The Press Box - Will The Real Donald Glover Please Stand Up? | Damage Control (Ep. 435)

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

This week on 'Damage Control,' The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins discuss the strange media phenomena surrounding the Parkland activists (1:18), Donald Glover's identity crisis playing out in The New Yorker (12:06), and the outcry over Mo'Nique’s pay-equity campaign against Netflix (26:08). More From The Ringer: The Surprising, Very Public Evolution of Donald Glover Subscribe to 'The Recappables' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Justin Charity from Damage Control. On this week's episode, we're going to be talking about Donald Glover and the new season of Atlanta, among other things. So we want you to check out our Ringer colleague Rob Harvilla's recent writing about Glover. And also, make sure you listen to the new Ringer podcast, The Recapables, covering the current season of Atlanta. The Recapables drops a new episode every Thursday, and you can find it wherever you subscribe to podcasts. All right, now on to Damage Control. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Cameron Collins.

Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, spoke with The New Yorker for a profile that the magazine published this week. We're going to be talking about Glover's sometimes uncomfortable positioning

in mainstream media and among white audiences following the success of Atlanta and his latest studio album, Awaken My Love. We're also going to be talking about Monique, the Oscar-winning actor and comedian who has, for several weeks now, locked herself into a battle with Oprah, Amy Schumer, Charlemagne the God, and most importantly, Black Twitter, over Netflix reportedly low-balling her

with their offer to produce her latest stand-up comedy special. But first, the Parkland survivors, the right-wing adults who despise them, and the left-wing adults who have deified them into memes. So, Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation, from the NRA industry. You just heard a clip of Parkland shooting survivor Cameron Caskey confronting Senator Marco Rubio at the CNN Town Hall last week over Rubio's reported ties to the NRA. Caskey is one of the many survivors who become gun control activists in the wake of the shooting.

He's given interviews, as many of them have. They've organized. They've tweeted. They have a real knack for social media in particular, and a few of them have gotten into viral spats with conservative figureheads online. But for me, there's a weird side to this. We have very quickly come dangerously close to celebrizing these kids in a way that I think I'm not totally comfortable with. Charity.

Why is it that we cannot help ourselves from metabolizing any sort of notoriety, particularly political notoriety, even in this case in the wake of a traumatic fatal event, without running the risk of reducing people to memes, you know, like if that's, you know, if that's, even the word. We'll get to the right-wing characterization of these kids in a moment, but I would say on the left, the people who are very proud of these kids for becoming these prominent voices and the gun control debate and also just sort of proud of their endurance after such a tragic event. You can tell that a lot of the conversations and a lot of the memification of these kids online is done in reverence for that. Right, right. You know, this has been a question for me since honestly, like the early days of Black Lives Matter through now to different, you know, political

movement where it's just like you're talking about a very grave set of political concerns. Right. And I think the people involved in the debate, especially the people pushing for more gun control, understand that gravity. But they're also just so immersed in a social media context where this is just how you behave. Right. Right? Like screenshots are just how you behave. Meme formats are just how you get through the day.

And there is no sense of, there's no sense of house training about any of it. Yeah. Even among journalists who are paid to talk about these things in a responsible, accountable way, there's just a lack of house training. I think, I think part of the problem for me is in just the weight we give to some aspects of this. I'm a little weirded out that people are like sort of noticing that Emma Gonzalez, for example, who's one of the most vocal and one of the most eloquent, kind of activists in this movement right now. People are noticing that she has more followers on Twitter than the NRA. And I'm thinking, cool, what does that mean?

And so that reduces the chance of another mass shoot. Like, what does it mean that people follow her online? That means something in terms of her having an impactful voice and people wanting to get behind her. But why does that seem to have some sort of political weight to people? Because they're comparing it to like the NRA, to like Dan and Loche, NRA spokesperson, et cetera. And it's just like, does that have some sort of political utility to you? Like, why is that your measurement of the movement? I don't understand.

I think it's a measurement for people who maybe. overly define social media and maybe just web media in general, but specifically social media as the pulse of politics. And I think that gets to a thing that I find stressful about a lot of how we talk about the Parkland survivors. I mean, we're talking about teens. Right. And a lot of people who are rooting for them describe that the word that comes up over and over again is how effective they are, right? Because this is America. And since Columbine, there have just been so many historic school shootings in particular. Yeah.

