Barry Jenkins on How The Underground Railroad Counters the Black Trauma Debate: ‘These Things Happened’
Oscar winner Barry Jenkins doesn’t want his new limited series The Underground Railroad to get lost in the debate over how and when Black trauma should be shown.
When all 10 episodes of the Amazon Prime escape-from-slavery drama premiere this Friday, the Moonlight director says he hopes viewers keep in mind that it is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name. And although the series, like the novel, includes a graphic scene where an enslaved Black man is casually and inhumanely tortured for attempting to run away, Jenkins says the scene has a purpose.
“It is one of the more horrific events in the book. But it’s also an engine in the book,” Jenkins tells TVLine. “Faced with a brutality that is so extreme, Cora [newcomer Thuso Mbedu], who in certain ways has given up hope on herself, changes her mind when Caesar [Aaron Pierre] comes in, and they both say, ‘This is too much. We have to risk everything now.'”
“It’s not just that they realize that it could happen to them, but it’s that they realize that they can’t believe these things are allowed to happen,” he adds. “It felt important to honor the book and present this same sort of event and try to do it as ethically and morally and respectfully as we could, but also to present it.”
Jenkins says historically, Black people have been brutally tortured and killed, and acknowledging past atrocities helps put into context the police brutality against Black people that keeps happening now.
“In my research, these things happened and much worse,” Jenkins says. “I remember in high school or college seeing images of lynchings, and you often see the aftermath. Because of that, it almost decentralizes the person who this happened to, and so it felt like going from the book to the screen, it was important to be very honest and just present it as these things happened.”
Tackling such brutalities also allowed Jenkins to pay homage to Black people who had to survive slavery as well as confront those who refuse to address the institution’s crippling impact.
“To me, it was an acknowledgement of the struggle and the things that our ancestors had to endure,” Jenkins reveals. “You can’t shy away from it, and I try not to make anything based on responses and reactions or out of spite. But, for the four years that I was working on this show, I kept hearing the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again.'”
“And if you’re talking about this idea of making America great again, you’re willfully not acknowledging what America was, and in some ways continues to be,” Jenkins concludes. “And now as someone who is in control of a certain kind of language, it was important for me to be like, ‘OK, this is the greatness you’re yearning for us to return to.”
I understand what he’s saying but I just feel like the most produced and popular Black stories we see these days are traumatic. It’s either about slavery or racism. It’s true that it happened and we still experience it but are there no other stories that can be told? It’s just a little bit frustrating.
I agree Tai.
I understand what you are saying, but Underground Railroad is a beautiful novel. Hopefully in the future we can see some uplifting African American stories. If you have not read the novel, I highly suggest it.
Hey, don’t forget gang violence and drugs. Slavery, racism, gang violence, and drugs. More Wakanda-style Afro-futurism stories, please!
It exists to fuel the propaganda. Here Jenkins in falsely linking MAGA to slavery. He knows damn well that is not the “greatness you’re yearning for us to return to”. You can hate Trump all you want but that is a bold faced lie. A lie that is very important for these ideologues. Everyone who disagrees is a Nazi and a Klan member.
I agree with Henry. This isn’t gratuitous violence. It’s there to move the story just like in the book. Read the book. It won a Pulitzer.
The problem is the white gaze. When Black men were lynched in the south, white Southerners threw picnics to watch. Now they get Amazon to watch us get harmed. Show me the lie
It was his plan all along.
People keep demanding more Black stories but it’s hard to tell Black stories that ring true without trauma. Like it or not, trauma is a big part of the Black experience.
This is reductive. Trauma is only a PART of the black experience. But TV and Movies are also entertainment and the disconnect is that they seem to be hyperfocused on only the Trauma part. But through the years black people have also experienced normal joy and triumph as well. We also have fun, funny, loving and warm stories. And if you have lived through some very traumatic experiences, why would you want to sit with some popcorn and soda see that fictionalized over and over and packaged as entertainment?
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Also the proliferation of slave narratives is also reductive because it seems to indicate that that is the only historical experience blacks have until the civil rights struggle. But There is a lot of history between 1865 and 1965.
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Personally when I clamor for ore black stories that haven’t reached the point of saturation like Sylvie’s Love or Hidden Figures. Not Underground Railroad for the umpteenth time.
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Now I’ll be over here watching A Black Lady Sketch Show
It’s must be terrible ‘being black’ when one of your biggest causes of death is being killed by other ‘black’ people.
Okay, boomer.
The irony of telling a slavery story on Amazon.