I began this book with an account of a racial assault on two middle-class black people in a coffee shop; it seems fitting that as I sit down to write these concluding pages, another location of the same national coffee chain is in the news, also because of a racial incident. On the surface, the circumstances differ in significant ways: in the earlier incident Dr. Bob Hughes and his colleague, paying customers, were assaulted and spit upon by another customer, a private citizen; in this more recent case, two men, described in initial accounts as “black real estate agents” waiting in a Rittenhouse Square Starbucks for a business meeting with a real estate developer they knew (before the simplifying apparatus of national media flattened the story to “two black men” who waited for “a friend”), allegedly were asked to leave by the location’s manager because one of them asked to use the restroom before making a purchase. Upon their refusal to depart after being denied access, as they continued to wait for their anticipated meeting, this manager called the police, who subsequently arrested the two men for trespassing. They were detained for nine hours before being released, as not only did the Philadelphia district attorney find no evidence any crime had been committed but Starbucks declined to press charges.1

So yes, the circumstances differ; yet to watch the cell phone video of this incident, captured by a white female patron outraged by the events, is to recognize the corollary, or perhaps the underbelly, of Hughes’s experience, two years before, in a Seattle Starbucks with his “professionally attire[d]” female colleague. The two young entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia video, while neatly and stylishly dressed, are not in formal professional clothing; one wears a black hoodie with white lettering, dark jeans, and Nike sneakers, while the other wears fitted sweatpants and a plain black top, with an olive green windbreaker and white sneakers. Notably, the white man they are meeting, who arrives as they are being walked out of the shop in handcuffs, is wearing a white button-down shirt, a light-blue down vest, blue jeans, and white sneakers—in other words, he is dressed in a similarly casual vein. His whiteness, however, confers an air of both professionalism and authority upon him despite his casual clothing, as evidenced by his ability to confront the police loudly, with incredulity and no legal repercussions, while his potential business partners are escorted out by multiple officers, handcuffed and in silence.

Similar to the expulsion of the group of black women from the California wine train in 2015, the presence of these black men’s presumably “unprofessional” bodies in the raced and classed space of the upscale community café (located in Center City Philadelphia’s “most expensive and exclusive neighborhood”) is deemed by the white manager to be trespassing rather than simply waiting.2 Would the outcome have been different if, like Hughes before them, the men had donned “professional” attire for their meeting? Experience, observation, and history suggest otherwise—suggest, in fact, that outcomes for black bodies “out of place,” even if those bodies are privileged ones, are largely more subject to the whims of the whites (or their surrogates) they encounter than to their bodily performances.3 Indeed, reading this incident in concert with Hughes and his colleague’s experience suggests a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation for black folks in America: to appear in professional attire, clearly marked as materially privileged, is perhaps to trigger a punitive response designed to put one back “in place,” while to appear in casual clothing is to risk being understood as impoverished and therefore allegedly dangerous, a fear-inspiring representative of purported black criminality.

Throughout this book I have argued that post-soul authors—writing in an era after the Civil Rights and Black Power politics of the 1960s and 1970s had waned but before the emergence of quintessential post-soul, bourgeois, and “post-racial” political figure, Barack Obama—narratively imagine black privilege as an existential and representational paradox. This paradox, the black and bourgeois dilemma, is that of a black subject simultaneously protected and caged by privilege, a middle-class subject whose black flesh is often a source of pride but always, as well, a target of violence. Here in the final pages of this project, I want to think, again, about how these ideas continue to circulate in our immediate present, what I am calling the Black Lives Matter (BLM) era. Via a closer look at work emerging from this immediate contemporary moment, we might again recognize the prescience of texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some of them published decades ago, which have nonetheless anticipated our immediate present in their emphasis upon bourgeois body and black flesh in opposition, on the recurrent paradox of a subject simultaneously black and middle-class. This emphasis is more than simply an assertion that racism continues to exist; it is a reminder of how that racism can create unlivable lives even for black people with every advantage, precisely because the black and bourgeois dilemma is one of existential impossibility.

