<em>America to Me</em> Tackles Race in New Ways
Watching TV these days, it often feels like we’re in the middle of a messy moment of self-reflection on the state of the nation. Earlier this summer, Orange Is the New Black’s sixth season delved more deeply than it previously had into issues of racial inequity within the justice system, both in prison and in court. The second season of Dear White People did the same thing with a fictional Ivy League university, exploring specifically how the Donald Trump presidency had affected students of color.
On Showtime, Sacha Baron Cohen literally using shock humor, model genitalia, and clumsy stereotypes to explore how passively depraved the nation has supposedly become. In its , was genuinely revelatory, but more frequently it felt like juvenile trolling from a self-coronated master of the form, made darker by Cohen’s refusal to distinguish between who deserved to be punked and who didn’t. The show exposed the country’s ugliest qualities rather than illuminating them.
