Atlanta
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Its whatever, the man tells him, shrugging off the dismissal.
As he drives off, his car is followed by a blue car from which he is silently surveilled.
After picking up his daughter Katie from his wifes home (theyre separated!
), Marshall drives her to school as the details of a legal case are discussed over the radio.
At work, the news of the Tesla reparations trial has all of Marshalls white coworkers in a tizzy.
Its scary, she tells him.
When she notes that the few Black employees at the office are free from such anxieties, she scoffs.
Not a care in the world, she says.
Again, Marshall is unphased, and his coworker challenges his blissful ignorance about his ancestral history.
He picks Katie up from school, and on the drive home, she asks, Are we racist?
herself having been confronted by the tensions rising throughout the country.
Katie is unconvinced by her fathers efforts at deflection.
Marshall and Katie eat dinner when the ugly truth appears at his door.
Dont slam my door, Shaniqua yells from outside (LMAO!).
The next day, Shaniqua shows up at his job with a megaphone.
Im not the Tesla guy, I dont make that kind of money, Marshall whines.
Shaniqua asks what he makes in a year, and he refuses to provide the numbers.
I bet you its more than I do, she says.
But not every descendent of slave owners has to pay financially.
I think he got off kind of easy, Marshalls cubicle neighbor says.
Pulling aside Lester, one of the few Black men in the break room, Marshall asks for advice.
You gotta fight that shit, man, one white guy tells him.
Natalie asks him when he goes to pick up Katie.
You were white yesterday!
(He shouldve told her not to get too cocky now cause we gotPerus colonial tea, too!)
Those who recall the seasonsfirst episodewill remember him as the white man fishing in the haunted lake.
As Earns older, whiter, wiser (?)
tethered, Earnest is more message than man.
Unlike Marshall, Earnest has embraced how reparations have remade his world.
Maybe its only right, he says, explaining to Marshall that a curse has been lifted.
The analogy he attempts to make here is a troubling one that imperils the episode with short-sightedness.
Where the episode is concerned, this more only refers to how whiteness reckons with reparation.
And in the end, the options appear to be suicide, resentment, or acceptance.
Though the episode comes to a close, it does not feel like closure.
What it gets right is that debt is an intimate affair.
To owe another is to be tied to them until ones debts have been paid.
The soul is repossessed.
But what The Big Payback fails to grasp fully is what happens when debts are accrued without consent.
This is an entirely different matter when one takes without even the performative courtesy of a contract.
Under such circumstances, repair and repayment prove to be presumptuous.
Perhaps this would explain why its satirical engagement with Black characters is so secondary and sensational.
To sit with Shaniquas character and the history that made her would unsettle the thought exercise.
Marshalls money may be in her hands, but her peoples blood remains on his.
Haunted by Beyonce:Speaking of Shaniqua like a ghost, Marshall cries that she follows me everywhere.
She wont leave me alone.
Marshall can barely handle even a small dose of the historical haunting Shaniqua has always had to contend with.
Shaniqua refuses to cower or coddle Marshall in the request for reparation.
She wont let calls for decorum disregard her grievances or her grandparents pain.
She doesnt owe Marshall such pleasantries.
