The Roach Is Coming

The Roach Is Coming (2018)

Created, starring and directed by: Derrick Woods-Morrow

Edited by: Aymar Jean Christian and André Pérez

How do you represent whiteness and masculinity in a way that honors its complexity and relationship to Blackness and queerness?

It’s a question few artists ask, especially in the mediums of film and video. 

Derrick Woods-Morrow started to ask this question after an incident involving police on the North side of Chicago. He had done nothing wrong but was framed as a threat, anyway. As a tall and muscular Black queer man, Derrick cannot escape hypervisibility. 

The incident reminded him of a childhood friendship in his home state of North Carolina with a young boy who would grow up to be a cop. Derrick remembers them sharing intimate moments that were some of his first memories of queer desire. Now that his friend is a cop, Derrick has to grapple with feelings of fear or apprehension despite their history of closeness. 

The Roach Is Coming emerges from this deeply personal and yet unavoidably political context. The film’s audio track is a conversation Derrick has with his childhood friend, now an adult and a police officer. It’s unclear to the viewer, but the conversation takes place with the two men sitting in a bathtub together (a perceptive might notice the subtle sloshing of water, which adds a surreal otherworldly quality to the listening experience). 

The images in the film transport us to the bucolic surroundings of upstate New York, where two twin boys, both white, are frollicking. 

In the film, Derrick juxtaposes the innocence of youth with the wisened, hardened responses of the adult cop to Derrick’s direct, sensitively delivered questions. Does the cop feel any sense of tension between his queerness and the violence of his profession? What does he remember of their intimacy? How does one grow from natural innocence to professionally administering guilt? Is there a psychic toll in this transition?

The piece does not offer any answers, only poses more questions, but beneath it all is a longing for innocence from questions about race, a desire for us to see each other as purely as children see each other. It’s clear that whiteness and masculinity are on trial for precluding this from happening. 

Toward the end of the film we see a young white boy spraying Derrick with a hose. Both are too small to move him. The image juxtaposes Derrick’s physical power with the innate sensitivity of his voice and questions. Is it possible to see his sensitivity inside his muscular frame, to acknowledge, as Derrick does in the film’s audio track, the innocent Black boy who wants to be loved but becomes, instead, an object of play or violence?

 This innocence appears as yet another casualty in America’s ongoing racial conflict.