Real talk made its way to the Television Critics Association press tour stage on Saturday, when “Atlanta” Creator and Star Donald Glover broke down use of the N-word on TV — and off of it.
A reporter in the Langham Huntington ballroom asked the FX cast and producers about a moment in the project’s pilot when a white person dropped the racial slur.
“That word is like, that’s how people talk,” the former “Community” regular began his bigger-picture explanation. “It’s just the way it is. Trying to pretend like people don’t talk like that — like I don’t talk like that — is kinda silly.”
“If we ignore that, people would immediately turn on the television and not know what world we were [in],” he added.
Glover said that art imitated life in this instance, as his character Earnest was unable to react to the touchy subject in maybe the righteous manner we would have wanted him to.
“Most of the time when I hear a white person say it, I still gotta work with em,” Glover said of his real-life experiences. “I don’t have the power to be like, ‘Yo, you can’t say that.’”
“There are different types of black people,” he continued. “Different types of black people take it different.”