Netflix's three-episode documentary on the Murdaugh Murders is subtitled "A Southern Scandal," but it doesn't explore -- directly -- what makes the self-dealing, manipulation, nepotism and violence that is the backdrop for this truly peculiar case "Southern." Without using the most egregious of stereotypes, that is.
I'm not arguing that the guardedness and paranoia voiced -- in the deepest of Dixie drawls, by the way -- is not rooted in fearsome patriarchy that started before Cotton was King and continues to this day. It simply is not laid out clearly for the viewer to understand how this regional history helped shape these events.
Scenes of nattily dressed white folks posed before white columns and speeding along waterways in motorboats are not enough. The "power," a word that one person interviewed seemed hesitant to use, is directly related to racial and economic disparities in the South, in general, and Hampton County, in particular. Black and poor white labor sustain the economy that affords the propertied class tons of leisure time and opportunity, apparently, to scheme and finagle.
Even though Hampton is majority Black and working poor, all that is delivered to the viewers is the lifestyle of rich white folks. Not a single Black person is interviewed and if it wasn't for one or two newspeople and Judge Clifton Newman, there would be none in this story.
It might be Black folks refused to take part. If that is the case, that's a story in itself.
From where I sat, fuming at the privilege and virtue signaling, I was nagged by the marginalization (erasure) of Black folks? Yeah, that's pretty Southern.
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