wsws | Intended as a pilot for a potential full-length series, Black & Privileged
is set in a neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Upon its July release
on Netflix, the film reached the top 10 most-viewed list on the
streaming platform and has been featured prominently at a number of
award ceremonies focused on African-American filmmaking.
While in reality a seriously impoverished community, the fictionalized version of Englewood in Black & Privileged
is a well-off neighborhood whose residents are mostly upper-middle
class African-American businessmen and women. One of the film’s central
characters explains, in regard to the neighborhood’s composition, “We
searched through the city of Chicago for folks who not only cared about
this community, but they cared about the people. And they had to
understand the value of money. So yes, we have our own schools, we have
our own banks, we hired our own police force.”
In Harris’s film, the lives of Englewood’s happy residents are
disrupted when a nearby housing project is torn down, causing low-income
blacks to turn up in the wealthy gated community. This sets off an
existential crisis among the well-heeled African Americans.
“If this happens, like, everybody’s going to leave—the doctors, the
lawyers, entrepreneurs like myself … They’re all gone,” warns Eldon
(Hendrix), on learning the unsettling news. The prosperous, self-deluded
denizens of Engelwood ludicrously choose to interpret the influx of
lower-income people as a scheme hatched by the “the [white] man” to
break up their idyllic community.
Black and Privileged is at its best when it skewers the
self-righteousness and hypocrisy of these layers. Another main
character, Dawn (Halfkenny), initially supportive of the new neighbors,
quotes W.E.B. DuBois: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race
in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” She insists it is
the community’s job to lend a “helping hand” to these poor souls. Her
enthusiasm turns to panic and hostility overnight, however, when she
discovers her new neighbors “standing in the middle of the street
drinking 40-ouncers.” Dawn demands that her husband (Henderson) call the
police on the new residents!