As I conclude Black Bourgeois, I want to consider several contemporary works by black women that seem to be commenting upon this impossibility. I begin with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and in fact employ Rankine’s poetic reflection on the experience of the microaggressed as a kind of framework to understand the position of the black (bourgeois) subject in the BLM moment. Rankine’s text—which, as she has noted in interviews, is a meditation upon how the racial microaggression contributes to and creates an environment in which black death becomes ubiquitous—is, like this book, preoccupied with the body, with flesh (as in the above epigraph) and the way that it carries memory, history, and racial assault within it.4 Rankine as critical and theoretical frame allows me to think more expansively about how this question of black and bourgeois embodiment, this paradoxical viscerality, circulates in two other, visual texts from our present moment, Issa Rae’s HBO comedy series, Insecure (2016–), and Ava DuVernay’s OWN drama, Queen Sugar (2016–), based on a 2014 novel of the same name by Natalie Baszile. These popular works, both part of an emergent renaissance in black television, centralize class privilege as they grapple with what we might call the life-or-death emergency that is African American life in our immediate present. These works, particularly DuVernay’s Queen Sugar, delve into a recurrent sense of racial crisis and precarity that circulates in the BLM era, even as they speak to nuances of black middle-class experience that would initially seem to distance their characters from blackness’s most immediate dangers.

Early on in Citizen, Rankine’s speaker turns her attention to tennis powerhouse Serena Williams and the way that countless bad calls—calls of foot faults and balls out of bounds, calls that seem unfair even to observing commentators, calls that cannot be proven to be but must, in truth, be motivated by racial bias—over the course of Williams’s career have taken a physical and mental toll:

Rankine’s words here, and in particular her shift to the first-person-plural pronoun “we,” push us as readers to consider, via our consideration of Williams, the limits of black “unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience.” These words ask us, in fact, to understand Williams’s bodily memory of racial insult, her frustrated optimism and hope for better, her rage at these continued moments of unfairness, as our own.

Rae’s Insecure tells the story of central character Issa (played by Rae), who works for a nonprofit organization providing educational support to inner-city schools, and her best friend, Molly, a corporate lawyer. If their friendship is the cornerstone of the series, the two women’s relationships with men have provided much of the attendant conflict over the first two seasons. The end of season one finds Issa cheating on her longtime boyfriend, Lawrence, also a recurrent character on the show, and the subsequent end of their relationship, punctuated by Lawrence’s sexual liaison with an acquaintance, Tasha.6 Season two picks up on this rebound relationship as it eventually fizzles out, and follows both Issa and Lawrence as they navigate dating and single life after years of living together.

Rae has stated in interviews that she sees Insecure as an Obama-era show, reflective of and perhaps enabled by the presence of Barack Obama and his family in the White House for eight years.7 Yet by its second season, even this show—typically a gorgeously lit, richly decorated landscape of well-dressed, impeccably coiffed, smooth-skinned bourgeois black people at play—cannot escape direct reference to the troubling racial politics of Obama’s second term (the beginning of the BLM era) and the precarity that surrounds black bodies in our immediate present. In season two, episode four of the series, one story line follows Lawrence as he rushes to buy alcohol at the grocery store in preparation for a major black social event across town—driving a Jaguar, a luxury car he can afford now that he has gotten a job in the tech sector.8 Stuck in traffic, he follows several other cars in making an illegal U-turn and is quickly pulled over by an approaching police car, which hails him with both flashing lights and siren.

