‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has a black people problem and its name is June

Dystopian fiction is by definition a showcase of the worst case scenario. To write it, creators must take horrible realities and stretch them to their logical, if pessimistic, conclusion. In a lot of ways The Handmaid’s Tale does dystopia fairly well — it draws upon modern misogyny, extremist pseudo-Christian ideology, and observable human rights abuses and imagines a world where all of society is governed by those terms. 

The problem with writing a dystopia is that worst case scenarios are subjective. Everyone’s nightmare looks different to the person standing next to them. Margaret Atwood, who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale book even has a quote that speaks directly to this concept: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” 

The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu follows the worst case scenario for its protagonist June, a white woman from the Boston area. June is forced into sexual slavery as a Handmaid, beaten, stripped of her autonomy, and separated from her children. As Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale has proven, though, June herself is a walking nightmare for another kind of person, and her increasingly selfish and entitled behavior has racked up a very specific body count that indicates a larger problem with her character.

June keeps getting black people killed. 

Two straight episodes in Season 3 have ended with Gilead killing black women because of something June did. 

In Episode 7 “Under His Eye,” a black Martha named Frances risks her life to give June information about her daughter Hannah’s school and is later hanged for her treason. June discovers that Ofmatthew, a fellow handmaid who is also black, had informed on Frances and retaliates by isolating and manipulating Ofmatthew into a mental breakdown. At the end of Episode 8 “Unfit,” Ofmatthew snaps in the supermarket and is shot. When Guardians arrive to drag Ofmatthew’s body from the market, June smirks triumphantly, having vanquished the snitch who, in her eyes, killed Frances. 

The thing is, June killed Frances. And she arguably killed Ofmatthew, too. Neither of those women would have been hurt if June had put their lives above her desire to see her daughter. Frances the Martha was keeping an eye on Hannah and didn’t want to cause any more trouble, but June pestered her until she relented. June psychologically tortured Ofmatthew for informing on her, but Ofmatthew was only performing the Handmaid’s duty of mandatory reporting in an effort to stay alive. 

June’s recklessness with other people’s lives indicates the desperation she feels under actively horrific circumstances, but the pattern of who lives and who dies as a result of her actions is a disturbing element that The Handmaid’s Tale either hasn’t noticed or refuses to address.

June doesn’t feel bad for pushing Ofmatthew past her mental limits because she assumes Ofmatthew is a pompous true believer in Gilead, but the reality of Ofmatthew’s situation tells a different story. To a more sympathetic eye, Ofmatthew was a woman who had three children stolen from her and was pregnant with a fourth, whose fertility nonetheless comes second to her blackness in the eyes of the state (in another scene, Aunt Lydia remarks that some Commanders refuse Handmaids of color, which limits Ofmatthew’s opportunities to prove useful). 

Ofmatthew’s bowing and praying might be grating to someone like June, who has been granted third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chances to keep breathing despite diving headfirst into anything that looks stupid enough to be fun, but it’s also how Ofmatthew and many other Handmaids have survived. In Season 1, June made a similar mistake when she assumed Ofglen/Emily was a “pious little shit with a broomstick up her ass but she gave Emily, who is white, the benefit of the doubt and took the time to get to know her story. Emily and June even bonded over how Gilead is structured to pit women against each other, so it’s particularly frustrating that June refuses to apply that lesson to Ofmatthew, who is trapped in the same system. Black handmaids barely get first chances in Gilead, let alone seconds. 

Ofmatthew and Frances aren’t even the first time June’s self-centered attitude led to a loss of black life. In Season 2 she begs Omar, the black man who attempts to help her escape Gilead, to take her home with him after Mayday’s plan goes awry. She convinces him to hide her in his home and again behaves impulsively; she is captured and returned to the Waterfords while Omar is hanged, his wife forced to become a Handmaid, and his son is sent away from his home. June could have let Omar go and told the exact same story she used later — that she was kidnapped and didn’t try to escape — and saved his life, but it was more important to her that a complete stranger improvise and die a pointless death on her behalf. 

June’s recklessness with other people’s lives is a product of the desperation she feels under actively horrific circumstances, but the pattern of who lives and who dies as a result of her actions is a disturbing element that The Handmaid’s Tale either hasn’t noticed or refuses to address. 

Looking from the outside, part of the blame lies with the show’s casting department that filled the show’s roster with mostly white actors and then presumably added actors of color in secondary roles — but those secondary roles have short, fatal arcs. If the cast was more diverse beyond the neglected Luke and Moira, then June’s transformation into a melanin-seeking missile might blend in with the background, but it’s just not. 

To revise Atwood’s quote for the current state of the show: Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them, and black people of any and all genders are afraid that a white lady will put her personal comfort and desires over their right to survive and blame them when they die. 

Would you look at that? Maybe The Handmaid’s Tale nailed dystopia after all.