In the season two premiere of HBO's Insecure, we have two big liberal themes: the wage gap myth and slavery reparations.
The season opener on Sunday night, "Hella Great," has the characters getting together for a party so that the main character Issa Rae can be seen to be having a grand old time when her ex, Lawrence, drops by to pick up his mail. Everything that happens at this party is ridiculous and, apparently, Lawrence had some sense about the breakup, because he decided to skip the party and have Issa send him his things. Lawrence appears to be the only sensible person at the party, and he is only sensible in his absence.
Let's take Molly, for example. She sees a white male colleague's check and is upset to find out that it is greater than hers. Rather than take this up with her employers, she assumes a gender/racial wage gap is at play. Another character shares a bizarre story in which a woman discovered she is actually making less than the white people who work for her. She asked her employer to rectify the situation, the employer did not, and "she still has to work there." I feel certain she does not. Assuming this story also takes place in America, she can quit and find another job that will treat her appropriately and, depending on the situation, probably win a huge lawsuit. But, no, she does not "[have] to work there."
Now we get to the truly bizarre part of the conversation. Another friend says that she has her own way of making sure everything evens out. She simply makes sure her black clients get more back on their tax returns than her white ones. She calls it "reparations." She also knows this is illegal, and she and her friends have a nice big laugh about how this could end in jail time. In her mind, this has something to do with civil rights, she calls herself Robin Hood, and even says this is why she "marched." I thought civil rights were about equality rather than a different kind of inequality, but maybe that's just me.
Now, let's talk about their fundamental misunderstanding of Robin Hood. It is the story of a man who fights for the overtaxed by helping them to get their money back. So it is, quite literally, the opposite of a woman who is keeping tax returns from people in the name of revenge. I'm not sure why she feels like Robin Hood, but she isn't.
To recap: we have a woman who looked at another person's paycheck and assumed foul play but didn't do anything to back up this assumption, a woman who is willing to risk going to prison to get revenge on people who probably didn't do anything wrong aside from being born her non-preferred color, and a bunch of people who don't understand what might literally be the most well-known folk tale in the English language.
No wonder Lawrence skipped this weird party.