Its good that the show-runners have brought on two noted and talented black writersNichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman. But one wonders: If black writers, in general, were to have HBOs resources and support to create an alternative world, would they choose the world dreamed up by the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan? Or would they address themselves to other less trod areas of Civil War history in the desire to say something new, in the desire to not, yet again, produce a richly imagined and visually beguiling lie?
We have been living with the lie for so long. And we cannot fix the lie by asking What if the white South won? and waiting for an answer, because the lie is not in the answer, but in the question itself.