When we talk about the effectiveness of the Parkland survivors as advocates, it just seems clear to me that we're not actually talking about political effectiveness. What we're talking about is a sort of media effectiveness. Right. I think the political calculus of gun reform seems as entrenched as it was after Sandy Hook and as entrenched as it was after Columbine. You know what I mean? Right.

So that's the additional. thing that makes looking at all of this very stressful is that these kids are inspiring in a very particular way that feels like a sort of breakthrough for how America thinks about guns. We're not really seeing the political advocacy clear as starkest terms as an expression of trauma. And that to me is what I'm looking at when I'm seeing these kids. I'm looking at very eloquent, very powerful students who are being eloquent and powerful at these rallies and on these interviews and at these town halls because their friends died. You know, there was a tweet that I saw that had like 50,000 retweets that was like a series of photos.

One was of Emma Gonzalez. One was of Furiosa from Mad Max. One of what was of a, you know, one of the Dora Melagie from Black Panther, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all women who have their head shaved. And there was this way in which it was like, fictional character, fictional character, student who survived a shooting a week ago. Right. As a sort of like, your symbol of like powerful woman.

And it's like, look, I get it. I get why this is a powerful image for you. But this is three fictional characters from movies and a student who survived a shooting. Like, who just survived a shooting. Who just survived a shooting. In the moment of the screenshot that you were putting with these other moments from Mad Max

is talking about surviving a shooting. I don't know. That just feels crass. I can't say that it's like wrong. It's not that it's wrong No, but I don't think you should feel upper heads I think you're right

I mean I think it is a breath of fresh air to talk to somebody who sees that and is like no this is inappropriate I'm not gonna hedge about it like that is weird It's weird right Yeah yeah

I mean I think I remember a lot of like Mawala was the subject Of a lot of that years ago It's like you're not really As much as you find this particular person inspiring You're not really grappling with who they are And why they're important

And why we're talking about them At the first place You're sort of detached on a certain level Absolutely. And then meanwhile, then on the other side, on the other side, I will, I can't even, you know, there's, of course, there's a conspiracy talk of crisis actors, et cetera. Right. That is not new. I mean, people, once people set that kind of stuff about the Sandy Hook survivors, they did not give a fuck.

And we should clarify, like specifically the Sandy Hook massacre was really, I would say that was the beginning of, I don't want to say mainstream, but I'll say pot. conservative outlets, feeling a sea change in the air and realizing that enough of these school shootings would eventually lead to a moment like this. And so they have to create some conspiracy mongering and counter narratives to school shootings as a way of undermining political consensus around gun reform. And so since Sandy Hook through the Parkland shooting, conservative media have deployed a lot of their most prolific online figureheads to basically contradict these kids and to do things ranging from saying, well, these kids are reasonable and they have the right to be political actors, but they're wrong, to positing that there are crisis actors and that the shooting didn't actually happen and that it was all a work to trick America into gun reform. Which is fascinating because that, too, is a symptom of how difficult it is to wrap one's mind around the truth of. something like Sandy Hook or Parkland or the pulse shooting. You can't face the fact that,

you know, 50 people died in the pulse shooting. It has to be unreal. Right. It has to be planted. You can't face the fact that someone walked into an elementary school and shot babies and teachers. You have to make up this alternative counter narrative. This is just such a weird moment. And this, all of this ties into the conversations we're having about Facebook and RussiaBots and just how, information circulates online that I just think a lot about in terms of political action because people's susceptibility to believe memes is so dangerous to me, you know? And it's not just, it's not just all right people. It's us, right? It's everybody. It's like nobody fact checks. And when you do fact check, you will probably wind up on a website that you, that looks official,

that has ads that's copy edited, you know, that seems like the real deal. Like, it's even just like conspiracy mongering has upped its game in terms of what it looks like online. You used to be able to very, very, very easily tell the difference between like a New York Times and some like bullshit all their website. And now, you know, a lot of these websites look alike. This is things, this is the stuff I try to keep track of. Because if I'm sometimes confused, then it's pretty easy to imagine how millions of