To us as viewers, the source of Lawrence’s immediate panic is evident and only reinforced when the officer’s partner calls sternly “Keep your hands where I can see them!” as Lawrence reaches into his pocket, after dropping his debit card to the floor in the confusion. Yes, and the body has memory. Black men and women who ended up losing their lives under similar circumstances—from Philando Castile to Sandra Bland, among many others—haunt the scene and shape the viscerality of his fear as Lawrence waits for the white officer to approach his window. Yet, true to genre, the interaction soon takes a swerve for the comedic. After questioning Lawrence on the basis of his paradoxical privilege (“Is this your car?”) and chiding him for his U-turn, the officer says, “I’ll let you off with a warning today, Hot Rod”—language that foreshadows later events in the episode—and then jokes, “I should write you a ticket just for being a Hoya.” A stunned and still-fearful Lawrence takes a moment to realize the officer is referring to his Georgetown University license plate, as the officer continues, “I’m a Villanova guy—we beat the shit out of you guys last year!” Lawrence’s pretense of laughter as he dazedly agrees, “Yeah, you did—you beat us,” signals the freighted double meaning of these words, the way that the officer’s statement can be read as a comment upon how the “team” of law enforcement has engaged fatally with the “team” of black people over the previous year, which at the time of the episode’s airing (mid-August 2017) would have included the deaths of Korryn Gaines, Keith Lamont Scott, Terence Crutcher, and Jordan Edwards, among others, at police hands.9

Lawrence’s police encounter is thus only partially played for laughs, haunted as it is by the bodily strain of this history, and his awareness of it (the body is the threshold across which each objectionable [death] passes into consciousness). Yet his subsequent encounter with two white-presenting women at the grocery store seems to scar him just as profoundly.10 Unable to pay for his beer because his debit card was misplaced during the police stop, he accepts the women’s offer to buy it for him, and after some flirtation in the parking lot he finds himself at their apartment, anticipating a hookup. Even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games. Yet the sexual encounter that ensues, a threesome with the two women, proves unsatisfying for all parties, as the women, disappointed that Lawrence has orgasmed before they wanted him to, complain, “We’ve been with a bunch of other black guys who could come and keep going.” Lawrence’s stunned reaction (“a bunch?”) only intensifies as the two leave him on the bed and begin reminiscing out loud about previous encounters: “You know who could fuck? LaMarcus.” Like the elusive, authentically black “Clevon” who serves as foil for Monk Ellison’s bourgeois inauthenticity in Erasure, here “LaMarcus” suggests a blacker, more sexually powerful competitor, capable and willing participant in the women’s dehumanizing fetishization of the black “Hot Rod.”

In this moment, Lawrence’s class privilege, performatively signaled via the difference between the names “Lawrence” and “LaMarcus,” places his black habitus in jeopardy, as his cisgendered, masculine black body—and the assumed hypersexuality that supposedly should accompany that body—is appraised by these two women and found wanting, a racialized and sexualized violation that compounds the fear and pervasive sense of vulnerability he experienced in the police encounter. It is no wonder that Lawrence later transposes the terms of his friend Chad’s exuberant reaction to what Chad imagines has been a sexual juggernaut of an experience; in reply to “You wore ’em out! My man ’Rence! Wearing that ass out!” Lawrence offers with little enthusiasm, “Yeah man. I am . . . pretty . . . worn out.” Rather than confirming the evening as a success in cross-racial sexual experimentation, this response reveals, instead, Lawrence’s grief and exhaustion. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. Lawrence is “worn out” from the bodily toll of a day that has confronted him, in myriad ways, with his own racialized precarity and objectification.

When Citizen turns to the question of police brutality, the provocation and conundrum of black class privilege serves as its opening frame. An unnamed police officer’s violence may—or may not—be a consequence of the black subject/suspect’s ability to make his “home” in a neighborhood of means:

In this passage, part of a section of Citizen titled “Stop-and-Frisk” (a “script for situation video” created in collaboration with John Lucas, a documentary photographer and Rankine’s partner), an anonymous speaker describes the indignity of being pulled over by police—pulled out of my vehicle . . . handcuffed and pushed into the police vehicle’s backseat. The scene in this passage widens out, over pages, to a sense of the ubiquity and similarity of such stops, their recursivity: “Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same” (107).

