#and from my removed by several degrees lane that would Just Feel Fucking Gross

[knowlesian]

a longer version of this is going to end up in my stede and ed meta (coming soon, i swear i just wanna be super careful and thoughtful on it) but like. it’s gonna kill me if i don’t say it.

“should they have just used made-up people without this historical baggage and real history” is a legit question to ask. it’s not a conversation i want to see white fans taking the lead on, but it’s a very important conversation to have.

the show has Done This, though, so speaking from the standpoint of the show being what it is (and making it clear that i’m not black, so my take on this from my indigenous people also fucked over by colonizers ancestry is from an adjacent lane and i also should not pretend i’m the authority here) is that since the show has been made how it is made: i just do not want to watch a romcom about a literal enslaver.

i might genuinely dip out if they did that! because look: i have seen that story. “grossest possible potential racist Learns To Be Good by like. fucking somebody they dehumanized on the most extreme possible level” is something white people loooooove in media. i don’t like it, i’m sort of bothered by the whole genre, and i’d hate to see ofmd fall into that pit.

and here’s the thing: i don’t think that means the show is ‘letting stede off the hook’, in the sense that his wealth 100000000000% comes from enslavement whether or not his family had the gall to think you can ever fucking legitimately buy and sell a human being. 

placing ‘should they even do it this way’ to the side for another very important talk to have, that’s one of the most interesting aspects of the show to me, in terms of how they’re handling very modern questions about racial power dynamics via a historical setting.

for context: i’m from the united states, where one of the most common arguments i hear about our history is ‘but my family never literally bought and sold somebody, so you can’t say they fought for enslavement’. i... hate even fucking typing that, because it feels so nakedly ignorant and hateful, but it’s important context here. 

because okay: let’s say stede (or his father) is not a literal enslaver. 

fine. how’d they make their fucking money anyway? this is the thing that’s harder to talk about: what about the people who owned ships needed to keep the whole thing going? the people who bet on the markets, the people who sold goods only obtained through enslavement, or even just the people who benefitted from the general system without obtaining the largest windfalls?

again: i think asking ‘should they have retooled a real enslaver�� is a valid question. but since they did, it begs the next question: should we hold stede to account for that anyway, even if we see the things that make him lovely as well? is he still a huge part of the problem, and does he need to actively fight against that world and cast away its benefits in order to keep from passively reaping its most horrific rewards?

ofmd seems to think the answer to all those questions is yes. and that’s part of what really interests me about the show, at all.