Review
America
Culture
Film & TV
Race
4 min read

What do we want from our stories?

New film release American Fiction satirises storytelling and the expectations placed on authors. Jamie Smith records his reactions to watching the movie.
A man sitting at a restaurant table turns and looks aside.
Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison aka Stagg R. Leigh.
Orion Productions.

This article was first published on the author’s Substack Quid Amo, December 16 2023. 

On a recent visit to Los Angeles, my wife Deanna and I went to see Cord Jefferson’s new satire, American Fiction, playing in only seven theaters nationwide right now. The film is a smart, beguiling adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure

Part of the fun of watching movies in L.A. is being reminded what a company town LA still is. We were slightly puzzled when, as a production company splash screen opened the film, a ripple of hoots and applause bubbled up from the audience. When, at the end of the movie, we saw an entire group video-recording the rolling credits, we realized a production team was in the house, seeing their work on the public screen. 

Watching this particular movie in L.A. was especially entertaining because of its meta commentary on our storytelling industries, including film. The winks & nods about screenwriting, adaptation, and philistine studio executives occasioned knowing guffaws in the audience. 

The movie asks important, uncomfortable questions about the stories that “we” (scare quotes will become obvious in a second) want to hear today, and why. 

What’s supposed to be a farce is embraced by white marketing executives as the latest Black trauma porn for awards season.

The key facet of the plot is relatively simple: a Black novelist (Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played cagily by Jeffrey Wright) has published several works of deft, critically-celebrated literary fiction. But he can’t sell his latest novel. His agent informs him why: “It’s not Black enough.” The Black novelist is puzzled (“But I’m Black!”) until he wanders into a reading from a new bestseller, the latest by a Black novelist celebrated by some famous white woman’s Book Club. Written in dialect, with flat characters and tired tropes, the novel panders to and perpetrates horrendous stereotypes dusted with a hint of redemption. But it does so with just the right dose of guilt-induction for white readers to feel morally assuaged just by reading the book. The publishing industry has seized upon the mad, pretzeled formula: You can sell a lot of books to white people by offering them the thrill of a little enlightened guilt that actually depends on their continued racist stereotypes. 

In a fit of disgust, rage, and desperation, “Monk” begins banging out just such a novel, determined to play a kind of Sokal-hoax on the publishing industry. Just one problem: the market clamors to buy this dreck and even turn it into a movie. What’s supposed to be a farce is embraced by white marketing executives as the latest Black trauma porn for awards season. You can imagine the comedic possibilities here. It’s a funny movie. 

As a white viewer of this movie, if I laugh at all the right points and get all the inside jokes, am I being offered a little absolution?

But it is also tender. What’s playing out on screen—the story surrounding the creation of the novel’s story—is a very different kind of Black story. Monk, it turns out, is the black sheep only because he’s a PhD in a family of MDs. Here is a Black family with a massive Victorian home in Boston and a beach house on the Cape—which is just to say, they are a family of accomplished professionals like so many others. Are we surprised? Like any human family, of course, their life is not without pain, loss, heartbreak, and animosity. But like any human family, there is also achievement, pride, joy, connection. 

Here’s a Black family. Here’s their story. Is this a “Black story?” Is it “Black enough?” What do we want from our stories? 

Jefferson’s endeavor here is fraught, and he knows it. The last part of the movie “goes meta” as a way to concede that there’s no “clean” way to raise these questions without slipping back into being part of the problem. As a white viewer of this movie, if I laugh at all the right points and get all the inside jokes, am I being offered a little absolution? To his credit, Jefferson never quite lets a viewer like me off the hook. Something about this story will, and should, remain unavailable to me. 

But also to his credit, Jefferson had me thinking of the Roman poet Terence when we walked out of the cinema. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” Jefferson tells a story that, in this climate, is willing to risk a claim to human solidarity. 

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.