, ‘People are going to feel that way about her—and they should.’ We have to show the consequences.” He noted that his own skin color had surely influenced his career, beginning with his first job, as a writer on “30 Rock.” “I wondered, Am I being hired just because I’m black?” Tina Fey, the show’s creator and star, told me that the answer was in large part yes; she admired Glover’s talent but hired him because funds from NBC’s Diversity Initiative “made him free.”

On using art to share information:

Stefani Robinson: “So you know better but you’re keeping the truth quiet—doesn’t that make you complicit?”

“A coward, you mean?” Glover said. “No, it makes me human. All we’re here to do is survive and procreate, pass on our information.”

“I tell stories because that’s the best way of spreading information,” he said. “We’re all tricking and toying and playing with each other’s senses to affect this thing hidden inside our skulls.” He drew a circle in the air, then jabbed a finger, trying to penetrate it. “That’s what Earn is trying to do with Alfred—tell him a story so he can get into his understanding and make him do what he wants.”

On finding your superpower by knowing your weaknesses:

Glover said that he thinks of reality as a program and his talent as hacking the code: “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm.” Grasping the machine’s logic had risks. “When people become depressed and kill themselves, it’s because all they see is the algorithm, the loop,” he said. But it was also exhilarating. When he was ten, he said, “I realized, if I want to be good at P.E., I have to be good at basketball. So I went home and shot baskets in our driveway for six hours, until my mother called me in. The next day, I was good enough that you wouldn’t notice I was bad. And I realized my superpower.”

Glover said he took the role because “I learn so much. I learn how Marvel movies work, how to handle guest stars, how to make execs happy when they come on set. I gain some of your power. Only now I’m running out of places to learn, at least in America.”

I wasn’t worried that I was going to shit the bed. I was only worried how people might take it, that I was just coming in as the creator and assuming I could be a director. I don’t look at what they do as easy.” He grinned, slowly. “I just look at what they do.”

Is there anything you’re bad at? “To be honest, no. Probably just people. People don’t like to be studied, or bested.” He shrugged. “I’m fine with it. I don’t really like people that much. People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, Oh, he thinks he’s the golden flower of the black community, thinks he’s so different.” He laughed. “But I am, though! I feel like Jesus. I do feel chosen. My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work—but I don’t know if humanity is worth it, or if we’re going to make it. I don’t know if there’s much time left.”

On external perceptions altering place and purpose:

Growing up, Donald was light-skinned and sunny, and his friends were the white kids at his school for the performing arts; Stephen was darker-skinned and stoic, and his friends were the bused-in black kids at his school, which was not for the performing arts. The relationship between Earn and Alfred—the darker-skinned relative who plaintively says, “I scare people at A.T.M.s! I have to rap!”

“My consciousness began to change when I hung out with Steve as an adult, because he’s scarier to white people. It made me super-black.”

On risk and the unreasonably high stakes of Black experimentation:

“Creative risk, for black sitcom creators, still felt unfairly risky. Issa Rae told me that when she co-created and starred in the HBO sitcom “Insecure,” about two black women friends in Los Angeles, she knew that “if it didn’t work I’d have closed a door for a lot of other people. It had to be great.” Even now that “Black-ish” is in its fourth season, Barris wonders if he dares to introduce what on a white show would be a standard device: a black-and-white dream episode. He said, “Every time you do something and it fails, it’s not just an episode of television that didn’t work—you have failed the culture.”

On the subtext to “cool” Black culture:

Tay-K was sixteen and on the run for murder when he made this song. It’s a real Jesse James story.” He pulled up Tay-K’s photo on his phone as “The Race” began to boom. Glover said, “Look at this kid! He’s a baby! He never had a chance! Y’all are forgetting what rap is. Rap is ‘I don’t care what you think in society, wagging your finger at me for calling women ‘bitches’—when, for you to have two cars, I have to live in the projects.”

“I don’t even want them laughing if they’re laughing at the caged animal in the zoo,” he said. “I want them to really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America. People come to ‘Atlanta’ for the strip clubs and the music and the cool talking, but the eat-your-vegetables part is that the characters aren’t smoking weed all the time because it’s cool but because they have P.T.S.D.—every black person does. It’s scary to be at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole, and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging! We’ll reach God soon!’

Full Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/donald-glover-cant-save-you