Donald Glover’s ‘Atlanta’ Makes the Case for Reparations

Atlanta has slowly but surely been approaching the level of comedic sharpness and formal innovativeness we witnessed in seasons one and two. This week’s singular standalone episode is a potent reminder of what the series is capable of at its most incisive. Likewise, “Big Payback,” written by Francesca Sloane and directed by Hiro Murai, imagines what reparations would look like on an individual level as opposed to the government payouts currently being proposed, with little movement, in American electoral politics. Told from the perspective of a white man named Marshall Johnson, played by MVP of the National Treasure franchise Justin Bartha, this alternative reality makes for one of the most hysterical and surprisingly emotional episodes of Atlanta so far, and a worthwhile excursion from the show’s central plot.

When we first meet Marshall, he’s in line at Starbucks looking at a package of shortbread cookies. In front of him is a Black man who’s accused by a white cashier of cutting the line for reasons we can only assume are racially motivated. Marshall shrugs off the encounter, purchases his coffee, and goes back to his car where he discovers the unpurchased cookies in his pocket and proceeds to eat them as if he’s starring in a commercial for white privilege. After Marshall pulls off, we see an old Ford Taurus with an obscured driver begin to follow him. So begins the “payback.”

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The next time we see Marshall, he’s dropping off his daughter Katie (Scarlett Blum), who he splits time with between his estranged wife (Dahlia Legault) at school. He hears a story on the radio about a Black man who was just granted the ability to claim profits from Tesla after learning that one of the early investor’s relatives owned his family during slavery in a landmark lawsuit. As the anchor explains how this case could have ripple effects across the world, he has a brief look of distress—very similar to when many of us initially heard of the coronavirus but thought it would only be as bad as the swine flu—before turning off the radio and heading to work.

Once he arrives at his office job, where the mysterious car is parked outside, we realize that the impact of the lawsuit has seemingly already begun when Marshall and his predominantly white co-workers are told that the company is making budget cuts. One of his co-workers (Madison Hatfield) tells him that she thinks the company’s being sued with the same clause from the Tesla case and encourages him to check his family ancestry, so he isn’t next. Meanwhile, a group of Black co-workers are high-fiving and chatting gleefully on one side of the office. Again, Marshall shrugs off all these warning signs, including persistent calls from an unknown number and a white woman crying hysterically in the parking lot, and goes about his day.

On the way to pick up his daughter from school, he hears Black deejays on a radio station joking that there are “no more apologies, just apolo-G’s,” which I think might be a more potent slogan for reparations than Black Twitter’s current rallying cry “open your purse.” When his daughter gets in the car, she asks whether or not their family is racist after a presumably Black classmate said they were and asks if they owned slaves. Marshall replies no, and earnestly notes that their ancestors were enslaved during the Byzantine Empire.

When they get back home, an attorney shows up to hand Marshall papers claiming that Marshall’s great-great grandfather enslaved the relatives of a woman named Sheniqua (Melissa Youngblood) and, therefore, owes her money. Sheniqua pops up behind him and begins inspecting and snapping photos of her soon-to-be home. It’s just the beginning of her “harassment,” as Marshall calls it, which includes later showing up outside of his job with a megaphone and demanding her money immediately and blasting him on Instagram. It was personally delightful for me watching Sheniqua assert herself on Marshall’s property throughout the episode without waiting for the legal process to go through.

When Marshall arrives at work again, his white colleagues are discussing the wave of restitution lawsuits like it’s the COVID-19 pandemic, asking each other if they got their “results” back—referring, of course, to 23AndMe. One woman unfortunately finds out that she’s “100% Nordic” while another boasts that she’s “69% Ashkenazi Jew.” Realizing his unavoidable fate, Marshall decides to get advice from one of his Black coworkers, who looks like he’s waiting on some settlement money. The coworker tells Marshall that the only thing he can do is admit he’s wrong and give Sheniqua as much money as possible.

After discovering that Sheniqua and her family have settled in his home and his estranged wife, who now identifies as Peruvian, wants to officially get divorced to protect her finances, Marshall shacks up in a hotel where he has a long, Holly Hunter-in-Broadcast News sob.

He then goes down to the lobby and starts to complain to a man named E (played by Tobias Segal, who played another or possibly the same random white man in the season premiere) sitting near him about his predicament. When Marshall asserts that it isn’t fair, the man tells him a story about how his father would also tell him that his grandfather “built everything [he] had from the ground up” before learning he had “a lot of help” and “a lot of kids.”

“Maybe it’s only right,” he shrugs.

“E, we don’t deserve this,” Marshall replies incredulously.

“Well, what do they deserve?”

He then segues into an eloquent monologue about how white people “treat slavery like it’s a mystery” and “something to investigate if [they] chose to.” When he says that “confession is not absolution,” it brings to mind the large swaths of well-meaning, liberal-minded white people who thought their long-winded admissions of guilt about systemic racism and acceptance of white privilege on Instagram during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests made a material difference in the lives of Black people. E then explains that slavery is something Sheniqua and other Black people experience tangibly every day.

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Before disappearing into the lobby, he assures Marshall that he and his family are “gonna be okay” because “the curse has been lifted.” This is the sort of abating message every white person wants to hear amid any effort to amend racism (that they can essentially walk away unscathed). Likewise, any sort of solace Marshall may have received during that conversation is undone when a man, who may or may not be E, shoots himself in the head and falls into the pool. As Marshall stares outside at the grisly image, a Black waiter casually utters, “There’s where I came from” and walks away.

A few years into the future, we meet Marshall waiting tables at a restaurant. There’s a large number of white people working in the kitchen, who we can assume are dealing with the same circumstances as Marshall. There also are still some people of color as well. Not only has Marshall given Sheniqua a large sum of his money, but he’s apparently indebted to her and her family for the rest of his life, notifying his boss that he owes 15% of his wages to “restitution taxes.” Enough time has seemingly passed that Marshall is comfortable saying this out loud and even looks chipper as he begins work. E is ultimately right that Marshall is “okay” in the sense that he’s simply taken on the low-paying positions that many Black people have no option but to work in and find ways to survive doing. Most notably, he still has an irrevocable supply of white privilege to work himself back up the professional ladder.

All in all, this week’s Atlanta succeeds as a delightfully funny piece of speculative fiction (depending on who’s watching) and a biting critique of the vain attempts to rectify the destruction of slavery by institutions and individuals, making for one of the best post-BLM episodes of television, so far. One can only assume there’s more to come.

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