This episode was clearly inspired by the real-life Hart Family murder-suicide. The Harts were a white lesbian couple who adopted lots of black kids. On the surface, they seemed pretty likeable - they spoke a lot about love, peace and happiness, gratitude, equality, anti-racism, social justice - lots of genuinely positive things. They were also groupies of a bunch of hippie bands like Nahko & Medicine for the People, Trevor Hall and Xavier Rudd who have a quasi-cultlike following penchant for psychedelics like ayahuasca, and would appear in music videos with them and on stage. As part of that scene, the Harts described themselves as belonging to a 'tribe'. They would take the kids they were fostering/adopting to lots of New Age music festivals, and on the surface, things looked wholesome - they uploaded videos of one of the kids dancing, they'd have the kids perform "Free Hugs" type stunts, and during a protest against police brutality, one of the kids was pushed to hug a cop and weeping.
But under the pleasant superficial stuff, all of the kids were being abused. They were being systematically malnourished by parents who behaved as if the kids should be grateful for what little they were being given. The kids were between the ages of 12 and 19, but as you can see in the photos of them, they all looked significantly younger, because they were so underfed for so long. When other people in the New Age scene they were part of commenting on how small they were, the Harts would invent excuses, saying the children had eating disorders, something they said was 'common among troubled black youths'. The Harts were using the kids as a paycheck from the government for taking care of kids, and using them as props to feed their narcissism, showing others how wonderful they were by raising these abandoned, luckless children in a supposedly loving home.
They physically abused the kids too - they were beaten with belts until they were bruised and had their heads stuck under cold water for minor infractions like stealing a penny. The school system became aware of the adoptive parents doing some of these things, and one of the women was even prosecuted for it, but incredibly the children weren't taken away from them even after these things were uncovered. After conviction, the Harts ended up taking the kids out of school altogether and moved to another state.
They used common racist tropes about black kids to disguise what they were doing to the kids. On one occasion, one of the girls escaped and rant to the neighbours house and said she didn't want to go back home, because the adoptive parents were racists who abused them. To protect themselves, the Harts explained that the children were "drug babies" who came from a troubled background, and the girl's mother was bipolar, and so would often make up lies. The neighbours believed the adoptive mother and did nothing. Only after another boy started coming around to their place, begging for food and asking them not to tell his adoptive mothers, did the neighbours finally report things to the authorities.
A few days after the authorities got involved (but hadn't taken the children into custody), the Harts realised the game was up. They drove themselves and their six adopted black kids off a cliff, and unlike the show, they were all murdered. Only some of the bodies were found washed up days later - some are still missing.
These poor kids were failed because of stereotypes about the way black people are, and the disturbing belief that it was better that black kids receive some form of care from 'nice' white parents, even if the actual care they received was grossly deficient and abusive. All too often, black kids are treated like a problem that people are glad to have been taken off their hands.
The New Age scene the Harts were involved in was implicated in this horror - the musicians I mentioned earlier made excuses for the moms, saying the official story must be mistaken and parroted the lies about how the troubled kids were lucky to have them. The manner of their murder-suicide even appears to have been pulled directly from the lyrics of one of the musicians (Nahko Bear) song lyrics: "Dreaming of the day we drive our cars into the ocean / And all the people looking on will wonder what to say."
The whole story is a horrific tragedy. Those little kids deserved better than to be massacred in this way, and were let down by the institutions that were supposed to protect them. Racist stereotypes about black kids, white do-gooders who seem sweet on the surface, black people as props, what black people 'deserve' and should be grateful for, the quality of white parenting - all of these things played a part in allowing such a horrific thing to happen. As always, Atlanta is thought-provoking in ways so many shows are not.
