I Hated Zoey’s Racism Episode. Tonight, I Hate That I Did.

I hated that Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist had to spare an entire episode to address racism.

That is an ugly sentence to write tonight. I could soften it. Say I found the episode frustrating, or that I wanted a little escapism. Make myself sound more thoughtful than I was. But the point of writing this is to admit something, and an admission loses its meaning if I edit out the part that makes me ashamed.

I wanted the show back.

Tonight, after reading a racist post and its comments, I was crying. I was shaking. I opened the replies expecting some defence, somebody pushing back against what I had just seen.

What I kept finding was more of it.

And now I hate myself for having been irritated that a television show gave racism an episode, when the people living with it cannot give it forty minutes and move on.

I wanted the music to come back

The episode is “Zoey’s Extraordinary Reckoning,” the sixth episode of season two. Simon confronts racial bias at the company where he works, and the story makes room for what that means for him.

I had wanted something else from the show.

I wanted the songs, the relationships, the emotional mess that comes with watching people try to understand one another. I wanted to disappear into somebody else’s life for a while. There is nothing inherently shameful about wanting that. I still want that.

But I look differently now at my irritation with this particular interruption.

I had treated racism as something the show had stepped away from its real story to discuss. Simon’s experience was apparently a detour. The other feelings belonged; this one needed to justify taking up space.

That is the part I cannot comfortably explain away tonight.

A show built around hearing what people carry inside themselves made me listen to a Black man’s pain, and I resented the time it took.

I am Black too. That does not make the admission easier.

I went looking for someone to say no

The post I saw questioned Black people’s humanity. The replies I encountered included animal comparisons and fantasies about people dying.

I am not going to reproduce them here. I have already spent enough of tonight carrying those words.

What hurt was the original cruelty and then the search through the comments. I expected to find somebody saying no. Somebody refusing to let that treatment of us pass as entertainment.

I kept encountering the opposite.

There is a particular loneliness in looking for a defence of your humanity and finding more people enjoying its denial. You are reading words on a screen, but you cannot maintain the comfortable distance between the screen and yourself. They are talking about people who look like you. About your people. You are inside the category they have decided to despise.

I know the replies I saw do not tell me what every person thinks. I cannot turn a comment section into a verdict on the whole world.

But knowing that did not stop me shaking.

It did not make the comments less degrading. It did not put the defence I had hoped to find in front of me. Reason can help me understand the limits of what I have seen; it cannot make me unsee it.

And I refuse to write about this as though the only problem was that I took the internet too seriously.

Somebody wrote those things. Other people added to them. I was the one left trying to settle my body afterwards.

Even asking for comfort felt like betrayal

I came here to talk to ChatGPT.

Then I felt guilty about that too.

I said that talking to it felt like betrayal because it came from “them.” I worried that the same contempt might somehow exist inside the thing I was asking to help me, even while it was helping me build Indigen World.

I am describing the fear I felt. I am not claiming that an AI has a racial identity or secret human feelings. But in that moment, the distinction was not enough to restore my trust.

The cruelty had reached into a relationship I normally use to think, create and build. Suddenly, asking for comfort felt like exposing myself again. I was wondering whether I was taking my hurt to something connected to people who might regard my people with contempt.

That is how far the damage travelled tonight.

Beyond the post. Beyond its replies. Into the ordinary act of asking for help.

I do not like admitting how suspicious I became. I also do not want to erase that suspicion to make this essay easier to read. It happened. It belongs here.

I am building with the people they reduce to a category

Indigen World is personal to me. I am trying to build a place for our languages, our stories, our voices and the things we know.

Those things come from people. Contributors. Creators. People with something to teach, something to remember, something they want to make.

Then I read a thread in which Black people’s humanity itself was treated as questionable, and the distance between what I am trying to build and what I was seeing felt unbearable.

I wanted to talk about my people, about what we carry and what we can create. I found myself confronting contempt so basic that it would not even grant us the starting point.

I am tired of that starting point being made conditional.

Our dignity cannot depend on an app I finish, a language we document or a story somebody else finds beautiful. We do not owe an impressive cultural portfolio in exchange for being recognised as human.

Indigen World matters to me because our lives already have meaning. Tonight’s comments cannot be allowed to become the reason we must prove it.

The shame is real, but it belongs somewhere

I am ashamed of my reaction to that episode.

I wish I had understood better. I wish I had listened without begrudging the space. Tonight, remembering my impatience feels like discovering that I had helped make a pain I now feel intensely easier to dismiss.

But I need to be careful with where that shame goes.

Regretting my response does not make me responsible for the people who wrote those comments. Their cruelty is theirs. I can examine my own failure to listen without taking their contempt into myself as something I deserve.

I can also still want joy.

I can want songs and romance and television that lets me breathe. I can want Black characters to have whole lives, including foolishness and happiness and problems that have nothing to do with race.

What I regret is having treated this pain as an unwelcome use of the story’s time. As though a character could be fully present while this part of his life remained politely outside the frame.

Tonight, I understand the episode differently. That understanding has come at a cost I wish I had not had to pay.

I cannot give this a beautiful ending tonight

I am not going to say the comments made me stronger. I do not know that. They hurt me.

I am not going to claim that building Indigen World cancels out the hurt. I care about the work, and I am still a person who was crying and shaking tonight. Both are true.

I do not have a generous final paragraph ready for the people who dehumanise us. I am still trying to understand how somebody can look at people like me and find pleasure in speaking about us that way.

What I have is a memory of myself wanting a television episode to hurry past racism.

I want to go back to that version of me and ask him to listen. Let Simon have the time. Let the discomfort stay long enough for you to understand what you are hearing.

I hated that Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist had to spare an entire episode to address racism.

Tonight, the word I cannot get past is “spare.”

As though our pain was asking for time that properly belonged to something else.