Instead, Walt just winds up being another fatherless child. It plays into a really big, weird stereotype, and, being a black person myself, that wasn’t so interesting.
What in the name of Jacob are you talking about? OK, I’m going to ask one last time, slowly. Have. You. Ever. Seen. The. Show? Fatherless children are a dominant theme on Lost. Let’s see, we’ve got Jack, Kate, Locke, Benry, Sawyer, Claire, Shannon, and Aaron. And those are just the ones for whom being fatherless is either a key plot point or important to their character arc. And since you’ve clearly never seen the show, you have no way of knowing, but none of those characters are black. Having a character who happens to be black lose his father is not a stereotype about black people when the loss of a father is a key theme of the series. If anything, it plays into a stereotype about Lostaways!
It is, however, helpful for you to explain that not only is your character black, but you are as well. I was confused about how that works.
Come on, man. Sure, it’s probably way more fun to be on Lost than it is to not be on Lost. And yeah, maybe you got spoiled when you still got to appear on Oz right up to the last scene, even though your character was dead. But now you’re coming off as a mean-spirited little whiner, and that makes me believe that just maybe Michael’s gradual slide into unlikeability had more than a little to do with how you actually are.
I hope I’m wrong. Maybe you’re really a cool guy and they caught you on a bad day. I’d like to think you are. I don’t want you to be like Isaiah Washington and take a dump all over your career. (Although he’s still got you beat because he managed to accuse a black person of hating black people.) You got to be a part of something big and cool that a lot of people really care about. Don’t spoil that.
That’s all I’ve got to say. You can go now, Harold.
Ever yours,
EJ