Rankine asks readers to recognize this recursivity, to see the ways that the repetition of this narrative—literally a script that plays out over and over on America’s streets, country, city, and suburban—erases black humanity, flattens each black subject into that “one guy” who is always already guilty. The way this scene plays out might be a consequence of the affront of black privilege, or might simply be a function of the way that public blackness operates as a perpetual case of mistaken identity, for rich, middle class, and poor alike.

If Rae’s Insecure lightens an initially terrifying police encounter only to return us to black fear and vulnerability via an unexpectedly troubling depiction of another, sexual, encounter that we might expect to be purely amusing or pleasurable, DuVernay’s Queen Sugar uses the account of a similar police encounter to dwell both visually and affectively in black pain. The series, which tells the story of the Bordelon siblings, who inherit a sugarcane farm from their late father, includes significant attention to Charley Bordelon West, half sister to the other two Bordelon children, Nova and Ralph Angel. After her father’s death, Charley, the estranged wife and manager of basketball star Davis West, moves to Louisiana with her teenage son, Micah. Davis, disgraced after his involvement in a team sex scandal is revealed on video, eventually follows the pair and begins playing in Louisiana in order to repair his relationship with Micah; ironically, the police encounter in question is set in motion by Davis’s extravagant birthday gift to Micah at the top of season two, a new luxury convertible.11

The first part of this encounter takes place in the second season’s first episode. We see an older white police officer first pull Micah over and then pull his gun on the teen as Micah tries to follow instructions to retrieve the car’s registration by leaning over to the glovebox. The next time Micah appears in this episode, it is as he is being walked into the police station by this officer—in handcuffs, and visibly shaken. When Charley, Nova, and Davis eventually walk out of the station with him, the camera pans down to reveal what only Nova notices as Charley and Davis bicker over Davis’s willingness to perform a “Step’n Fetchit act” to gain special consideration from the officers—Micah was apparently so terrified by this experience that he at some point urinated on himself. Yes, and the body has memory. While this image alone provides a visual cue to the extent of Micah’s distress, only much later in the season, in the eighth episode, do we learn the full extent of what Micah has suffered.12

Upon being confronted by Davis after yet another outburst in which Micah erupts in uncharacteristic rage and defiance—a recurring motif throughout season two, signaling Micah’s unaddressed trauma from the police encounter—Micah responds to his father’s “What happened to you?” by revealing a far deeper violation than the officer’s pulling of his gun. Through tears, his eyes averted from his father and the viewer, he recounts:

He put me in the back with cuffs on, right? He told me he was taking me in. He was being nice to me, sort of, you know, talking to me. I tried to tell him that I was your son but he didn’t believe me. Then he drove past the police station. Said we were going for a ride. That’s when he stopped being nice. Out of nowhere he said that he hated “fancy-talking niggers,” you know that I sounded like I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. So . . . we pull up in an alley somewhere. And it’s dark. And he gets out of the car and he says—he says “I’ma take that silver spoon out your mouth boy”—he kept saying that, I’m gonna take that spoon out your mouth boy, put something else in it. So then he gets out of the car. He opens the door, takes out his gun, he pushes me down, and he puts the gun in my mouth. And he pulled the trigger, Dad.

At this point the camera’s focus shifts briefly to Davis, whose face reflects his own distress before he rushes to comfort Micah, sitting down and wrapping an arm around him, saying “It’s alright”; the next words from Micah are muffled by their embrace: “He didn’t have to do that.” Queen Sugar highlights, in this scene, the particular challenge to state-sanctioned white racism presented by the upper-middle-class black body, driving a car the officer could never buy, living in a neighborhood where the officer cannot afford to reside. Maybe because home was a hood the officer could not afford, not that a reason was needed. Micah is one of this privileged number, these “fancy-talking niggers”—a phrase that gestures not only toward pricey educations and commensurate vocabularies but also toward particular kinds of accents and ways of speaking. It seems important to note not only that Micah attends an exclusive New Orleans private school but that he had been, until very recently, raised in California, and his speech bears the mark of that place and not the southern space where he now resides.

