Despite HBO going into full crisis management mode to address the outrage over the announcement of its racially charged new series, Confederate, the backlash continues to build. Last week, HBO announced the new series, which imagines an alternate history in which the South successfully secedes and maintains slavery into the present day. The reaction was certainly not what HBO expected. Rather than celebrating the new series, many on the left strongly condemned the “slavery fan fiction,” citing the fact that the two creators of the show are white as a big part of the problem.
Now, AP reports, the social justice activists behind the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag movement have started a new one that has “caught fire”: #NoConfederate.
A social media campaign to derail HBO’s planned modern-day Southern slavery drama quickly caught fire, prompting the cable channel to ask detractors to withhold judgment until they see “Confederate.”
The campaign, with “OscarsSoWhite” activist April Reign among its organizers, asked people to tweet to HBO with the hashtag “NoConfederate” during Sunday’s broadcast of the channel’s “Game of Thrones.”
As The Daily Wire reported last week, HBO’s teaser announcement revealed that its star producers, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (pictured below), were helming the racially loaded series. Here is the original announcement describing the “alternate timeline” piece that HBO surely believed would be met with high praise from the social justice left:
CONFEDERATE chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.
Instead of increasing its “woke” creds, like it certainly believed the new series would, HBO has been met with widespread furor.
“It is exhausting to think of how many people at HBO said yes to letting two white men envision modern day slavery. And offensive,” tweeted author Roxanne Gay. She also penned a brutal piece for The New York Times titled “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction”:
It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed.
“Give me the confidence of white showrunners telling HBO they wanna write slavery fanfic,” tweeted journalist Pilot Viruet.
Ira Madison III blasted the series in a piece for the Daily Beast titled “The ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators’ Next Show Sounds Stupid as Hell“:
This is white nonsense. … Even if we ignore the fact that this sounds a hell of a lot like the present — Klan membership and hate crimes in America are on the rise, the prison industrial complex is basically the government’s substitute for slavery, and Bo, Luke, and Daisy Duke are far from the only ones repping the Confederate flag — white people love to imagine a world where “the Confederacy won.” It’s been the subject of many pieces of fiction, from “If the South Had Won the Civil War” to “The Confederate States of America.” But Americans barely know enough about what actually happened during slavery as is, so how about HBO just pick up the canceled series “Underground” instead of this?
Charles Pulliam-Moore also wrote a scathing response for Gizmodo: “The Problem With HBO’s Confederate Is That the Legacy of Slavery Isn’t an Alt-History Fantasy, It’s Our Reality“:
What is there to be learned from seeing black people being enslaved, brutalized, and exploited that we can not already glean from our actual historical record? What is there to be learned about being born into a system in which you are at an immediate social disadvantage that we can’t already cull from decades’-worth of statistical analyses of black peoples’ economic lives? Though black people are now free in America, in very profound and devastating ways, we are still dealing with the fallout of enslavement that manifests itself in a variety of forms systemic inequality. These aren’t the trappings of an alt-history prestige drama. They are our realities.
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HBO has been scrambling to put out the firestorm, particularly by stressing that two black writers/producers (husband and wife team Malcolm and Nichelle Tramble Spellman) are involved in the project, but so far the network’s crisis management team has failed to stop the mounting outrage.
In response to the new hashtag movement, HBO issued a statement Sunday once again stressing that two
African-Americans are helping steer the show.
“We have great respect for the dialogue and concern being expressed around ‘Confederate,’” reads the statement. “We have faith that Nichelle, Dan, David and Malcolm will approach the subject with care and sensitivity. The project is currently in its infancy so we hope that people will reserve judgment until there is something to see.”
HBO’s next sure thing is looking less and less like a sure thing.
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