Sacha Jenkins' three-part documentary explores race and American history, with a "bonus" episode that outshines the series proper.
Showtime is billing Sacha Jenkins’ new docuseries Everything’s Gonna Be All White — or everything’s gonna be all… white if you prefer your typography to be cutesy — as three parts, plus a bonus episode.
This is an odd choice of focus. The three episodes of Everything’s Gonna Be All White are a solid if formally inconsistent attempt to tackle the racial history of America in discipline-spanning socio-economic-cultural terms. It makes some smart connections and is full of worthy insights, but I’d never recommend it over HBO’s similar Exterminate All the Brutes or a dozen PBS docuseries covering the same terrain.
Everything's Gonna Be All White
The Bottom Line The series is solid, but the bonus episode is better.
Airdate: 8 p.m. Friday, February 11 (Showtime)
Director: Sacha Jenkins
The so-called “bonus” episode, however, feels like an extremely perceptive distillation of what worked and didn’t work in the series proper, and it functions as a template for an ambitious regular panel show on race that Showtime should probably order to series immediately.
Jenkins, a longtime journalist whose Showtime credits include recent documentaries on the Wu-Tang Clan and Rick James, may be a year or two behind the moment when Everything’s Gonna Be All White would have been groundbreaking, but he still has his finger on a general cultural pulse. If you’ve followed recent (or semi-recent) coverage of Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust faux pas, accusations of colorism against the movie version of In the Heights, ongoing discussion of the 1619 Project or the never-ending name controversy with the NFL’s Washington Commanders, Jenkins and his wide-ranging group of expert talking heads provide useful context and clarity. Sometimes they address the headlines directly and sometimes they offer nuance that too often gets lost in our soundbite culture.
Everything’s Gonna Be All White isn’t as rigorous as the Marxist critique Raoul Peck presented in Exterminate All the Brutes, but you can see a similar desire to bring together as many of today’s conversations in a way that ties them into ongoing and globe-spanning debates. His broad focus is on the ways Americans approach history and the way history impacts America in 2022, and those with open minds will find his points on everything from the evolution of our system of racial classification to the baked-in racism of myriad American institutions to be persuasive.
But there’s a strong sense that Jenkins doesn’t care how persuasive you find the series if you come in disagreeing. Centering the perspective of people of color, the series rather emphatically trolls the white fragility that Jenkins argues fueled the January 6 failed insurrection, and that will cause more than a few people to watch the trailer forEverything’s Gonna Be All White (or just look at its title) and start immediately whining about reverse racism without watching a single second of the actual series.
