Saint X.

Okay, so I wouldn’t say I love this show. In fact, when I started it, I was kind of hate watching it maybe because who makes a show about a White woman getting assaulted and murdered by two Black men anymore? But as I’ve been studying representations of Blackness in American culture, I’ve been weirdly intrigued by bad representations. I’ve wondered how people go about portraying Black people badly and what the motives of this poor representation might be (fear? ignorance? something more sinister?).

So this show opens kind of like mad racist. A girl is traumatized by her sister’s murder in the Caribbean and is triggered by a Caribbean neighborhood she and her boyfriend moved to in Brooklyn. Truly, her White boyfriend asks if she wants him to walk her home from a bar before he heads to the office, and she says no, Flatbush is safe, and then immediately, as she’s walking home alone, gets catcalled by a Black man and runs into another one before hurrying home as fast as she can. The neighborhood is not safe because there are Black men in it and Black men killed her sister.

So yeah, I was not like loving it, to put it lightly, but the further you get in, the more (maybe) the show shows you that there’s a gap between the sentiment of the characters and the sentiment of the show. At one point, one character says something crazy racist and I vocally said to my TV, aghast, “How racist,” and then the TV said back, via another character, “How racist can you be?” So we were aligned maybe, me and whoever made this show, and if not completely, at least we could express the same sentiment sometimes, in the same words.

They also show the backstories of some of the people working in the Caribbean resort (including the alleged murderers) in a way that at least demonstrates that Black people aren’t solely props or objects of fear in this story. These flashbacks give them more depth (though I can’t say how accurate they are to actual Caribbean life) and so far seem to suggest that there’s probably more to the story than everybody knows.

I don’t know. I think I like (still wouldn’t say love) this show because it’s a little ballsy. I respect, maybe, White artists who address race in a messier way than the hyper-PC-ultimately-sometimes-flat way that some other artists do it. I think maybe there’s some understanding and humanness in having Black characters who are not wholly good or bad. (I’m thinking too of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.) I respect it maybe, the willingness to put some skin in the game, to make even your minority characters (hopefully not stereotypically) flawed, even if, inevitably, someone (me) will shriek at how wrong you’ve gone about it.

Image: Hulu