Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?

Updated at 6:40 p.m. ET on April 17, 2021.

In the trailer for Amazon’s new horror series, Them, Diana Ross’s “Home” soundtracks a tender scene: A Black husband and wife in the 1950s survey their new house in wonder and dance in the living room with their two daughters. “When I think of home / I think of a place where there’s love overflowing,” Ross sings. But, as in the song, the tenor of the trailer changes. We learn that the Emory family has moved to a white part of Compton, where residents don’t take kindly to the demographic shift. “They came from someplace worse. We’ll have to make this place worse,” one neighbor says. A montage of racist harassment follows: White classmates make ape noises at one Emory daughter; golliwog dolls hang from the family’s roof; a church is set ablaze.

In response to the trailer, many Black viewers lamented what they saw as an industry pattern of exploiting Black pain. “Black trauma is just entertainment for black hollywood filmmakers and white execs,” the writer Berneta L. Haynes , echoing criticisms aimed at other recent horror works such as the HBO series and the film. The outcry only grew after , created by Little Marvin and executive produced by Lena Waithe,premiered last weekend. In a pan for , Angelica Bastién “one of the most anti-Black pieces, Aisha Harris “ suffers from the same predicament that has arisen in the wake of Black people becoming hashtags in death—the public knows far more about their last moments on Earth than all the moments that made up their life before.”