They're Studying Business (I Study the Floor)
On Industry's handling of race, DEI, and identity
Spoilers for Industry. Also, I got to interview the Industry cast! (TT link/IG link)
What are we meant to learn from Industry’s handling of race?
On Sunday, HBO’s Industry returned for a fourth season. In the premiere episode, “Paypal of Bukkake” (what a name), the show featured a startling number of references to race in a way that shocked a number of viewers.
We got: Kiernan Shipka’s Haley referencing the color of her private parts and using an imaginary Black boyfriend to threaten another character. Harper Stern (Myha’la) asking Kwabenna (Toheeb Jimoh) if he’s ever fantasized about sleeping with a white girl. Eric (Ken Leung) calling Harper an angry Black woman, Harper clocking his Black girlfriend, and Eric defensively insisting he’s not a fetishist. Jonah (Kal Penn) saying he can only get off by watching videos with two Black performers— or Black on Black, as he so eloquently words it. Harper’s boss calls her a progressive face, and she accuses him of making her a “poppet in Blackface”. We also get Harper standing in front of the mirror wielding a giant— you guessed it— black sex toy.
That’s a lot. For the past three seasons, race has been a silent main character on the show. In Season 1, Gus (David Jonsson) tells his boss he refuses to work somewhere that treats him like a victim. Eric tells Harper he ignored her non-target background and plucked her out of nowhere by giving her a chance. In Season 2, Harper tells departed love interest Daniel Van Deventer (Alex Akpobome) his last name isn’t very Black, and he says Stern isn’t very Black either. We also get a reverse colonialism joke when Rishi (Sagar Radia) jokes about marrying his white wife.
Aside from a reference to progressivism in Season 3, the show has tacitly unaddressed the fact its main characters are Black (Harper) and Lebanese (Yasmin, played by Marisa Abela). Of course, this could be due to changing show dynamics— at the top of Season 1, Industry was billed as a show about a group of very young people (grads!) beginning their careers in finance at the bottom of the totem pole.
Side note: I will watch any show about a group of young people in a workplace. I watched For the People!!
The constricted nature of class mobility in England proved to be an interesting backdrop for the class of grads— Black New Yorker and college dropout Harper, upper class, privately educated Black conservative Gus, nepo baby polyglot Yasmin, and working class Rob (Harry Lawtey) and Hari (Nabhaan Rizwan). Rob and Yasmin’s tension is highlighted as a sort of Romeo & Juliet story set among the British class system, and many of the first season’s conversations revolved around accents, clothing, and passing from one class to the other— or the inability for people to do so.
In Season 2, the focus narrowed to the inner workings of the bank and the private lives of the main cast, but by Season 4, only two of the original grads remain.
Harper’s arc, in particular, is contrasted against both Gus and Eric’s— Americans watching the show would expect an instant bond to form between the two Black characters, but the bonds forged in private schools are forged in steel. Gus spends more time with his Oxford classmates than with Harper, who gets swept up under Eric’s mentorship. This is where the real outsider bond forms— both American, both POC, both iconoclasts with slippery morals and penchants for breaking rules.
Season 3 introduces us to Otto Mostyn, a sneering financier connected to both Harper and Yasmin. Presented as a personification of London’s ruling class, Otto funds Harper’s new venture spun out of her former workplace, which focused on sustainability and green initiatives. When they meet, Mostyn clocks Harper as a disrupter who doesn’t really care about saving the world— money is money. The season ends with Harper being taken under his wing, and we learn Otto is also working closely with Aurore (Faith Alabi), a rising star in the conservative party— another Black woman under his employ.
We are living in the post-DEI (and post-woke) age. The current administration is currently using its X account to denigrate non-citizens and defend ICE’s horrific actions. WBD, Comcast, and Disney all took a step back from DEI efforts after the election. Amazon and Paramount also quietly pulled back from DEI initiatives in the last two years. Since the election, 1 in 5 companies say they’ve cut DEI programs, 35 major companies among them. In the UK, opposition to immigration is once again growing. It doesn’t surprise me that progressive attitudes surrounding diversity and supporting people from underprivileged backgrounds are receding in an age where some are sprinting to take their masks off.
Otto Mostyn’s gleeful dismantling of Harper is representative of something POC feared after the rush of DEI initiatives after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement— all of this is temporary. All of this can be taken away. Similar to the greenwashing movement and Wall Street’s false promises of sustainability (that Industry clocked during its third season), companies and governments can use people as props or concepts to be carted out when needed and discarded at will.
As always, I think the Industry writers are brilliant, and live with their finger on the pulse. For years, the worldview of the show has been that being married to identity politics was foolish when the enemy can appear wearing the skin of a friend— again, Gus and Aurore were two deeply conservative characters (one more ruthless than the other) whose politics were not shaped by their Blackness, but by their inherited stations in life (Gus) and ambition (Aurore). This is a radical take on the internet— like I said in A Grand Unified Theory of Trauma Discourse, much of the internet is overrun by people declaring that criticizing them is [insert label here]. As Harper eloquently said in one Season 3 episode: “I prefer the kind of feminism where women can be c*nts.” Believing someone won’t betray you, hurt you, or fleece you because you share an identity is silly. Sometimes, they’ll even do it with a smile on their face.
Also, I am a Tumblr kid and a child of the internet: title is taken from this Industry S1 edit set to Lorde’s “A World Alone” (my favorite song on Pure Heroine, I fear, and the one that also gave us “maybe the internet raised us/or maybe people are jerks). They were just kids in S1!!
Not an economist, but not entirely sure what data we should be looking at when we say things are expensive/bad/scary. Per the Times: “The price of beef has risen 16.4 percent over the last year. The price of coffee is up a whopping 19.8 percent. The price of lettuce is up 7.3 percent and frozen fish 8.6 percent.” (Despite Trump’s Claims, Grocery Prices Are Rising, The New York Times)
Similarly: Not only is food more expensive, it is also becoming ultraprocessed garbage. (The Globe and Mail)
Sophie Gilbert writing about misogyny is always a must read (I loved her book Girl On Girl last year), but this piece about the murder of Renee Nicole Good and the horror of Grok was breathtaking. A society obsessed with punishing women will always find new ways to punish women. (The Unspeakable, Enabled, The Atlantic)
On Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel also interviewed Gilbert about this, stating: “this moment represents a red line for the internet: It is a test of whether society will tolerate tools that silence women through humiliation and intimidation under the guise of free speech.” Hearing Gilbert speak at length is always a gift— if you have time, I’d recommend this (or reading the transcript). (The Problem Is So Much Bigger Than Grok, The Atlantic)
I loved reading your work and have been iffy on watching industry. So appreciate the deep dive here.
"Believing someone won’t betray you, hurt you, or fleece you because you share an identity is silly." As someone obsessed with the psychology behind money, I definitely need to watch this.