It’s part of the Slave Playization of Black entertainment. Trauma bonding as the only means of connecting to the audience. It’s pure pseudoconnection and pseudoinsight imo https://twitter.com/mrgartrelle/status/1318173983964004353

If you look at how the creators of these works always discuss their own work it’s always “process,” “unpack” and other trauma and therapy conferred language. The only thing they can do is drag you through trauma porn then offer low insight pseudotherapy through homework after

These people can’t generate real connection, empathy or insight with a Black audience like an August Wilson or a Charles Fuller. All they can do is force a trauma bond then offer pseudo insight or pseudo therapy. Sl*ve Pl*y had for example attendants to process with in lobby...

...after the show. And a homework list to read. Lovecraft similar has an official podcast that is pure pseudotherapy and has a homework list to read as well. It even tells you up front it’s there to help you “process”

One thing I’ve always asked people who attacked me about the play on here who told me it gave them a lot to unpack or process, is “after you did process what did you learn” and they either can’t say and get mad or say something super banal...

...like “white people need to listen to Black people more or better” or “white supremacy creates intergenerational trauma we’re still working out today”...”slavery was worse than history books says@ who doesn’t know that? It’s 101-level insight.

A breakthrough in therapy is a deep insight or realization that happens so suddenly that it actually borders on or is full blown traumatic. It’s more succinctly traumatic insight. Hopefully when the trauma wears off you’re left with the insight. These works do pseudo-breakthrough

They lead the audience through all this trauma bonding via images of trauma porn, then couple it with a lot of 101-level glib insights from pop-academia particularly pop-intersectionality and pop-Afropessimism and from pop-psychology, all of which are shallow pseudo-insights

However the combination of the trauma bonding and the pseudo-insights created the superficial sensation of having just experienced a breakthrough. You feel like you’ve just had trauma paired with insight. It’s a very canny trick. However when it wears off it’s actually nothing

It’s worse than just offering nothing, it offers you a placebo that it pretends will cure you https://twitter.com/snbatman/status/1318221156751650817

I know I’m using the word pseudo a lot but it really is totally a pseudo world it’s the only word that fits. But they traffic in pseudo-breakthrough. They combine trauma but with pseudoinsight to produce pseudo-breakthroughs. Fake traumatic insights

White liberals love trauma bonding with Black people because they feel that’s our expertise. That we are suffering experts who they can lean on to teach them how to deal with suffering since we are so used to it. Also it’s the only way they can feel any connection with us at all

...white liberals can only relate to Black people via trauma and trauma bonding or as entertainment or sensual experience. These works combine all three and are catnip to them. Meanwhile Black liberals just want to bond with white people at all costs to get a seat at the table...

...so if it is to be via trauma bonding so be it. Better than being on the outside looking in

O’Harris once asked me why I don’t just ignore the play and am being such a hater. He told one of his critics @TorraineWalker the same last night. It’s because it’s not a one and done thing. It’s going to be incentivized and the new normal esp. after those 12 Tony nominations...

...and we’re seeing it also in so many new works coming out like Antebellum and Lovecraft Country. It even shows in things like Watchmen, which is made by the same type of white and Black liberal.

It’s hard to just ignore cuz it goes beyond any one work. It started before the play and the play is biggest propaganda volley in accelerating and normalizing it yet. In addition to all the Tonys it will win, the Hooded Justice episode of Watchmen is an example of same ethos

Cord Jefferson won an Emmy for Hooded Justice episode of Watchmen and it had same Slave Play themes (black Hooded Justice has an illicit sexual affair with white clueless Captain Metropolis, who like white lovers in Slave Play can’t empathize and is racist)...look at him discuss

same therapy talk, intergenerational trauma, the play’s creator is big fan, would not be surprised if Jefferson himself saw the play, it’s all just one giant wave. As they all win more awards for this stuff it’s just going to incentivize next wave of black creatives to imitate it

The Emmett Till episode of Lovecraft Country was another example of this ethos and aesthetic infiltrating Black art. Ruby leaves Emmett Till’s funeral to indulge in some more of that BDSM-tinged sex and race play (literally) with her white lover and then lectures her...

...about how she can’t understand her pain as a Black person and then Christine the white woman volunteers to undergo an extreme trauma roleplaying therapy in order to feel the racial pain her Black lover wants her to feel. Just like Slave Play...

...now we can’t even dramatize the inciting incident of the whole civil rights movement without this bdsm self loathing racial psychosexual rot infecting it too. We’re training a generation of Black creatives have their kink and striving be only way to connect to anything

Oh another example...Harriet Tubman movie created a fictitious dreamy white masterbae who is smitten with Harriet and has some weird psychosexual bond with her that keeps him infatuated and she herself seems to have some weird trauma bond...totally invented Slave Play plot line

Another reason for using trauma bonding based on preexisting intergenerational trauma as a narrative technique is it’s a cheat or shortcut to generate false connection to the flat characters and dilemmas these people create https://twitter.com/behembaba/status/1313365950520061952

Like @Behembaba points out, these people can’t really characterize Dee with depth on Lovecraft Country to earn an emotional connection but they can evoke Emmett Till’s funeral then tell you Dee was his best friend and trick you into transferring your emotional response to Dee..

So the trauma bonding is something that makes you recall an emotional response you already have to something else and then associate it to the work you’re watching although the work you’re watching didn’t really even earn it, but just borrowed it from well known people and events

...it’s why Lindelof’s HBOMen and Lovecraft Country borrows from Tulsa massacre and Lovecraft injects Emmett Till. As opposed to Fences and A Soldier’s Story which can tap into all the same issues and traumas strictly using the characters and conflicts generated within the work

However when it’s time to use the historical traumas they draw from to insert their own hard earned insights, they can’t extrapolate it into any type of positive vision of Black liberation politics, just boring assimilationist lifestyle issues and personal melodrama...

This is why the only thing they can envision examining after borrowing the emotional response from Emmett Till to traumatize the audience is just a little girl feeling alienated as an individual or Ruby trying to get her white lover to care and trying to teach her...

...with nothing about the broader collective response and political possibilities. this article came out today in British GQ and it evidences the same fixations that this class can’t see beyond. Talks about George Floyd+Breonna Taylor but what it means for talking to white bae

In general that’s how myopic this class is with everything. All they can ever take from these big struggles is how to get more diversity and inclusion in boardrooms and writer’s room and how to train white people in racial etiquette such as to make their own assimilation easier