Dinin’ Like White Folks: Black Rage as Sacred in Underground Episode Four, “Firefly”
(Episode 1.04)

Police & policies have been rioting on our bodies; destroying people & property every single day of your lives. So Exactly What Kind Of Violence Don’t You Like?—Jesse Williams
In school, every February, my kids learn about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and the importance of peace. It’s a fine lesson for a kindergartner or a second grader. But last year, after the Baltimore Uprising, I kept my boys out of school for a day, and took them to the library to teach them some other lessons. Nobody really wants to have these conversations with their young children (a recent episode of Black-ish takes on this conundrum, specific to black parents in America), because no one wants to hear questions like the one my 7-year-old asked me: “So, who’s gonna save me from the police?”
At the same time, I think every parent can relate to my response: “Me. Mommy is going to fight to make sure nothing happens to you.” And I also told him that there are people all over the world who are angry, and fighting for him—angry like King was, angry like Malcolm X, angry like Fannie Lou Hamer, like my mother and so on. Black anger—black rage—is a sacred component to any fight for freedom or civil rights. My kids will know that King preached nonviolence, but they’ll also know that King understood the power (and usefulness) of violence, and spent much of his time in a rage over the treatment of black Americans. What he did with that rage certainly made for better optics than what Malcolm X did with his rage, but people seem to forget that both men were considered a threat to America; and so they were both cut down.
I’m not allowed to say that watching black rage unfold—whether in a news segment covering an uprising, or on a show like Underground (though, to be clear, there are no shows like Underground)—gives me satisfaction. As a black American, I’m to watch a movie like 12 Years a Slave, weep for Solomon as he hangs from a tree—barely conscious—and then receive my satisfaction when a white savior intervenes and helps him find his way back to freedom. This is justice. No white people or property owned by whites (or cities where whites and white privilege are in control) have been harmed. This should satisfy me.
That is not the story Underground is telling, and that is why I write about the show every week. The stories tell me that I’m not alone in wanting to see an entire cotton field on a Southern plantation light up with the flames of a freedom fighter whose own face has been lit up by slaveowners. I’m not alone in wanting to see—wait for it—a white man get his back opened up (by someone he loves, no less). I’m not usually allowed to say any of this, but in a recap of the events of “Firefly,” I get to make the suggestion that black rage—and the violence and destruction that sometimes must, necessarily, come with—it is more than okay. I’m not ashamed to say that ever since Django Unchained my body and mind have been waiting for a story where black rage is a sacred tool in liberation.