Walter White and Bleeding Brown: On Breaking Bad’s Race Problem

by Chris Prioleau, Co-Editor in Chief During its run, Breaking Bad was one of the best shows on television. It was as intense and scintillating as anything ever broadcast; the direction and cinematography were sharp, intelligent, and engaging; and the acting was very often phenomenal. It was–and I mean this in both the literal and dudebro sense–an awesome show. However, I can’t join the recent chorus of voices heralding it as one of the greatest television shows of all time. I ultimately forgive the show’s structural flaws, of which there are quite a few. Less forgivable is the racism ingrained in its very premise; racism that, all too often, casually spills over into the way the show depicts its white and nonwhite characters and ultimately undermines its richness.

Rethinking War Journalism

Friend of Apogee Sara Novic has a great essay up at The L.A. Review of Books on the West’s relationship to journalists in war zones: Are the limits of Western empathy really so shortsighted that a single British or American citizen being shot at is of more interest than hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavians enduring the same or much worse fates? Judging from history, the former has both more literary and political currency. Sarajevans living for years without running water in their besieged city were easy enough to ignore, but a few Westerners without toilet paper get two-book deals. When Harper’s decided to commemorate the siege of Sarajevo, they did not bother to speak to a Sarajevan.

Not Just Guilty: A White Response to the George Zimmerman Case

This is the first of two essays that reflect on what has happened in the months since the trial of George Zimmerman. You can read Apogee’s original response to the not guilty verdict here.   by Melody Nixon, Editor-at-Large   Have we already forgotten about Trayvon Martin? There’s a kind of disbelief that is so strong it makes you wish you didn’t have a body. When I first learned of the not guilty verdict I was punched in the gut with horror and surprise. The deep horror of Trayvon Martin’s story – and George Zimmerman’s story – is tied so inherently to the body: First, to Trayvon’s body with darker skin, with smaller frame than George’s, without armor. Secondly, to George’s body, to the car it sat in, the gun it held, the property it thought it was defending. W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assumed to be criminal, violent, malignant?” How does it feel, too, to be consumed and distorted by your own power? What malignancy, crime and violence wait there? The horror of this story is tied in an indirect...
Read More