other people are too, right? Right. Look, if I just, I've become one of the people who's like, if Sandy Hook didn't change anything, if like an attack on the most vulnerable kind of person you can imagine didn't do anything, I'm really wondering what is going to, what is going to do something, you know? I'm really wondering, like, I really, these appeals to sentiment to change Republican politics in this way. I get them, but I think that we, in terms of how we, in terms of how we assume political action from there on, I think we overstate their effectiveness. Yeah. I mean, this is a catharsis for the survivors, for the families, and it's simultaneously

this catharsis for the left and American politics in general. I just hope that we follow it with something more substantial than nothing. You know, we failed the kids already. It would be a shame if they stepped up like this. And we just continued to keep failing them. Yeah, absolutely. This week in The New Yorker, Donald Glover revealed that he's strange as hell. For many of us, even many of his fans, something about him has tended not to quite add up, but not in a bad way.

He's very slippery, but in fascinating ways. But this profile has really stoked a lot of conversation to that regard. The profile written by a tad friend entitled Donald Glover, can't save you is as of this recording the most red piece in the new yorker.com this week. And it has absolutely made the rounds among our black friends, especially, because it seems like we're all trying to wrap our minds around who this guy is and how the narrative about him keeps changing. And we're posting, we're posting on Twitter, these screenshots with these question marks. We're posting, if you post four different screenshots from this

piece, it seems like it's about four different people. Yeah. And this guy is really hard to pin down. a really great time being sort of sarcastic trying to pin him down. How are you feeling? I think up front we should concede that Donald Glover is a creator who has worked across different media. Yes. Right? He's very multimedia. He's a musician. He's a stand-up comedian. Well, first of all, he's a singer and rapper and stand-up comedian and show writer. You know what I mean? And director. Right. And actor. Right. So, There's a sense in which his being hard to pin down maybe comes with the territory. Sure.

But I don't know. There's a second level. There's a second level of inception with this guy. Which dream level are we on right now? Which dream level? We're moving to the second. Okay. I think we're on the, we're in the hotel.

Okay. We're in the hotel level of Donald Glover right now. There's almost a tropeiness to how he talks in this profile. Because Donald Glover, as a creator, as a. celebrity brand ascends and everyone is sort of like okay we get this even if you didn't like Donald Glover's weird rapping from 2011 I'm raising my hand right now I feel very seen childish Campino right you know they there's some earlier much more awkward much more alienating much more moody phases of his career that are more polarizing certainly than Atlanta is like

Atlanta's pretty generally acclaimed. But this profile is basically Glover presenting himself as an Altier who sort of doesn't have to suffer fools, doesn't have to gladly participate in a New Yorker profile even, can just sort of be the consummate difficult man. Right. Right. But the way he's difficult in the profile is, when we say slippery, it almost seems like it's put on. Is that your read? It's like he's doing a bit.

See, this is where I'm indecisive. because first of all, what I appreciate about this profile is that it's long as hell. This is not the kind of, I appreciate that. It took me, it took me a while to get through as many, as many New Yorker profiles do. But this is why I value them because this is not like, you know, like another kind of glossy magazine will not hide the fact that the reason you're on the cover is because you had a thing that just came out. And it's really promo for you. And they're going to do a piece. but it's if you stack all the pieces they do every time you have something come out against each other,

they're all kind of the same unless the profiler is really good, and they're very good profilers. But a New Yorker profile, this is a lot of room. This is a lot of language from him. It's a lot of weird ideas from him. This is, I don't want, I mean, depending on your read of the profile, this could be a profiler giving him a lot of rope to hang himself with. But it also, what confuses me about this profile sums up, I think, my impression of him so far, which is that I can't really make sense of him. And I also, in most cases, don't like his art.

I like Atlanta. Right. I think he's a fine actor. I think he's the least interesting actor in Atlanta. That's absolutely true. Like, his contribution to that show as an actor is not really what excites me. I also just don't think earns an interesting character. I think he's like deliberately not interesting, which is fair.

But I, he's such a sphinx. I, like, I wrote out some quotes because I didn't know, I want us to talk about, for example, I feel like Jesus. I do feel chosen. My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work, but I don't know if humanity is worth it or if we're going to make it. I don't know if there's much time left. Charity, how do you feel? about this man, single-handedly adjusting the doomsday clock. Yeah, that's what I mean by.

