opinion
Netflix’s ‘You People’ Wasn’t Funny at All
to My Black and Mexican Jewish Family
Photo by Jennelle Fon
Cinthya Silverstein
A s a couple that is two
parts Jew, one part
Black, and all parts
lovers of comedy, my husband
and I sat with hopes (maybe not
high ones) to watch Netflix’s “You People.”
It’s not often that we see our cultures represented
together in buzzy movies, especially not ones set in
Los Angeles, the city we love so much, and with the
comedy king Eddie Murphy in the cast, and we were
excited about the possibility of seeing ourselves
reflected in the story of blended Black and Jewish
families. Unfortunately, at the expense of comedy greats
including Murphy, Jonah Hill, Deon Cole, Elliot Gould
and Julia Louis Dreyfus (with cameos by so many
others!), the movie ended up being a painful reminder
of how our family — made up of Mexican and Black
Jews with Ashkenazi roots — so often must explain
and justify our existence in Jewish and Black spaces.

The movie starts with Jonah Hill’s character
very comfortably recording his podcast about “the
culture” (ostensibly, hip-hop culture?) with his Black,
queer best friend, seeming to set the stage for the
progressive coolness that will later allow him to date
someone who is not “square” and potentially Black.

Hill’s character loves rap music, sneaker culture and
Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, and he knows not to
say the full title of that song from Jay-Z and Kanye
West’s “Watch The Throne” album.

Yet we find him in scenarios that time and again
have him playing into uncomfortable tropes — like
saying “our boy” when referring to Malcolm X — as
he quickly and nervously falls into defining Black
culture at its most reductionist form. It’s no surprise
then, that the film goes on to portray Blackness as a
monolithic, one-dimensional stereotype.

It doesn’t get any better when we see Hill’s
character in a Jewish space: High Holiday services
at the Skirball Cultural Center, here serving as a
synagogue. There and throughout the movie, Jews
are portrayed as white and uncool — sometimes
aggressively so, almost as if the writers didn’t trust
the audience to know this family is Jewish if not for
the mom complaining about tattoos and trying to
set up her son with a highly educated daughter of
a friend.

My husband and I have been to the Skirball Center
on many occasions, one of them being a wedding
Netflix for two supremely cool Jews of color. But you would
never know from the movie that such an event could
ever take place, or even that Jews of color exist in
Los Angeles — even though, ironically, the actor
playing Jonah Hill’s eventual love interest is Black
and identifies as half-Jewish. Instead, in creating the
world for “You People,” the writers continue a dated
tradition of movies that overly simplify the worlds
they depict based on racial binaries.

This flattened view of the world is especially
lamentable because the rom-com genre has at its
fingertips the easiest blueprint: All families are ridic-
ulous and oftentimes the blending of two families
even more so. Within my family alone, several differ-
ent cultures consistently push against each other in
humorous ways. There’s “nerd culture,” “comic book
culture,” “skate culture” and “food culture.” Even
in my culturally blended family, where my Mexican
immigrant parents regularly share meals with my
Black mother-in-law, the resulting humor has never
been about racial differences. In a story where the
message is that we can all get along, we don’t need
the punchline to be about race.

“You People” could have told a story in which
Jonah Hill’s character actually subverts the standard
narrative, maybe one in which his character realizes
how easy it is to fetishize Blackness and through
experiences with his father-in-law comes to find the
richness and fullness of Black culture that can even
be expanded by his Jewish background when blend-
ing his family with his fiancée’s. Or a movie in which
a member of the Nation of Islam tries to openly
accept a Jewish son-in-law and, rather than using
Louis Farrakhan as an awkwardly divisive plot
point, we see instead a Muslim Eddie Murphy
trying to find ways to connect with modern-day
hip-hop culture. Either option would allow the
audience to see the layers in these characters
that are so often erased from narratives about
Jewishness or Blackness.

Instead, the writers opted for the easiest avenue:
comedy based on persistent racial “othering.” But
the differences shown are no longer based on any
actual truth. They are based on beliefs we have
been told to keep repeating to keep the agenda
of white supremacy intact. The writers are depict-
ing worn-out “differences” that don’t represent an
authentic Jewish or authentic Black experience.

Presenting any cultural experience as the “authentic”
one is just another way of saying stereotypes are
true — and that’s not funny at all.

Several years ago, my family participated in Ava
Duvernay’s life-swap show in which we traded homes
and experiences with a family of white Mormons. Our
goal at the time was to show examples of coexis-
tence and to demonstrate how contemporary identi-
ties are multilayered. But we also hoped that the
experience would help us find greater acceptance as
Jews of color, which still feels generally elusive. “You
People” underscored for us why.

At one point during the life swap, my husband said
to me, “Listen, when you’re Black and Jewish, and
everything hurts, laughter is the best medicine.” But
laughter doesn’t come easily when the jokes only
make sense if you don’t exist.

Sure, there were a few chuckles in my house
during “You People.” The comedian Mike Epps was
funny as he always is, and I laughed when Jonah Hill
showed up to his date in a tie-dye sweatsuit, in a
very L.A. move. But for nearly two hours, all I could
think about was how “You People” feels like a movie
for folks who are clinging to stereotypes because it
helps them feel comfortable with their own cultural
identities, which once were dominant but now must
share real estate with others that are equally authen-
tic. By confining the definition of culture to a singu-
lar idea of “race” this movie prevents an important
conversation from moving forward. And that means
my family, and so many other Jewish families, are
once again left behind. ■
Cinthya Silverstein is a mother and photographer in
Southern California.

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