'24: Legacy' and the Complicated Issue of Minority Patriotism Under Trump

The first time we see Sergeant Eric Carter, the hero of FOX's new action extravaganza 24: Legacy, he's griping about his job "helping the One Percent sleep better at night" or some such thing. I can see a bunch of highly paid television scribes huddled in a room bursting at the seams with empty cans of La Croix, trying to sort out the fastest way to establish their protagonist's blue-collar, all-American bona fides. "Have him say something about the One Percent," someone cackles. Into the script it goes. Sergeant Carter is played by a black actor, Corey Hawkins of Straight Outta Compton fame, and he'll spend the rest of the show blowing up Arab terrorists for those same rich people. That the show pits one maligned demographic against another is both provocative and grossly ill-timed.

The original 24 series was a far more straight-ahead shoot-'em-up patriotic fantasy of the Bush-era variety. Muslim extremism got you down? Send ol' Kiefer Sutherland into battle, and he'll shove a screwdriver in a guy's pinkie finger until he talks. Even back in those "good ol' days" (which, by the way, weren't so good), the whole affair was more than a bit ghoulish, but it looked more like the typical American power fantasy. Give a grizzled white guy a gun, and your problems are solved.

There's an undercurrent of ethical complication when a black person stands up as a fictional representative of the established American order. For hundreds of years, our political and economic systems have either explicitly or implicitly worked against the interests of black people specifically, and minority groups more broadly. Slavery, segregation, de facto segregation techniques made possible by real estate scams like redlining, and restrictions on voting rights don't lend themselves to unabashed patriotism. This is not to say that black people as a group are anti-American. It's more that America has given them plenty of reasons to be that way if they so chose.

So maybe it's not surprising that the African American action hero varietal isn't often the avatar of Yankee exceptionalism. There's Will Smith's seminal performance in Independence Day, as Air Force captain Steven Hillard, in which he welcomes an alien to Earth by punching it in the face. In the 1980s, Carl Weathers was the macho black man of action, waving the flag against the nefarious Russian Ivan Drago in Rocky IV and fighting yet another alien in Predator. Weathers's characters in both of those films died in dramatic fashion, long before the white heroes vanquished the villainous foreign entity.

A 2012 Department of Defense report stated that 77.8 percent of active duty military in the United States are white. The next year, the New York Daily News reported that non-Hispanic whites in the US made up only 63 percent of the population. There's no clear correlation between the rate of minority enlistment in the military and a lack of patriotic fervor, but it does make one wonder why the numbers don't correspond more to the greater makeup of the nation.

Hollywood has an even harder time with notions of diversity. Every few years, we debate the lack of representation in movies and television. That nagging issue is presumably part of the decision to cast Hawkins as the lead in 24: Legacy. To its credit, FOX is home to the Lee Daniels stable of dramas— Empire and Star—which spotlight African American culture. ABC has the Shondaland shows like How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal. Those shows tend not to spend much time thwarting terrorism, which makes 24: Legacy unique. Its hero is a member of an oppressed minority, swashbuckling at a time when real-life Americans are at odds over the oppression of another minority—Muslim Americans.

The New York Times review of 24: Legacy by Neil Genzlinger points out this thorny issue, calling out Muslims as "President Trump's bogeyman of the moment." Our entertainment rarely, if ever, reckons with the fact that we seem hellbent on reinforcing the dangerous notion that our Muslim neighbors are secretly plotting to shoot up a public place or detonate a car bomb. One of the only situations in which American TV viewers see Muslims on TV is in terrorist narratives like 24 or Homeland. Perhaps that should have been an early sign that a large percentage of American voters would rubberstamp a politician who painted said group as intrinsically harmful.

On these shows, there's never much time to sit back and consider these issues, especially not on 24—a series in which the entire premise is that there's not enough hours in the day to do anything but shoot first and ask questions later. How would a black military hero feel when his or her government routinely turns a blind eye to unjustified police shootings of unarmed men and women of color? Would they all be able to, in good conscience, support such a lack of interest in clear instances of injustice? When I watched 24: Legacy, I couldn't help but think about a real-life American hero, Muhammad Ali, who refused to fight in a war he knew was unjust, for a nation that did not have his best interests in mind. Unfortunately, for the producers of 24: Legacy, I'm not sure I was supposed to be thinking at all.

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