In the trailer for the fourth and final season of FX’s Atlanta, a stuffy white guy in a suit asks Paper Boi, “How did you do that?” Do what, Paper Boi wonders. The stuffy white guy in a suit proceeds to lean back and do an awkward shuffle… dance?
It’s an Atlanta trademark: white folks trying to act “cool” around Black people, leading to what the Atlantic dubbed the “spectacle of white ignorance.” But the show has also been criticized for being “for” white people, a claim that creator Donald Glover refutes.
“To be real, if you’re online, everybody’s gonna have an agenda on some level,” he said at the TCA Press Tour on Tuesday, via Deadline. “It would be silly to say that sometimes what people say doesn’t affect you because — especially being Black — I feel like a lot of the Black criticism bothers me only because it sounds like [it’s from] Black people who don’t really know what we’ve been through.” Glover continued:
“I don’t think they give a lot of credit to what we’ve gone through. So to be like, ‘Oh, these Black people hate Black people or these Black people hate Black women.’ I’m like, It’s such my it’s such a small view of who we are. I feel like it might even be because of what we’ve been through that you look at us the way you look at us.”
To claim that Atlanta is “only for white people,” Glover continued, “it’s like we’re cutting ourselves down, which is kind of wack to me. I’ve seen on TikTok where people say Atlanta‘s transphobic. Man, I’m neighbors with a trans man and he told me Atlanta is his favorite show. I love how you guys talked about the trans thing because a lot of this shit is just takes for the internet, you know?” He believes that the backlash can be traced back to “internet people trying to get hot” (and not in a ripped and/or jacked way).
Atlanta returns on September 15.
(Via Deadline)