ilija

he’s “demonic”, he looks “satanic”, he’s secretly controlling everything behind the scenes. he’s allegedly harming actors he doesn’t like. he has this hidden power over the workplace, over the show, over people’s careers, over the rest of the writers, over the SHOWRUNNER. he will fire fellow cast members that piss him off or are “too progressive” to his liking. and whether people intend it or not, that is not neutral language when it is being aimed at a jewish man, because this is the thing: antisemitism is not just slurs and swastikas, and a lot of the time it works through older narrative patterns. the jew as secretly powerful, the jew as manipulative, the jew as corrupting, the jew as physically marked by evil. the jew as someone who tries to appear respectable in public while supposedly pulling the strings in private. those ideas have been around for a very long time, and they do not suddenly become harmless because the people saying them are in a fandom space and think they are just “criticizing a celebrity.”

and to be clear, this doesn’t mean ashkenazi jews are never white, or that jewish celebrities can’t have white privilege, class privilege, or industry power. the point is that jewishness does not always fit neatly into the sometimes flattened american white/non-white framework we’re all familiar with. ashkenazi jews can be perceived as white, move through the world with many of the advantages of whiteness, and still be racialized through antisemitism when the context shifts. that conditional quality matters. jewishness can be treated as irrelevant when people want to talk about privilege, then suddenly become legible through conspiratorial or dehumanizing tropes when people want to construct a jewish person as dangerous.

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The “Robby is a racist and a misogynist” fan theory is interesting to me.

Do you really think Robby just woke up one day and suddenly found himself in an ER full of women and people of color? How exactly do you think Mohan, Collins, McKay, Ellis, etc. got there?

He hired them. He’s the Chief of Emergency Medicine. He interviewed them and decided how to rank them as candidates in the NRMP system. They are there because Dr. Robby chose them.

Was Robby a dick in episode 2.10? Yes. Has he been a dick before? Yes. Does he need to get his shit together and stop lashing out at people? Absofuckinglutely.

But is he a racist and a misogynist? Many of us carry internalized biases that we’ve been socialized with, even when we try to be mindful of them. That’s not what most people mean by “racist.”

But he also chose to do a four-year residency in an urban hospital in a predominantly Black city, and later chose to apprentice himself to a Black physician with whom he worked for many, many years.

Hard to imagine those being the choices of a strident racist.

I urge everyone to consider the possibility that there’s something more complex at work here.

With The Pitt, we talk about everyone's mental health. I’d love for us to talk about the mental health of our queens, who are also navigating this anxiety‑fuelled work environment (without reducing them to "the women" or "the women of colour" in the show. They’re full, complex characters, not only diversity tokens, they've got other narrative roles besides just being that. Still an important aspect, but they’re more than just that)

It’s just.. out of all the characters, there’s only one who gets those so‑called jokes about how he should kill himself or be killed :

So yeah, when you decide to actually watch The Pitt properly instead of just skimming through it… you just don't feel like leaving him by the side of the road, and to condone this sort of harsh generalisation about his' mental state.

That doesn't mean we're saying he's flawless or that he gets a free pass. It just means we're actually using our brains and putting things together. We see someone in mental distress, someone who hates himself, who’s in denial, and who causes damage because of that — not just because he's racist, misogynistic, or asshole deep down.

And acknowledging that absolutely doesn't mean the other characters should just bite their tongues and put up with the situation, or that their mental health doesn’t matter. It means we're watching a show with complex dynamics that deserve better than oversimplified takes.

We can agree on that and still defend, worry about, or feel frustrated for Mohan, Santos, Mel, Al-Hashimi, Dana, etc. It’s not about picking sides or to deny structural inequalities and violence. It’s all about catching the whole picture.

#tfw you're hanging on by your very last thread and it's suspiciously noose shaped