It seems like he's doing a bit, right? Like, that just seems like a thing. So much of Donald Glover's art Intel Atlanta, it seems to be engaging with the idea of, like, insecurity. Yeah, which is fair. Trying on different identities and not really being totally comfortable in your own skin. And to me, it's like, I read a quote like that. And I'm like, you're doing an impersonation of other people that you've read. profiles of who are like famous people that you maybe admired at some point.

You know, like that's just such a generically, I'm a genius quote. Yeah. I mean, there's even that moment where, you know, he says, I don't see anyone else out there who's better. Maybe Elon Musk. And it's like, I don't know. First of all, the fact that he picks Elon Musk is his one exception is a big red flag. And even though he goes on to saying maybe he's a super villain.

It's too late. Yeah. Well, no, if anything, the super villain line just makes it doubly obnoxious. Because it's like now it sounds like he's doing a general. Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor. You know what I mean? It's like the worst thing I can think of. And it's also this weird about to get evacuated from the species type of rapper

Bracadocio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just like if natural selection is real, this form of whatever this is is not going to last. Right. It just does not seem, it doesn't seem convincing to me. But on the other hand, there are moments in the profile where I feel like I understand this lack of convincingness, where he talks about kind of algorithmically figuring out how to, see you're laughing already.

He sounds like Elon Mund. This is how Elon Musk sounds in interviews. Absolutely. But algorithmically figuring out how to game being good at things to get people's attention. Whether it's learning how to play, it is very revealing, learning how to play basketball and PE as a kid to deciding to direct an episode of Atlanta, etc. Which clarified for me

why it does seem like everything he does is a kind of drag, which is not bad, I should say. Being an artist whose performance is playing at being an artist is not uninteresting. He's not the first. But there's a sense for a lot of his art

with which he's always just an approximation of the more interesting thing. I feel like this about his last album, for example. Yeah. Which is literally that. I mean, Awakey and My Love is in a practice. I mean, it's done with really good session musicians.

And so it sounds like a great album. But it's also like, one, all of Childish Gambino's rap. I mean, music before that is rap in R&B. So he does this funk album that seems like a super on the nose funkadelic Prince tribute album. And that's a choice, right? It's a choice to be like, instead of making music that is the thing that is who I am, I'm going to be the Pokemon Ditto. Right?

Like, I'm just going to... I don't know what Pokemon's thing it is. I trust that that's an accurate. His whole thing is that he, like, carbon copies other things. Gotcha. And he does it very precisely and effectively. Yes. But there's no self at the heart of it.

The question you're left with at the end of each of those impersonations and at the end of a long New Yorker profile is, wait, who is this guy? Right. Right. Like, who is this guy? Again, I'm wondering, is that bad? Well, okay. So you talked about...

You talked about the idea of opportunism. And here's the striking thing. Let's just get into it. So the striking thing to me about Donald Glover is that a lot of his language in the interview, and at one point in the interview, him and the reporter talk about it. The reporter tad friend is white, right? Right. There's an exchange they have about how this whole profile would go if the interviewer were black instead.

Right. Gambino says all of this pro-black shit, right? He says all of this shit about like, you know, there'd be a chance that you would relate to me better. You would understand me better. But even then, I'd have to worry about like whether you would sell me out for your white mainstream audience, yada, yada, yada. And it's like all of these things that sound very 2018 black Twitter core. Right. I'm rooting for everybody black, you know, sentiment.

The weird thing about it being that five years ago, childish Gambino. slash Donald Glover was literally the opposite of that. The whole, the childish Gambino's bad rap, I would say, in like 2011, 2012, sort of like in the middle of community, was that he was this, he was a self-styled exceptional black guy who was like obsessed with rapping about Asian women, obsessed with white women. Right. And had this air of not wanting anything to do with black people. And so the fact that seemingly overnight, he is transformed into Derey. Right. It just seems like it's ditto again.

It seems like he's impersonating a thing. He's gesturing at a thing because he knows that that is what will resonate. But it's like if anyone, anyone who knew who Donald Glover was five, six years ago. Right. I just don't know how you could You can totally feel like Oh yeah, this totally makes sense That this is who this guy would be

Which is, it's funny Because I think about the headline of this piece You know, Donald Glover can't save you My immediate reaction, just my, you know, This work of psychological evaluation You wanted to know the first words that came to mind When I read that headline They were, when was he ever

When was he ever trying to? When, like when, who put him in that position? I think he put himself in that position in order to say he's not in that position. Right. And that is odd. Right?

