The Illusion of Whiteness in Atlanta’s “Three Slaps”

Recently, we’ve been reading and discussing Greg Anderson Elysée’s Is’Nana The Were-Spider in my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course. Over the course of the semester so far, I have referenced “Three Slaps,” the first episode of Atlanta season 3. I’ve referred to this episode specifically because it, and the series as a whole, addresses a myriad of concepts and themes that we have been covering throughout the class. When we finished Is’Nana The Were-Spider Volume 1, we watched “Three Slaps.” I hadn’t watched the episode since it first aired back in the spring, but rewatching it, especially in the context of the class opened up a lot of important moments for conversation. Here, I want to point out a few of those moments.

The first moment comes at the opening of the episode with a white man, played by Tobias Segal, and a Black man, played by Tyrell Munn, fishing on a lake that resembles Lake Lanier in Georgia. The white man talks about the social constructs of race and the malleability of whiteness, and he tells the Black man about the Black governed town underneath the lake’s surface that the government flooded to form the lake. This narrative is connected directly with stories about Lake Lanier and the flooding of Oscarville. The stories, while not totally factual as Jewel Wicker points out, add to the thematic tone and narrative thrust of the scene and…