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This week, Earn, Al, Darius, and Van (shes back!)
We want to apologize to the community properly with your help, the designer tells Al.
The art of apology hinges on the authentic address.
Before these concerns emerge, however, Al and Darius initially relish in the spoils of corporate courting.
Unlike Al and Darius, Earn is visibly uncomfortable with the deal.
This feels like an Uncle Tom photo-op … youre not worried about what the streets think?
Earn asks, perhaps expecting peer pressure to inform Als decision-making.
Al groans over Earns high-mindedness.
Reminding Earn of what happened to the original MLK, he calls him to recite the arc of history.
They killed him, they say in unison.
Eventually, Als dreams of change-making are killed by the very structures that claim to support making change.
Is this your first time apologizing for white people?
Khalil asks him, sensing fresh meat.
Al, uninitiated in the ways of this world, does not play along at the press conference.
When a French reporter asks After this, is racism over?
Al goes off script and rejects the ridiculous nature of the question.
Khalil steps in and announces that their board is working on an initiative to end racism by 2024.
The room is very excited!
At the closed committee meeting, Al discovers the board to be self-serving rather than community-oriented.
How does any of that help Black people?
Why would they fund their own demise?
Thats not a business; thats a charity.
A white assistant offers to take Darius to a Nigerian spot out of the way.
Darius asks, Wheres Mimi?
and the white woman has no answer for him as she went over her head to acquire her shop.
I am now, he responds.
While Van and Earn enjoy their complimentary stay, they luxuriate in the opportunity racialized aggression has provided them.
They kill the distance between them in their fancy room, fashioning their trauma into an intimate moment.
Yet, in the morning, when Earn wakes up alone to the violence of a phone ringing intensely.
He picks it up and then slams it back down on the receiver.
The world can wait.
