Even before HBO thought enlisting two white men to explain how 400 years of slavery was so horrible by resurrecting a modern-day version of it was a great idea, Amazon had their own alternative history series in the works.
Deadline reports that Aaron McGruder, the creator of the Peabody Award-winning animated series The Boondocks, has been working with Will Packer (producer of Straight Outta Compton and the remake of Roots) for over a year on Black America—a groundbreaking series based on the idea that freed slaves received reparations after the end of the Civil War and formed their own country.
The show will take place in the country of New Colonia—a sovereign nation created from land that was formerly Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. If HBO’s Confederate—an imagined version of the modern-day US where the South won the Civil war and continues to practice the terrorist tradition of slavery—is the ice cream dreams of white America, then New Colonia is the fantasy of Black America.
The show is constructed around the fantastic, unrealistic, impossible totally made-up notion that African Americans secured post-Reconstruction reparations and created their own nation (similar to the real-life treaties that created Israel, Austria, Palestine, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.) Since its formation, New Colonia has thrived, while its old, racist nation, the United States, has steadily declined.
While Packer wouldn’t comment directly on Confederate out of respect that the series has not been fully realized, he did say say that on a personal level, “the fact that there is the contemplation of contemporary slavery makes it something that I would not be a part of producing nor consuming… Slavery is far too real and far too painful, and we still see the manifestations of it today as a country for me to ever view that as a form of entertainment.”
Amazon has not yet announced a projected release date for Black America, but trust me, Black America will be waiting.
In a related story, the White America Emergency Foundation began distributing handkerchiefs and pain medication for the output of white tears and butthurt wypipo who will surely start a Twitter campaign about canceling their Amazon subscriptions because they are outraged about Aaron McGruder and Will Packer’s racist show
