![]() “When I was at William & Mary, the most I could have said was that I felt stressed out or gloomy. “For a long time, I didn’t really have the vocabulary to understand that,” he says. In terms of his own inherited trauma, Jefferson says that he never met his maternal grandparents, who were white, because they disowned his mother for marrying a Black man. Through counseling, he recognized that he struggles with anxiety and depression, something he attributes in part to intergenerational trauma and his reaction to injustices he saw happening in America and around the world. Jefferson acknowledged his own challenges when he thanked his therapist during his Emmy acceptance speech. The massacre, combined with the racism and injustice Reeves experiences as an adult, leads him to become the superhero Hooded Justice. Episode 6, for which Jefferson won his Emmy along with show creator Damon Lindelof, reveals how that trauma spills over into subsequent generations. ![]() In “Watchmen,” a central character is Will Reeves, who as a child survives the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a real event that Jefferson calls “the original sin of our show.” Reeves’ parents are killed, along with hundreds of others in an attack by a white mob. Laughing, he adds, “I feel some sense of vindication that we’re having this conversation right now.” “Being interviewed for this magazine is a little funny to me because I largely remember William & Mary as a time in which I was getting in fights and cutting class,” he says. He’s the first to admit he was not a stellar student. Cord recalls visiting the campus as a child and hearing glowing reports about the university from his father over the years. ’72, was the second Black graduate of W&M Law School, and the university’s chapter of the Black American Law Students Association is named for him. Jefferson came to William & Mary through a family connection - his father, Wilson C. “I credit those classes with shaping the way that I think about the world in a very real way, and I appreciate that.” ![]() “It forced me to start thinking about these very serious things in a way that I hadn’t been forced to when I was growing up,” he says. Through his classes, he delved into topics of women’s history, immigration, criminal justice and the politics of being Black in America. As a biracial youth who grew up in a mostly white, upper-middle-class suburb of Tucson, Arizona, after living in Saudi Arabia and Greece, Jefferson looked to sociology to help make sense of the world around him. ![]() Jefferson explored those themes as a sociology major at William & Mary, although he didn’t know then that he would draw on his education in quite this way. We had history books, and if you read history books, you’ll start to see that history has a way of repeating itself in this country, particularly when it comes to issues of racism and social injustice and police violence.” “Immediately post-‘Watchmen,’ there was a lot of discussion of the show feeling prescient,” he says. “Watchmen” aired in November 2019, about six months before the police killing of George Floyd and the social unrest that followed. Sound at all familiar? (Aside from the falling squid, that is.) Cord Jefferson ’04, an Emmy-winning writer for the series based on DC Comics’ graphic novel, is often asked about the show’s connection to recent events. Echoes of century-old racial violence and oppression reverberate through generations in the fictional world of the HBO series “Watchmen.” There are deadly traffic stops, hidden identities, corrupt police officers and vigilantes who carry out their own forms of justice and revenge. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |