There was another in-depth discussion behind the scenes about the moment when Sharee talks with Regina (Constance Marie) about being called the n-word when she was just 4 years old. Everybody was kind of very sensitive to, OK, how are we going to express this without being over the top and trying to be realistic but also not pointing the finger too much at what potentially the campus police might have had going on in their minds? I think we struck a really even and good balance,” he says.
“We had discussed certain levels of aggressions initially. “I brought a lot of that to the table as we were shooting,”īyrd also had his own personal encounters with the police to draw upon when it came time to Chris’ own confrontation with campus security, in addition to having seen countless videos on the news of black individuals being targeted by the police in the midst of the # BlackLivesMatter movement. “It was amazing that it was such a parallel,” says Byrd.
Similar to Chris’ storyline in the episode, in which his c ollege baseball team sits out a game in protest to make the administration take notice, Bryd and some of his teammates had walked off the field during a football game in addition to staging a sit-in – motivated by a coach who had said racially insensitive things to another black player. In Bryd’s case, he had a few personal experiences to pull from for the episode, most notably as a football player at Ramapo College of New Jersey. “It was truly one of the most both challenging and incredible creative experiences of my life.” “I’m not black and I had to be really really open and ask a lot of questions and do a lot of listening and make sure we had as many voices as possible in the conversation that were African-American,” says Weiss. Even the soundtrack for the episode was completely comprised of African-American artists. She enlisted an African-American writer ( Talicia Raggs) to co-write the episode and an African-American director (Jeff Byrd) to helm it.
Weiss, however, knew she had to educate herself as well. “Instantly, the network went, ‘That’s amazing, let’s do it.’ There was not even an instance of, ‘Oh wait, the girls in the poster are going to be side characters in their own show.” “I prepared this big defense,” she recalls. Picking up from the preview week, Iris is joined in her efforts to get the administration’s attention by Sharee, who also revisits a painful memory of being called the n-word growing up, and Chris, who is unfairly targeted by campus police, assaulted and nearly arrested in a scene reminiscent of the many real-life cases of police brutality against unarmed black men that have continued to infiltrate the news cycle.Īlthough Weiss knew what she had to do to make the episode work, she was skeptical the network would be of the same opinion. Iris goes on a hunger strike to force the college dean to issue a harsher punishment to the group of racist students who left cotton balls on the grass in front of the Black Student Union. The episode saw each character confront racism in a different way as the racial tensions on their college campus come to a head. The hour, titled “Occupy Truth,” was the culmination of a conversation that first began in the season five premiere. Instead of moving on to another sensitive subject, Weiss pushed onward, albeit with a unique new framework: an episode told entirely from the perspectives of recurring African-American characters Iris (Sharon Pierre-Louis), Sharee (Bianca Bethune) and Chris (Sam Adegoke). You cannot tell a story in which our white characters are saving the day,” she says of her hesitation. “We can’t tell this story from Daphne and Bay’s point of view. However, it wasn’t nerves giving her pause.
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