There is a long-standing American tradition of taking pleasure from creating a spectacle out of Black trauma. From human zoos to the ubiquitous presence of dead Black bodies on social media, much of the American public has frequently found a sadistic joy in watching Black people suffer. Slave narratives—a genre that has been mined relentlessly for gold—are some of the most common examples of this. These forms of entertainment have almost always been produced by white people.

Recently, however, Black producers and entertainers have taken Black trauma and explored it in a way that has moved it away from spectacle toward healing. Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele’s blockbuster horror film, sparked a multitude of conversations about racism and its scarring effect on a Black person. Its critical and popular success opened the door for more such projects.

This conversation is not just happening in film, but in all forms of entertainment. Random Acts of Flyness, a 30-minute late-night show created by Terence Nance for HBO, is another example. The series, which was created in 2018, has been called a "visionary, and speculative exploration of Black life in the United States," and continues to serve as a microcosm of Black consciousness. Nance and his collaborators—a host of talented Black writers, producers, and directors—investigate the ways in which Black people inhabit a place in America. The series explores the saddest thoughts, starting with the idea that a Black man cannot even ride his bike without being stopped by the police, and comes back around to express the joy that comes with creating and maintaining such a core component of American culture today.

Par for the course, trauma turns up in almost every corner of the series. To a tuned-in viewer, the concept that just living as a Black person can be traumatic is always there, hanging in the background. It is fitting, then, that Nance explored this territory in the very first episode, most particularly in a skit entitled "Everybody Dies."

The skit is modeled after a late-night cable variety show from the ’70s and ’80s, anchored by the deviously pessimistic "Ripa the Reaper." Ripa, a parody of the Grim Reaper from the "Department of Black Death," hosts the show with as little empathy as possible, ushering murdered and otherwise abused Black children to the other side. All the while, she sings of the inevitability of death.

Ripa shows little emotion until the end, when she is fatigued and overwhelmed by the Black death, and tries to launch herself to her own demise, only to stumble back through another door and continue the show. The viewer gets the impression this is not the first time Ripa has been so desolate over her position and that she is tethered involuntarily to the gig.

The morbidity of the skit is the point. The delivery in the form of a variety show encourages the spectacle. There is nothing cool or funny—the hallmarks of a variety show—about dead children, but for the American public, there seems to be something endlessly intriguing about the death of Black children.

For years and years, Black trauma has been made into entertainment entirely by white people. Only in the past decade or so have Black people been able to take agency and control of this narrative, whether in film or television or comics. In doing so, Black creators have managed to isolate and reconceive a motif that is much more powerful, accurate, and resilient.