‘White People Won’t Save You’ And Other Gems From The Mind Of Terence Nance

The mind of Terence Nance is like no other.

His work is an Afrofuturist’s dream that holds a mirror up to present-day reality and forces it to confront itself in an abstract, yet fitting, manner. It serves hard truths you can’t look away from, and it does so in the blackest way ever.

HBO recently renewed Nance’s series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” for a second season. The show, which premiered in August, interrogates the way we view race, gender, romance, trauma and oppression through vignettes, weaving in and out of darkness and humor (and often dark humor) to do so.

It gets real in the most surreal ways. It’s a show born of unapologetic free black expression. It doesn’t adhere to the boundaries society aims to place on non-white art. Instead, it tears them down and dances around them as if they had a chance in the first place. To Nance and his team, that expression was second nature.

“The show is, whether or not it feels like it, the most natural and easy kind of creative expression that we could come up with,” Nance told HuffPost at CultureCon in New York City in October. “I don’t think it was in any way us trying to be strange or radical or provocative in any substantive way. I think that the reality is that [HBO] wanted to do this show because they wanted to see what our most natural state was in that way.”