Image: BET. Screenshot via YouTube.
The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a world where female autonomy is banned, hemmed in by a hateful, sexist theocracy. But what if the target if that regime was a little different?
In a clever segment from BET’s The Rundown with Robin Thede, Thede and co. imagine a world where microaggressions — primarily the microaggressions white people level at people of colour — are all banned.
The result is a slick, well-made parody of The Handmaid’s Tale‘s aesthetics and mood, lampooning the subtle racism that so many Americans know well. Microaggressions are the seemingly minor, plausibly deniable acts of prejudice that privileged people often get away with every day. In particular, Thede’s parody targets the attitudes white women display toward black women’s hair, which often gets fetishized (our own Evan Narcisse has written brilliantly on overlapping issues in the context of video games over at Kotaku) by white women.
The parody is worth watching and thinking about. It’s below (there’s a walkup routine at the beginning, the parody itself starts about 50 seconds in), and The Rundown with Robin Thede airs Thursday nights on BET.
[YouTube]