This officer, as does the officer in the recollection of Citizen’s speaker, pushe[s] Micah into the police vehicle’s backseat. But the officer of Micah’s retelling goes further than the violence of handcuffs, of knee pressing into . . . collarbone. The phallic and queer implications of the “silver spoon” the officer rhetorically places in the teenager’s mouth, which he then replaces with, literally, the barrel of a gun, disrupt naturalized conceptions of black racial and gender identity. Micah as black and bourgeois young man is queered first by his imagined fellating of the silver spoon of material privilege and then by the actual gun barrel forced into his mouth, as this officer’s own private joke—his interior resentment, rage, and desire—transform into a cruel and outwardly directed sexual violation. The pulling of the gun’s trigger extends this raced and classed violation to a reminder, again, of black precarity regardless of class status; it serves as a visceral message to Micah as black “suspect” that police officers are endowed with the power of the state, and the will of the people, to kill black subjects with impunity.

Micah’s muffled but outraged “He didn’t have to do that” as he recounts this part of his experience points both to the fact that such prompting is unnecessary—in the episode’s present moment, America in the year 2017, no black person over the age of ten or eleven would likely be unaware of this power held over our lives—and to the fact of its excess. The officer has already violated, humiliated, and threatened Micah by forcing the gun into his mouth, because of course the existence of the trigger, his knowledge that it could be pulled, is a reminder that he could die at any moment; actually to pull the trigger is to trick Micah into believing that the moment of his death has arrived. Indeed, this scene forces us to recall Micah’s urine-soaked pants from episode one and to realize that this moment of terror, the moment he believed himself dead, and not simply the process of a routine police booking, is likely when he lost control of his bladder. Here, DuVernay creates narrative space to reimagine Micah’s character as not simply a sheltered rich kid who can’t handle, even briefly, what poor and working-class black people endure on a regular basis, but rather as a black child forced, like so many other black children, to confront far too soon the ubiquity and omnipresence of black death, and worse, to accept that this death is always already coming for him, in particular. It has reached and overtaken him. It is here.

Black Bourgeois, then, is in part a chronicle of how contemporary black cultural production interrogates and illuminates this dilemma: black flesh proudly worn yet targeted for death; privilege as imprisoning cocoon and as always insufficient hiding place; the familiar violence of these contradictions and how to inhabit their aftermath. I return to Citizen:

For Rankine, here, the microaggression operates as bodily injury, the sort of abiding injury that makes safety impossible. For where is that place, the place of safety, that is someplace other than in the body? We bring our bodies with us; they are the vehicles in which we travel. As the old saw reminds us, wherever you go, there you are. When the body is injured in such a way—not (always) literally, but certainly metaphysically, and also perhaps physiologically, which is to say within its very systems, the internal structures that allow for the organism’s healthy function—how to soldier on? How to hold what one’s body can’t hold, and live with the content it is living that is nonetheless unlivable?

