Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nier, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon.

There is something tragic about such noble suffering, that the only way around trauma is through it. This is why the word character - etymologically speaking - is about being etched, marked or carved with lines, as opposed to being free of all blemishes. Musing about the workings of psychoanalysis, the famed British analyst Wilfred Bion described once how “if there aren’t two anxious people in the room, the two being both the therapist and the patient, then there is not much point in turning up to find out what you already know.

So where does this leave the narrator? Hating whites and wishing them all dead? Of course not. “In order really to hate white people,” he now observes, “one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black.

The problem is that the series is well made. It is well acted, thoughtfully paced, and meticulously produced. It would be less irksome if it were not so watchable. As I watch I become distractingly aware of how my sympathies are always being directed towards Paris and never towards Raqqa, Damascus, Tehran, or Algiers. Most of the characters, regardless of origin, are depicted as having both flaws and admirable qualities and the direction is subtle by the standards of most television. This is what I find increasingly grotesque: that something objectionable has been so carefully designed to be received as unobjectionable or even as admirably candid.