Some thoughts on Seth Milchick and and the severed vs. unsevered Black employee with @sageshouldknowbetter on Tumblr.

sageshouldknowbetter: The food thing is so crazy, though. Like, who decides what cultures it represents? There is nothing authentic and little made by actual members of the cultures the food represents. It’s probably incredibly bland— some “spicy” options, of course, but almost perfunctorily. Let’s not stop at going outside— someone needs to write something about the innies being taken out for Thai food for the first time.

binomech: I’ve posted some considerations about race before. While the vending machine snack update from the Lumon is Listening video, the almond allergy, and the weak enamel mentions are super revealing, it still shocked me to learn that Seth has also been getting his meals through the airline menu approach (as we saw on the performance evaluation.) I have to wonder how much he was groomed, how much of his childhood was already influenced by Lumon, how much his (presumably Black) parents, and all the Black history and culture in America that comes with that, including any kind of culinary tradition, were present. Eustice Huang has not lived in her parents’ home for the duration of the fellowship. How Cobel and Graner, who are white and get a little more leeway to act against direct orders than Seth and Eustice (even Natalie), are the only unsevered staff that can exist outside the actual headquarters without being in the process of running an errand for Lumon.

sageshouldknowbetter: This last post has etched “Wanna go see her together?” into my crystal head cube ever since I saw it. Because Dylan knows that Mr. Milchick will also get blamed for this— that he already stepped out of line by activating the OTC and not being able to prevent Dylan’s son’s arrival. But it’s not just about that. It’s about two Black men having potentially dangerous information about the other— both able to expose the other to their white woman boss, who undeniably uses that status as a weapon ([to] Natalie), but only at their own risk. The difference is that one of them has a lot to fight for and a lot less to lose.

binomech: Yeah! And again, Seth Milchick knows he’s Black, but Dylan G doesn’t. There’s so much going on in that exchange. The way in S1, Milchick’s offering of perks to a very pissed-off Dylan reads as agonizingly infantilizing to the audience (not incorrectly, but very much how Dylan understands it, which is not how Seth does), but as S2 progresses, it has become evident that Milchick is doing a lot of perk bargaining of his own, that when Dylan tells him fuck you in the security office, it was a fuck you to his one single goal of being the pioneer of the novel idea of treating innies somewhat more kindly.

binomech: The second fuck you from Dylan in Cold Harbor is still addressed to Mr. Milchick. He could’ve used his first name to pull him down, like Irving B did before Seth gave the call to turn him off, but he didn’t— it’s a sign of respect, but establishes a distance, which was intended all along, after all, when they never allowed the innies to know the staff’s first names. But this time it’s done on purpose because at last they’re on equal footing about first names, which is all Dylan had behind him the security room at his back, but now they’re actual, physical people. And it’s also a wake-up call about alienating this Black employee that he has more in common with than with Natalie Kalen. Imagine hearing, seeing all this resentment reflected back at you through all these Black people you’ve been telling yourself you’re helping with promises of little trinkets and five minutes of music and watermelons for funerals (which, again, can they say it much clearer?), funerals for people you gave the direct order to get killed, and you, not Jame Eagan, have been the one in front of them in the break room, breaking them. You’re finding yourself towering over a sea of Black faces from C&M that you trained into minstrelsy and bleeding like they probably bled for you, like a cornered animal that they reassured you you weren’t (unlike the severed innies), and they are staring at your complicity in the eye, but they don’t know about race or racism, and the only other Black person you could extend and request recognition from is doing PR work for the Eagans on television and doing overtime and holds too much of their opinions on her mouth to express any of her own (you can see each other through the walls of your glass cages but never meet outside of them).

binomech: But Natalie is also rich enough not to be at risk of being appointed head torturer for the entirety of the severed floor. That’s the job for a Black man working security at the abattoir, who is “naturally” inclined towards violence because of course. Use simpler words, apologize for your brilliance, you came here to be a jailer and a pair of manacles to yourself and others, those words are for white people. Watch Helly R (a white woman, the innie of Helena-fucking-Eagan-CEO-in-waiting) invoke her dead friend (who spat your first name like a curse the moment he learned it and smirked at you in both pity and defiance before you put him down, whose love you saw and knew and killed twice over through both parties), touch the hearts of the people you’ve been trying to reach your whole life while you watch from a crack in a bathroom they locked you in.

binomech: The ways in which the promotion that supposedly gave him the freedom Cobel had means nothing because he’s Black, and the way it continues to be dangled in front of him like he dangled the coffee cozies and finger traps and family visits to Dylan even as Dylan started to spit back that it was not enough, and it never would be.

sageshouldknowbetter: Oh my lord, C&M. Do you think Milchick has ever looked at his Black employees and just wanted to say everything he can’t say to Natalie. to have someone to talk to about all of this. But a) it would be disrespecting Lumon, b) it would destroy his Smiling Cool-Headed Manager persona and c), he doesn’t know if they’d understand anyway. If they don’t, he’s sick at the idea of explaining it to them. If they do understand, he’s horrified about what that would say about the depth of racism and afraid to think about that too hard.

sageshouldknowbetter: “While you watch from a crack in the bathroom they locked you in” is crazy. Milchick must feel all kinds of resentment toward Helly because she can be as defiant as she wants in her short existence. She can steal his walkie-talkie, hit him in the face with a trombone, even insult and laugh at the Dieter story (even though that was Helena, I think Helly R would have ridiculed it too, if only out of the genuine discomfort all of the actual innies had). But she, she who inhabits the body of a wealthy white woman, can’t be punished the way he can — paradoxically both because her body is valued (by both the outside world and the white man they need to keep satisfied) and because her innie, to him, seems to have so much less to lose. She doesn’t need to worry about job security or what her boss wants her to do. She knows she can die at any moment, and she is willing to take chances with the time she has left. So while Milchick forces himself to jump through every hoop and try to go above and beyond to do exactly what Lumon wants him to do, Helly can stomp around the severed floor, freely insult the corporation that spawned her, and even have sex in a makeshift tent on company time completely unpunished. And here Milchick is in the corner, having to perform absolutions for putting on a paperclip “the wrong way.” No wonder he looked so dead-eyed at the end of season two!