Black refiners. Thoughts on THAT moment from episode 9?
This is probably gonna get deleted and downvoted to hell. But, fuck it. The Milchick and Drummond moment really struck a nerve for me as a Black person.
It was more than just somebody senior being shitty to a subordinate. It was a white man placing blame on a Black man for a mess that other (white) people helped create. A white man telling a Black man how to speak. A white man demanding an apology, receiving it and then telling a Black man it wasn’t good enough.
Also, Mr. Drummond looks the type to use a hard R.
When you look at Milchick’s entire arc from the beginning, he was always doing grunt work for Cobel. And when he replaced her, he didn’t have the resources that she did. More seemed to be asked of Milchick than would have been asked of her or anybody else. And I know, I know — Ms. Cobel may have been given special treatment. And Milchick has certainly made some blunders. But it doesn’t change the optics for how he’s been treated. Especially when you factor in his performance review, the negrofied Kier paintings, Milchick asking Natalie about them and her non verbal reaction of ‘Gurl, same. But we can’t talk about that here’. Tramell Tillman and Sydney Cole Alexander both did an amazing job in episodes 9 and 5 of saying so much without saying anything. And I’m sure Black folk can relate to that non verbal communication you have with a fellow Black person when you know some bullshit is afoot.
I have worked in corporations where white people would comment on ‘big words’ I use in e-mails. I have been the only Black employee, with no peer I could talk to about racial microaggressions I’m experiencing in the office. I have also had my Blackness used against me by white superiors to create disparaging narratives.
Sometimes it’s fine to be Black. But you have to be a certain type of Black person, which is deemed ‘acceptable’.
It’s easy to say ‘I don’t think Lumon is acting as it towards Milchick because he is Black’, because Lumon are such a piece of shit that they don’t have any real respect for anybody. I have even thought this when I was in situations where the racial bullshit was happening to me. ‘This company is just shit, it’s shit to everybody’. But two things can be true at the same time.
Abuse of power within the workplace has been a constant theme of Severance. But I didn’t expect the show to bring race into it. Even when Milchick was given those Kier paintings, I just thought ‘It’s just Lumon doing their weird shit’ and didn’t think the show would make anything of it. But it did. And at a stretch, it also potentially sheds a different light on the treatment of Gemma and Miss Huang, especially compared to Helena.
Yes. Lumon are terrible to everybody. But the optics here do matter. Especially when you look at the bigger picture. More-so if you identify with Milchick’s interaction with Drummond as I did.
Note: To clarify (because somebody mentioned it in the thread), I made the image at the top of this post. They are not direct screenshots of the official subtitles. I assumed (a mistake) that this would be clear given the post. But I guess it wasn’t. So, this is the disclaimer. I am not saying that Drummond was going to say that or that he would. It was just an image to accompany the topic of the post, of how in conjunction with other elements of Milchick’s story, that TO ME there was an undertone to that interaction with Drummond that may resonate with Black people specifically, as it did with me.
Note (18.3.25): So, the post got locked. Which is unfortunate, because it was cool to see other people’s thoughts, that others felt seen and that some hadn’t made the race connection. I re-posted this post as a blog post — for those who want to share their thoughts, comments, disagree, etc.