Fear the Walking Revisionists

[dropcap1]I[/dropcap1] haven’t been able to sleep right since I saw episode 2 of Fear of the Walking Dead. It wasn’t the ever-present threat of society’s devolution. Or the flesh-eating zombies with their surprisingly hard (not-yet-decayed) skulls to protect their brains. Or the horrible choice Madison made to not take the food. It was the scene in which brown people yell about police shooting a homeless man 20 times for doing nothing that wouldn’t let go of me. Obviously Fear the Walking Dead is following in the kill-all-the-Black-men footsteps of The Walking Dead, but this felt different. This is beyond negligence or racial obliviousness or even lazy writing. This feels pointedly and specifically like “gaslighting” or being told that something you can clearly see is happening is not happening. Back to FTWD — Chris is on a bus when someone says the police shot a homeless guy like 20 times. Now, cue the crime scene and add all the details we’ve come to expect at a crime scene: yellow police tape, a kid with a camera (why not just his phone?), a loud, angry Black man yelling about his rights, and a mob of unruly and mostly brown protesters (I see you, bald white guy who I like to think of as Token the Mascot for Plausible Deniability). Literally every person in these picture is brown Hmmm. This feels so familiar.Yes, you can – and someone already did – argue that “the audience knows from the get-go that these protesters, for all their righteous, social justice-minded rhetoric…