Before I conclude my discussion, I want to step back, to think for a bit about why these cultural texts produced by black women turn to stories of police violence in their attention to the question of black vulnerability and precarity, and particularly to the ways that the privileged black body is subject to this everyday threat. There are many bourgeois black women characters throughout both series, and both series do attend to certain kinds of class- and corporeality-inflected dilemmas that these characters experience (I am thinking, for instance, of corporate lawyer Molly’s attempts to break into the white and male “boys club” of the senior partners at her firm, or businesswoman Charley Bordelon’s efforts to establish her sugar mill in the face of all manner of undermining opposition from the wealthy white family who currently monopolizes the business—not coincidentally, the same family that once owned Charley, Nova, and Ralph Angel’s Bordelon ancestors as slaves). When Nova calls her sister a “bourgie bitch” in season one, she gives voice to what audience members have already come to recognize about Charley—at least on the surface, we are meant to understand her character as a version of the light-skinned (or “yalla,” cf. Morrison’s Tar Baby), haughty, and out-of-touch black career woman who believes she is better than those around her precisely because of both her financial and her skin-color capital. This role on Insecure is occupied by the series’ only married friend, Tiffany DuBois (played by Amanda Seales), who wears her hair long and blonde, scrutinizes Issa’s hipster clothing choices, and generally operates as the diva of the friend group. Of course, neither series leaves these characters in the realm of simple stereotype. We ultimately see cracks in Tiffany’s facade of bourgeois perfection, as the show reveals her marriage had gone through major struggles offscreen, with her husband living in a hotel for months; Charley’s character on Queen Sugar is revealed to be both more loyal to her family and more passionate about her racial identity than either her class or racial origins (Charley’s mother is white and wealthy) would at first lead us to believe.

Nonetheless, to delve most fully into black and bourgeois precarity and the vulnerable paradox of black middle-class subjectivity, both series include extended narrative attention to the police encounter, specifically the encounter of a bourgeois black man with a (seemingly or actually) hostile law enforcement officer. While this might seem merely coincidental, or a concession to contemporary events, I would argue that these episodes of Insecure and Queen Sugar are doing something more—namely, visually framing black male vulnerability to police as a stand-in for the paradox of black and bourgeois subjectivity more broadly, so that we might read these black men’s bodies as surrogates for a precarious and vulnerable blackness writ large. I say this not to diminish the specificity of black men’s experiences with police—although the #SayHerName movement has emerged in part to call attention to the ways that black women are also victims of police and other state-sanctioned violence, and recent statistics show black women are the group most likely to be unarmed in police encounters, such that this specificity may be more a matter of whose experiences receive more attention than of substantive difference or of either gender having it “worse.”13

Instead, I am interested in how these two small-screen narratives helmed by black women, narratives that repeatedly center black women in numerous ways, are so similar in their turn to black men when they want to speak to a particular kind of paradoxical black and bourgeois precarity. I want to suggest that this narrative turn, rather than reflecting a shared willingness to ignore or downplay black women’s experiences—which seems highly unlikely from two show runners (Rae and DuVernay) who have demonstrated their commitment to telling black women’s stories—is in fact about what police as a collective signify and how the violent confrontation between police officers and black bodies might be understood as archetypal, or as what Frank Wilderson would call an antagonism, “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions.”14 I am reminded here of a recent music video that does particularly powerful work to communicate this: Run the Jewels’ and Zack De la Rocha’s “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k),” which premiered in 2014. The video, which features Atlanta’s LaKeith Stanfield as a young black man (“Kid”) being pursued by an officer (“Cop”), played by Shea Whigham, represents interaction between the men as far more than police/perp but rather as the tangle of two weary adversaries in an unwinnable war.15Insecure and Queen Sugar visually invoke this antagonism and suggest that Lawrence’s and Micah’s experiences speak in broader ways to how even materially privileged black subjects carry the injured body, the body made precarious and vulnerable to and by racist assault. Further, as I will argue below, despite the way these particular scenes with Lawrence and Micah might be said to represent black men’s experiences, black women are central to how both shows, but Queen Sugar especially, work in broader ways to conceptualize racial solidarity within and beyond social (class) conflict.

