'The Handmaid's Tale' shifts its focus to the rage and limitations of its heroine

The Handmaid's Tale premiered on Hulu in the spring of 2017, early in the administration that eventually nominated three of the five Supreme Court justices who ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade. At the time, its story of a woman who had been kidnapped and separated from her daughter and her husband and held captive by a couple who raped her repeatedly in the hopes that she would produce a baby — one they would also take from her — got attention for being a frightening and foreboding vision of what worst-case scenarios for the loss of liberty might look like.

But it also got attention, more and more over the following years, for its limitations. Most glaringly, its central character, June (Elisabeth Moss) is a white woman, and most of the other women held in Gilead as handmaids looked to be white as well. "This could happen here" was a warning that was foolish to those who knew that in the United States and