That's weird. It's not odd. It's self-serving. I don't think it's odd. But again, it's odd. I'll tell you, it's odd. It's odd that journalists buy it. Because I will say that outside of this particular New Yorker profile,

it does seem that since Atlanta's season one, since awakened my love, since his sort of critical ascendancy, Donald Glover is the subject of profile, sometimes black writers, sometimes white writers. And all of those profiles are sort of tasked with papering over all the stuff I just mentioned. When he was a racially somewhat confused and problematic figure, a lot of contemporary profiles of Glover do seem to go out of their way to pretend that those phases of his career that totally clash with what he is presenting himself as now just never happened. And so like the New Yorker profile, I think, does this and other profiles do this. They reduce Glover's background to like, oh, he got his start on 30 Rockin community.

And then from there he went to Atlanta. And it's like, no. He had a whole musical career that you just skipped. And that's the source of a lot of things that complicate these sort of pro-black narratives of Donald Glover. And was a source of a lot of conversation to that effect at the time that a lot of people were. That's just written out. Pretty suspicious. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it's very true that that was written out of the narrative. I will say that this profile was the first that I've read. I have to be honest, because he, until Atlanta was not an artist who really excited me, did not really read on him before Atlanta. But I do value this profile giving me the language of how he thinks about these things. Like that algorithm quote, if you really don't want to be the entire piece, just like control F for the word algorithm. I think it appears in the piece two times and it's in one graph.

I think that's so, I think it's useful to know that he's so calculating in the middle of a piece in which he's seen doing a lot of calculation. I think this piece is deceptively smart about this, but I do agree with you that there's this prehistory of debate about him that is unmentioned, but I think borne out in this profile. Yeah. I do want to say for the record that I am a fan of it. I'm actually a really big fan of Atlanta. Yeah, like Atlanta too.

but TV shows are made by a lot of people. But, and we're going to Charity's anime quarter for a second. Earn being the least interesting character on Atlanta is a very anime choice. Very anime move to have the protagonist of a show be the least interesting character. I support that. That's the end of Charity's Anime Quarter. On that note. Before we get to our next topic, here's a quick word from our editor, Sean Fennacy, on his podcast, The Big Picture.

Hey guys, this is Sean Fennessey, the editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and I want to tell you about a podcast I host called The Big Picture. Each week, I welcome a different filmmaker to talk about their latest movie and how it was made. I've talked to the directors of some of my favorite movies, including Jordan Peel, Greta Gerwig, Ryan Johnson, Barry Jenkins, and dozens more. You can find new episodes on the Channel 33 feed every Friday by going to The Ringer.com backslash podcasts, or by subscribing to Channel 33 wherever you get your podcasts.

I hope you'll check it out. Hey, my loves. I am asking that you stand with me and boycott Netflix for gender bias and color bias. I was offered a $500,000 deal last week to do a comedy special. However, Amy Schumer was offered $11 million, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle $20 million. Then Amy Schumer went back and renegotiated $2 million because she said, I shouldn't get what the men are getting their legends. However, I should get more, and Netflix agreed.

When we asked Netflix to explain the difference why the money was so different, And they said, well, we believe that's what Monique will bring. We said, well, what about my resume? They said, we don't go off of resumes. Then we asked them, what was it about Amy Schumer? And they said, well, she sold out Madison Square Garden twice, and she had a big movie over the summer. Is that not Amy Schumer's resume?

So you just heard the Oscar-winning actor and comedian Monique launching a boycott against Netflix, who supposedly offered Monique just $500,000 to do a stand-up comedy special, despite the fact that Netflix has offered Amy Schumer $11 million to do a stand-up comedy special. And Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle both earned, you know, upward of $20 million for their stand-up comedy special. So Monique is basically saying, you all need to pay me. I'm a black woman.

It's not like you're soliciting a ton of these stand-up comedy specials for black women. And you're going to offer me $500,000. This is bullshit. it. Monique launched this boycott several weeks ago, and she's done a lot of interviews talking about it. A lot of people online, and I'd say Black Twitter specifically, have been sort of second-guessing Monique and second-guessing her value and saying, well, I don't know. Monique isn't like a super huge stand-up comedian. Monique's not as relevant as she was. Maybe when Precious came out, maybe she only is worth $500,000. A lot of weird gaslighting of Monique, who, again, is an Oscar-winning actor. But anyway, Monique is pissed off at Netflix.