Perhaps it is too pat to read anything more than nostalgia and individualized longing into Lawrence’s arrival, after his long day contending with racial stereotype and the precarity of his own black and bourgeois body, at Issa’s apartment. The camera widens from its tight shot of Lawrence’s face as he ends his conversation with Chad (“I am . . . pretty . . . worn out”) to reveal that he is parked outside the Dunes complex where he and Issa once lived together and where she still, at that moment in the show’s arc, resides. And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body? Perhaps that place is “home,” a home to which Lawrence now cannot actually return. If this suggests a kind of tragic estrangement for Lawrence’s character, Insecure does offer other intimations of the sorts of contingent and fugitive home spaces that are possible for its characters, largely through the lens of female friendships. In Queen Sugar, by contrast, black women play a formidable role in Micah’s healing, not just via his participation in his aunt Nova’s anti-police-brutality activism but via an altered relationship to looking, seeing and being seen, that is facilitated by black women and girls.

In the same episode as Micah’s breakdown and confession to his father of his experience at the hands of the police officer, there is an earlier scene in which Micah, his girlfriend Keke (Tanyell Waivers), and her friend LaTisha (Trina LaFargue) emerge from an open wrought-iron gateway into a fenced-in courtyard, lush with foliage. Micah is dressed in his private school uniform, while Keke and LaTisha, both adolescent black girls, are in casual but fashionable clothes—a sun dress, a T-shirt and colorful shorts, high-top sneakers. These cues suggest that the school day has just ended and that the girls, who do not attend Micah’s school, have come to meet him at his campus. Their conversation immediately raises the question of black privilege and racial belonging, as Micah, professing his interest in the French novel The Three Musketeers, says of its author, Alexandre Dumas, “Besides, Dumas was kind of a . . . undercover brother.” LaTisha expresses immediate skepticism with a sharp “What?” while Keke scoffs, affably, “Ain’t no such thing as a sort of a black dude. Either you are or you aren’t, and it ain’t hard to tell.” At this moment, while the camera is still focused on the three friends, we hear a police siren, and the attention of all three is drawn, along with the camera’s eye, beyond the fence to an unfolding scene of a white officer detaining two black male adolescents who are seated on the curb, handcuffed and looking at the ground, as the officer stands behind them speaking into his radio.

Whether Micah was planning to agree with or to protest the notion that there “ain’t no such thing as a sort of a black dude”—on the basis of skin color, material privilege, or ability to pass for white—the sound of the siren forecloses this conversation and seemingly obviates the need for such debate, as it immediately places all three, as black subjects, on high alert. LaTisha asks, “Y’all should we stay? Make sure that goes down okay?” And without waiting for Micah’s agreement, Keke responds, “Yeah, girl. Just in case,” at which point LaTisha raises her tablet to begin filming the encounter. Here Keke and LaTisha, with Micah’s tacit approval, enact what Simone Browne calls dark sousveillance, which she conceptualizes as not just a particular action but “an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance,” critique which might then include “antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices.”16 Keke and LaTisha’s recognition of the potential for this police encounter not to “go down okay” is a part of the girls’ critique of the police as state actors empowered to discipline and bring under control black bodies by any means at their disposal, up to and including lethal force; their decision to hang around the area and film the encounter “just in case” thus might be understood as both precautionary or protective, and condemnatory. It also, of course, brings Micah’s arrest back into narrative view. Although at this point in episode eight’s story arc the extent of his violation by the officer has not been revealed, even the start of the arrest as depicted in episode one of the season is memorable for its isolation (Micah is pulled over on a deserted road), for the lack of sousveilling eyes to stay and watch, and wait to see, just in case.

Notably, there is also a moment, while Micah, Keke, and LaTisha are behind the fence, watching the adjoining scene unfold, that a handful of Micah’s white classmates (all also in school uniform) approach. One, “Christian,” hails Micah and walks up to him, and once he has been introduced to Keke and LaTisha the group engages in some playful banter, as Christian assures Keke that “[Micah] talks about you all the time.” None of the white teens appear to have noticed the police activity at all, and Christian goes so far as to invite Micah and friends to the movies. We see Micah look over at the scene beyond the fence again, concerned, before declining and promising to see Christian at school tomorrow. The scene ends with LaTisha returning to filming and Keke and Micah, now arm in arm, again watching the police encounter.

