‘Black Mirror’s’ Season 4 Finale ‘Black Museum’ Offers a Horrifying Critique of American Racism
For most sci-fi, black people don’t exist.
Take a look at the multiplex. Galaxies far, far away are usually populated by white people, and if there are any black people in space, they exist in some odd post-racial society that seems to have conveniently forgotten the racial difficulties of the modern world. Which isn’t to say sci-fi isn’t often about race—many times racial disparities in our current society are used as allegories in sci-fi. It’s why films like Netflix’s Bright create a world where orcs are treated racially as non-white and somehow, the racist attitudes toward non-white people in this world are non-existent.
It’s a wonder then how within the same month, Netflix managed to release two pieces of science fiction that are as diametrically opposed to one another as Bright and the Black Mirror episode “Black Museum.” The former is a bloated $90 million film that uses allegorical racism to tell an overdone story about how mean humans can be to others, but “Black Museum” dismantles exactly how childish and cliché that approach is by delivering one of the best science fiction stories about racism and the black experience since Get Out. It uses the cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism to combine elements of sci-fi, horror, and a blistering critique of the present black experience while also excavating our past.
The problem with most science fiction that uses race as an allegory is how it reduces racism to hatred based on emotion and circumstance. Human beings hate aliens, orcs, vampires or whatever else because they’re different than them. It ignores the sinister ways that racism has entrenched our legal and political system. “Black Museum” tackles that and much more, using the American curiosity framework—a roadside museum—to tell its story.