‘Atlanta’ Gives Us a Confusing Portrait of a Black Teen Passing for White

There’s been a renewed interest in “passing” narratives recently with Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaption of Nella Larsen’s Passing and Brit Bennett’s bestselling novel The Vanishing Half, which is currently being developed into a miniseries for HBO Max, as prime examples. Mariah Carey’s revealing memoir The Meaning of Mariah reignited a conversation about her racial ambiguity and how it manifested in her career as a pop and R&B singer. There was also a moment on Twitter at the start of the pandemic when users were perplexed about Rashida Jones starring in the Black Netflix sitcom #BlackAF and accused the biracial actress of passing throughout her career up until that point.

Clearly, the Atlanta writers’ room, which has been a little too attuned to Twitter discourse lately, took note of social media’s increasing fascination with the subject. In fact, tonight’s episode seems to be partially inspired by a viral TikTok of a seemingly white gentleman, known as @billybillynyc, in which he reveals that his father is Black, something that amused the internet for about a week last year.

In “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga,” Donald Glover crafts his own passing story, also in black-and-white like Hall’s film. The 30-minute vignette, however, feels less in touch with the genre’s classic hallmarks and tropes, as it takes place in modern times, and follows a white-passing boy who attempts to be seen as Black when it proves to be beneficial for him.

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But before getting into the episode though, we must acknowledge the sheer absurdity of one of this week’s guest stars, Kevin Samuels, who recently passed away. To call his appearance untimely would suggest that there was ever an appropriate time to cast the personal stylist who spent the latter part of his career dishing out blatantly misogynistic relationship advice on YouTube. But the fact that his behavior is currently being discussed online is unfortunate when the show is already fielding allegations of misogynoir—so much so that it needs to be pointlessly addressed in the episode description. Likewise, this season has been strangely preoccupied with featuring famously problematic men, maybe for intentional trolling purposes or what the show believes is insightful social commentary that just isn’t landing (probably a mixture of both).

At the start of the episode, we’re introduced to the protagonist Aaron (Tyriq Withers) in his bedroom, which has Logan Paul merch hanging on the wall to signal that we are in a white youth’s space. Aaron, who’s playing video games on his bed, also appears to be white, but the sound of his voice as he speaks into a headset says otherwise. Knowing Glover’s experimental tendencies on this show, I initially thought his voice was being dubbed with a Black actor’s and that we were about to embark on some artsy-fartsy version of that Lil Dicky and Chris Brown music video for “Freaky Friday” or something. We’re left startled once Aaron abruptly calls his opponents the N-word and tells them to “eat a fucking banana” after they beat him.

After the title card, it’s revealed that Aaron, like Billy from TikTok, has a Black father when we see him driving his son to school. When his father brings up the local shooting of a Black man by police and tries to issue a warning to him, Aaron retorts that it’s “not a problem” for him and defends the officer. From their brief conversation, we understand that the self-loathing Aaron identifies as white publicly and, as we see later, exclusively socializes with white people at school. His father jokes that he “can fool his friends” but that he knows “where that nose came from.” Aaron also has dreams of attending Arizona State with his girlfriend, but his father refuses to complete the FAFSA so he can receive financial aid.

When he arrives at his high school, a wealthy, Black benefactor named Robert S. Lee, played by Samuels, shows up to announce that he’ll be paying for all the Black seniors’ college tuition in addition to renaming the school after himself. This is clearly a nod to Robert F. Smith paying off a class of Morehouse graduates’ student debt in 2019 and, later on, a Robert E. Lee joke when we see the way his name appears on the school sign. Hoping to get the money he needs to attend Arizona State, Aaron sneaks off to the gym after school where Lee is holding auditions to authenticate students’ Blackness before handing them a check.

The more interesting portions of this episode highlight the way white individuals desire an adjacency to Blackness when it’s beneficial to them while rejecting all the ugly parts of that experience. But this idea becomes lost in all the other notions about race, performance and gatekeeping within the Black community that are packed in. Considering that Glover has been at the center of the latter conversation regarding his music, stand-up material and romantic interests, it’s hard not to envision the multihyphenate furiously hammering away at a Google Doc during a scene where Aaron is asked to “name six things that mix with Hennessy” and “why The Five Heartbeats broke up” by a group of taunting, older, Black men as he stands under a spotlight. Knowing these topics are being handled by Glover and not a writer we don’t know as well is distracting to say the least.

The audition, or test more accurately, for the tuition money is funny to watch in real time and eye-roll-inducing in its broader implications. The montage of the panel asking Aaron things like “which soda is good for you?” and “mustard or mayonnaise?,” along with the aforementioned questions, is hysterical and spot-on in terms of knowledge and opinions that are passed on in the Black community. The panel ultimately concludes that he isn’t Black, saying that he only has white friends and pointing out his “matcha-colored Allbirds.” Before Aaron storms out, Lee even compares him to Clarence Thomas.

On top of feeling aggrieved that his complexion lost him paid tuition, Aaron notices a Black boy named D’Andre leave a comment on his girlfriend’s Instagram post. When he calls her to confront her about it, she tells him that it doesn’t matter because she knows he’s not going to Arizona State with her. With all his dreams collapsing at once, he does the stereotypical angry white male thing of building a flamethrower and going to his high school at night to burn it down.

When Aaron arrives, a Nigerian student named Felix is also there with a flamethrower after being told he wasn’t Black enough to receive the tuition money. Aaron agrees that he’s not really Black because he has a “culture to pull from” and “country to go back to.” After going back and forth, the two end up chasing each other around the facility with their flamethrowers. Felix eventually makes it to the top of the building to shoot at Aaron below him, but he gets shot by a police officer instead. Aaron, who’s also holding a flamethrower, is simply told to put his hands up and placed in a police car.

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Lee eventually arrives at the school in a bathrobe and walks over to Felix, who’s still alive in an ambulance. He ends up writing him a check, telling him that “getting shot by the police is the Blackest thing a person can do.” In general, this episode seems confused about what it wants to say, but this utterance felt like some kind of thesis—maybe that Black people have encouraged this sort of Oppression Olympics within our own community and that we’re wrongfully determining one another’s Blackness based on the amount of suffering we’ve experienced. Whatever message Glover is going for, it’s a clunky one.

In the final scene, we see Aaron working at Best Buy a year later with a shaved head, a neck chain and a thicker accent, clearly embracing his Blackness. When his ex-girlfriend shows up, things are initially awkward, but he eventually tells her that he’s never been more attracted to her in his life. Before the credits roll, he winks into the camera.

With all the ideas this episode tries to tackle and muddles in the process, it seems like a standard episode of Atlanta featuring the show’s cast might have been a safer bet. But fans, like myself, may just have to accept that this show is a run-of-the-mill anthology series about racism now and buckle in for the next season, or simply not watch it at all.

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