I find this conclusion—and this scene as a whole—telling in multiple ways. First, while the scene opens by positing, aurally, that “ain’t no such thing as a sort of a black dude,” the visuals of the scene almost simultaneously contradict this claim and reinvoke divisions of class, depicting Micah and Keke on the opposite side of the fence’s bars from the two poor black kids in police custody. The class privilege of those on Micah’s side of the fence is obvious—that privilege is marked not only by Micah’s prep school uniform but via such visual and even embodied details as Keke’s glowing skin and subtle jewelry, or her and LaTisha’s impeccably done hair and bright, fashionable clothes. While the handcuffed young men on the other side lack the same look of well-cared-for vitality, costumed in faded colors that suggest wear, their skin closer to ashen than glowing, what most clearly positions them, materially, is the barrier of the fence itself—shot through iron bars that recall the bars of a jail cell, the imagery of the scene suggests the two youths are (always) already imprisoned. Thus while the sounds of the scene—not only the cheerful claim that “ain’t no such thing as a sort of a black dude” but the interpolating and terror-inducing call of the police siren, which enfolds all of the black characters in the frame—insist upon one meaning, the scene’s visuals suggest another. Micah, Keke, and LaTisha view the handcuffed boys through a fence that not only figuratively marks the boys as “criminal” but operates as a form of class and caste discipline, presumably protecting those on the inside and excluding those on the outside. And even as we as viewers know that this disciplining barrier might at any point be turned against class “insiders” like Micah precisely because of their blackness, we also know—are made to know both by the visuals of this scene and by our recollection of Micah’s turn as the young black boy in handcuffs—that being on one side of the fence versus the other, even in a contingent or temporary way, has meaning and, often, tangible consequences.

Queen Sugar asks us to hold both of these truths together as we watch: Keke and Micah’s material privilege over the boys via their temporary positioning within the confines of the fence, and their shared vulnerability with them as black subjects all always within reach of the police. In this moment of contradiction the series captures, all too clearly, the black and bourgeois dilemma, the ambivalent paradox of a subject protected (and confined) by privilege while also and always vulnerable to racism because, in the words of Reginald McKnight’s Bertrand Milworth, “black is black.”17

Most important, perhaps, the scene offers a lesson in racial—rather than class—solidarity, in the power of the teens’ choice to remain at the site of the police encounter as witnesses. Micah, Keke, and LaTisha could have accepted the invitation from Christian (whose name signifies at best his symbolic status as the white American Everyman, at worst his figurative alignment with white evangelical Christian racism) to go the movies. In so doing, they would have abandoned the kids beyond the fence—black people who look like them but who exist in a very different relationship to the bars between them—to whatever “just in case” catastrophe might await at the hands of the state.

They do not.

This act—of tarrying, of bearing witness—is a choice. It neither resolves nor dissolves the black and bourgeois dilemma. But it offers an action to take, one that makes clear, to us and to them, where their loyalties lie. What exists beyond that single action remains murky, but a final turn to Rankine’s Citizen might point toward a possibility:

I return to Citizen here because of what this passage suggests about both the power of witness and its limits. There is a moment, as Micah, Keke, and LaTisha sousveil the boys’ encounter with law enforcement, that one of the handcuffed boys looks up from the ground, at his surroundings; while it is unclear what exactly he sees, we are never shown eye contact between him and Micah. A mutual looking, a kind of cross-class understanding, is what we as viewers might wish or hope for from the scene, but the episode remains focused on what Micah sees, on the view from the inside of the fence. That view is only one angle of vision, however, and if it’s raining then we are, all of us, subject to that water, shower or deluge. What rains down beyond the fence touches down inside its boundaries as well—they are permeable, and we are, anyway, never fully inside. And while it has to be seen, we might also honor the desire to stop looking—not to turn away, but to walk out and stand among them. There is joy in that vibrant splendor of wet leaves, rain-darkened flesh. The only shelter is the communion we find there.