We get that, right? The problem is that Monique has sort of painted herself into this corner where she's also pissed off Amy Schumer. Right. She's also pissed off Chris Rock. She's argued on the view with Whoopi Goldberg, who has told her that she maybe hasn't gone about her business in the right way since Precious. We can talk about sort of some controversy surrounding Precious in a second. Right, right. She did a breakfast club interview last week where she argued for 45 minutes with Charlemagne the God on air.

Charlemagne's also sort of second-guessing Monique and her husband and their sort of business tactics on all of this. And Monique threw out all of this. She said, she's not just talking about herself. Monique does make a point of saying that, look, this is about black women comedians in general. This is about black women in general. Right. You know, in the way that Viola Davis, in terms of, you know, black women in Hollywood and dramas, you know, Viola Davis has talked about pay disparities between black women and white women.

I got the Oscar. I got the Emmy. I got the two Tonys. I've done Broadway. I've done off Broadway. I've done TV. I've done film. I've done all of it. I have a career that's probably comparable to Merrill Street, Julian Moore. Let's Sigourney Weaver. They all came out of Yale. They came out of Juilliard. They came out of NYU. They had the same. path is me. And yet I am nowhere near them, not as far as money, not as as far as job opportunities, nowhere close to it. I don't know why in this moment where you would think, in this political moment where you would think, people would identify with the cause of a black woman saying, Hollywood needs to pay me more money. I'm an Oscar winning actor and comedian. I'm also the only good performance in almost Christmas. Okay.

You would think people would sympathize with that cause. And yet Monique is like the odd black woman out. And I want to understand why. There are a lot of ways to come at this. I think this is complicated because like you, from what I sense, I am pro Monique in this. At the very least, there's no way that Monique should be getting 500,000 if Amy Schumer is getting 11 million. I've seen Amy stand up. I've seen her movies, I've seen the show, I've seen interviews.

I do not think that there should be a $10-plus million disparity between these two people when it comes to a Netflix comedy special. But more importantly, I wonder if Monique, her first error in making a right argument was hashtag boycott Netflix. This to me is a difficult thing to ask. Yeah, that was an opening. That was a choice. This is a choice that if I were Hercon Cigliary, I would have said, this is not going to get people, you know, this is going to make people think that you're overreaching. Once they think rightly or wrongly that you're overreaching, it is really hard to get them back on your side. I mean, I mean, we're thinking about this in the context of, you know, who's big on Netflix right now.

It's other black artists. It's Shonda Rimes. It is Dave Chappelle. It is Chris Rock. It is movies like Mudbound. You're asking a black audience who is loyal to black artists to forsake the black artists that they see being boosted by Netflix. You're also asking them to forsake all the things that white people like friends. Frazier.

That's more importantly, Fraser on Netflix. Fraser is the shit. And we're in a moment where people treat Netflix like it's a TV channel. So you were asking people to give up a TV channel. what to them functions like one. It just seems like a miscalculation to me. But on the other hand, I think it is evidence of how strongly she feels that she is being underpaid. And I think black customers' loyalty to Netflix, worldwide loyalty to Netflix among every race, is part of the reason that she feels she should be getting more than $500,000, which, as you mentioned, it is just it is more than just low-balling.

That's like, that's... If I were at Monique, by the way... That's dismissal. If that were... If I were starting with that opening gamut, which I wouldn't boycott, I would be like, look, man, y'all pay for Bright. Y'all pay for Bright. Like, come on. Yeah, but people watched Bright.

