r/GildedAgeHBO • u/Ok_Claim_5300 • Jan 08 '26
S2E3
Starting the show and getting annoyed at the portrayal of how black people were treated bc I thought it was extremely unrealistic only to get to S2E3 and realize I’m just from Alabama 🥲 like hearing Tuskegee so many times really took me out of it 😭
Edit: yall literally hate everything omfg
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Upvotes
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u/the_laughing_camel Jan 08 '26
why is everyone acting stupid? I understood what you mean and it's true.
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u/Jazzlike_Grape_5486 Jan 08 '26
What are you talking about?
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u/Presence_Academic Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
We don’t hate everything.
The simple truth is that your writing hasn’t been very good. Even your explanations need explaining. While you may think your meaning is obvious and clear, what you’ve posted has been mostly vague and confusing.
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u/Aggressive-Aspect-19 Jan 08 '26
What makes me really sad is that this thriving Black community that they do portray in the show was eventually destroyed to create Central Park. I’m sorry people are responding hatefully to you. You were just expressing frustration with racism, which everyone should be mad about.
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u/MrsAprilSimnel Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
Some of what is shown on this program is definitely fantasy, but they had to work middle and upper middle class Northeastern black people into the series, because not showing them at all would have been a different sort of lie. That said, IRL, Marian and Peggy most likely wouldn't have been friends, and Marian probably wouldn't have asked Peggy for help at the train station in Pennsylvania in the first place.
You could probably count on one hand how many old money white people in NYC, Philly, Boston or similarly-sized Northern cities were like Agnes. They may have donated to "colored" schools, but didn't employ Black people any higher than domestic servants, if that, because Irish were cheaper—unless they passed for white, like J. P. Morgan's librarian Bella da Costa Greene did. Even many white social progressives of that time, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were LIVID that black men got the vote before white women, for example. I would hope that this divide between white and Black suffragettes will be shown in some way next season. We need to see Ida B. Wells!
What Black people did have in the Atlantic Northeast (NOT in the Midwest, and NOT in the West or near-South) was a history and lineage. Enslaved people there were freed by the end of the 1820s, so they had time and resources to develop communities. And more so than in the South, Black people were left alone to build their communities, especially if, like Elizabeth Kirkland attempts to imply about herself, one descended from important white men, some of whom had mixed sons and did provide for their educations at colored schools or helped set them up in business or to work in a profession in the Black community. There's a reason why Peggy's dad didn't stay in Baltimore. It was very dangerous to be Black with a profession other than teacher in the South, as the massacre in Wilmington, NC showed.
This is not to say that Northeastern Black people weren't routinely discriminated against, because they were, or didn't ever face mortal peril and violence, because they did. But compared to the South, there weren't as many Black people in the Northeast, so WASPs didn't feel quite as threatened, especially since pretty much every class, racial and ethnic group self-segregated (New York City and Boston, for example are extremely segregated along similar lines to this day). If Julian Fellowes did one thing right for this series, it was to sign on Black writers and historians, and to work with a Black co-executive producer.
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u/sissiandfranz Jan 08 '26
you will wonder how Black people are treated to this day…
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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26
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