In fact, the first episode contains one of the most disturbing moments I have ever seen on television – which led me to take a break from the show and question whether to revisit it.
#Trauma porn series#
For me, the series – which charts Cora’s traumatic life on a plantation, her narrow escape to freedom and the subsequent violent racism she’s met with even in “free” states – is, at times, incredibly traumatic to watch. Now that the 10-hour series has finally been released, these existential questions surrounding the show’s necessity and purpose still linger. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday.
Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Sign up for The New Statesman’s newsletters Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive. And unfortunately, for black people, it is everywhere in our popular culture. In both trauma porn and these sentimental retellings of historical racism, the white gaze makes racism a spectacle to be observed from afar, but never truly reckoned with. Less trauma-heavy anti-racist movies such as The Help (2011) or Green Book (2019), lazily tell their stories through the comfortable distance of a white protagonist, and also position racism as a long-forgotten artefact of the 20th century. This issue isn’t helped by Hollywood’s lack of diversity, which leads to even the least morbid narratives about black life being told through the “white gaze”, which assumes that the “default” viewer is white. In neither story are the characters given any real development – rather, they are collateral damage only existing to make the point that racism exists.
Or similarly, Amazon Studios’ recent horror series Them, which follows a family violently chastised by a combination of racist townspeople and racist supernatural entities in 1950s California. For example, last year’s Oscar-winning short film Two Distant Strangers, which depicted a black man stuck in a time-loop where he is repeatedly killed by a police officer. From Orange is the New Black to When They See Us and 12 Years a Slave, gradually television shows and films have begun to be accused of exploiting black pain for profit: critics nicknaming the emerging genre as “trauma porn”.Ī common critique of “trama porn” is that these exhausting portrayals of racism are written with white audiences in mind. Audiences have begun to notice that although the “anti-racist” narrative genre is exponentially expanding, the stories that are being told are similar. In recent years, cinematic portrayals of police brutality, slavery, segregation and other forms of black suffering have increasingly been met with eye-rolls from black people themselves.
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