That's fair. That's fair. People watched right, right? I mean, it's complicated because, you know, you alluded to this when you talked about Whoopi Goldberg. There's a thing with Monique that keeps coming up that I really think is a shame, but I also think it's complicated, which is that... in the post-precious moment, right, after the, you could say, professional peak of her career with a sort of mainstream audience, you don't get more mainstream than the at that time, even older, even wider, even more male, Academy Award voting body, a story that got circulated post her winning the Oscar was that she refused to play the game, that she refused to cooperate, that she was not being nice to producers, that she was not being nice to, basically, she was refusing to kiss ass in the industry and the way that one tends to do in order to not only win the Oscar, but also to have a sustainable career after that. And this is where we get into a really

complicated place because as far as I'm concerned, nobody is above being accused of being difficult to work with. Some people are just difficult personalities. But this charge is always levied, or more frequently levied against people like Monique, women, people of color, and certainly the intersection. And so when a story like that takes off from a major Hollywood director, and then everyone starts to believe it, and then other people are like, yeah, she was mean to me once. It just snowballs into Whoopi Goldberg on The View telling you, telling you that you just don't know your place. The fact that the main mouthpiece is for that critique of Monique are Oprah, Whoopi Goldberg and Lee Daniels. Black people in the academy.

Great. Yeah. That makes it, that makes it, that makes. it difficult for her. And also, it just seems like her business overall is maybe not managed particularly well. I believe, like, her husband is her main business partner. It seems like she has a very indie, let's call it that, like a very indie sort of grassroots. Yeah, very, right. Ooh, there you go. I like that. Dennis Kucenich. She has a very Dennis Kucenich operation going. And it's, it's certainly, it is not. savvy. And I do not think that we should underestimate the extent to which savviness absolutely plays a role in these things. But then the other part of this is

Amy Schumer is savvy? Yeah. Well, God. Right. Right. Right. I just like I don't. But that's the problem is like speaking of white women. Like the real problem, here, here's my sense of what the real problem is here. Monique doesn't have white allies in the same way that Viola Davis does or the way that Octavia Spencer does in Jessica Chastain. But the other thing is that Monique, once you put precious aside, especially, Monique doesn't have white fan bait. Like, Monique is just not for white people. So it's easy for her to get traction on some level for this as a news story.

But it sort of not really hit the critical mass she needs. Right. For boycott Netflix to make sense. Because it's just, Monique is the most sort of like black audience figure. Black people know Monique. We all know Monique. I grew up watching Monique. Right.

That's the thing. It's like black people know Monique, but there is a hard limit to the potential political capital she has here. And like, Viola Davis doesn't have that same limit. Yeah. And this is getting us into a fascinating corner of just, you know, the black mainstream versus the white mainstream. Because as people who've grown up with Monique, it is to us inconceivable that Monique does not deserve to be. getting paid more than she was offered by Netflix for this show because I can't, she's been around so long. Yeah.

And she ascended to an Academy Award out of a frankly unlikely place. Yeah. And so for me, it's just inconceivable. But you're right. Like, what Viola Davis has is that she can go on interviews and say something that another white actress might sort of bristle at, which is that I'm not getting paid as much as Meryl Streep and I deserve to be. And Meryl Streep agrees with her. Right, right. Whereas

Monique can't compare herself to Merrill Street It won't track And I mean First of all It is quite a shame That the closest person she has Like compare herself to was Amy Schumer

Right, right Frankly who is not Meryl Streep But also just She doesn't have Amy Schumer's support Right And we got to talk about like

Just not just in this conversation But like broadly Like the political capital Of the white ally White allies Will really get you A change your life They will change your life.

And that is so, to your point about Monique only kind of having a black audience, that to me is what I see in that number of 500,000. That to me is what Netflix is saying is that, you know, it's not that we doubt that black people will watch your show. It's that this is not a platform for black people that in order to get the big money, not only do you have to have a kind of comparable career, you also, you know, Chris Rock, white people love him. He yells at them all the time. and they still love him. Dave Chappelle makes white people who are really awkward and they still love it

because as we said in Tonne Hanse coach they love that spanking. Monique doesn't do that. I just think it's a really a shame not only what's happening but also just the way we metabolize the conversation to be a conversation about how much she isn't worth,

how much she shouldn't be asking for. In this moment of as you point out, this moment of women of color in the industry and people of color broadly and women broadly sort of saying fuck you pay me.

She is one of the few people who've come up in this conversation for whom there's been a smackdown. And that's weird. Yeah, it's distressing. I mean, look, I believe that Whoopi is wise, but I... Do you?

But we'll get to that. I believe Whoopi is wise, but I believe Monique is right. I do too. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Cameron Collins.

Don't forget to rate and subscribe if you like the show, and we'll be back in two weeks.