The third season of HBO’s anthology series True Detective stars Mahershala Ali, a black actor who is on the verge of entering Hollywood’s A-list. Ali plays a rural detective with a very Nabokovian name, Wayne Hays (meaning, make things clearer). His wife, Amelia Reardon, whom he meets while investigating the mysterious and rather spooky disappearance of two white children, is an English teacher and also black (Carmen Ejogo). The teacher and the detective are wrapped up in the story of the Purcell kids. It become the center of their lives. Amelia writes a popular true-crime book about the case, and Wayne spends his adult life doing little else than thinking about it.
We have seen only three of the show’s eight episodes, and it would be surprising if the coming episodes did not take surprising twists and turns that reveal missed clues and deeper truths in the opening episodes—many close observers of the show have speculated in this way. What I want to consider in this post, however, is not the deepening mystery, or the complicated race relations between Hays and his white superiors, or even the white poverty that he and his wife are exposed to and have to deal with in rural Arkansas. Instead, I want to abstract one aspect of what we have seen of season three and examine it completely outside of the show’s developing plot. This abstraction concerns how blacks, to be successful in the US, must concern themselves profoundly with the lives and stories of white people. I call this the Obama dilemma.
Now, there are two directions an examination of this abstraction can take. One begins with the Purcell kids, whose white parents are working class, live in trailers, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and so on; and it ends with the new Lifetime documentary by dream hampton, Surviving R. Kelly, a film about how the black R&B singer allegedly raped, for decades, black girls from working-class families. What connects the two is how America’s law system (and its public) responds to crimes that involve white children versus crimes that involve black children. But I do not want to go in that direction, whose terminal point is as obvious as it is depressing.
I want to instead think along the lines of something that approximates the double consciousness described by W.E.B. Du Bois in his classic of black American literature, The Souls of Black Folk. Indeed, this is the soul of detective Wayne Hays, as it appears in this abstract, which I call the Obama dilemma. It’s a double consciousness in the sense that one part is black and the other is white, and the two cannot be unified, in the way that white consciousness can be one, as it does not involve itself with black identity (or consciousness).
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
But I do not want to reach Du Bois’s conclusion (the merging of the double self into “a better and truer self”). I do not accept the idea of a true and final self. My point of departure will be instead: “one ever feels his two-ness.” Both sides are, in my opinion, valid. The black part and the white part. It is valid for Hays to have a black life at home, black children, black sex, and so on (though he mostly drinks at white bars). And also to see, as a detective, the world through whites eyes that are deeply concerned for white lives, and to be one among these whites eyes. (The only problem with double consciousness is, in the American context, it’s severely limited. The ideal consciousness for our society would not be double but multiple—Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos.)
But Hays’ success depends on his inner whiteness and its ability to genuinely care for white stories. His white partner, Detective Roland West (Stephen Dorff), on the other hand, does not need to make the same emotional investment towards blacks to advance his career.
If Hays was like West, then, and only had one consciousness (but in his case, a black one), he would not have many opportunities in his white-dominated society. Certainly the higher levels of law enforcement and politics would be closed to him. And the higher a black goes in American public life, the more their white side dominates their thoughts. Obama spent most of his presidency caring for a lot of white people. That was something he could not avoid. It certainly came with the job, the highest office in the US. To get there, the White House, you must begin with Hays and his preoccupation with the Purcell kids. That is the foundation of black ambition in this country. Again, all of this will likely throw little to no light on the developments of the third season of True Crime.
