Harper-from-Industry-core

The representation we deserve

💖Motivation Meows💖

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.

To read what you missed this week in Good Black News, click here. Otherwise, this week, we’re talking about Harper Stern — my favorite character on TV.

Now note: I’ve been with “Industry” since the very beginning so I’m not new to the hive, and I love the success the show is now getting in its third season. I’ve seen the whole season already since I covered the show for TechCrunch, but don’t worry — I don’t include any spoilers below.

Feel free to send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori

This month I’m reading: Slaves to Fashion by Monica Miller

This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Witchy by Kaytranada (featuring Childish Gambino).

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💢From the Chatterbox💢

I’ve always really liked Harper from “Industry.”

I watched the first season of that show, which premiered in 2020, more times than I can count. I still see the ending of the first episode in my head, where she checks herself into a fancy London hotel to celebrate her success at work that day; she puts on a robe and stares out the window at the city lights in front of her. She’s a young Black girl fighting for even a chance to find footing in that cold-cut, white-boy world of finance.

And I related to that, as a young, Black girl, who was fighting to find her footing in the cold, cut white-boy world of journalism, mounted with the extra pressure of having to write about finance, tech, and business. I related to the pressures Harper went through, the fast thinking one has to make when they are trying to stay up and alive. I figured one day, I would check myself into a hotel room like that, put on a robe, and just gaze out into the city lights before me, just because I can.

There are many unspoken elements about race and class in this show that I loved. I liked that, whether “Industry” knew it or not, for once we saw the world of finance through the eyes of a Black American girl from nowhere, who had to claw her way out of her middle-class origins — at whatever cost — to stand on the trading floor at one of the most prestigious banks in the “Industry” world. We don’t have stories like this. And I felt that there was someone speaking in a language that I could understand, that most audiences wouldn’t be privy to.

Wall Street stories always focus on young, white boys trying to move their way up. Or recently, about white women also trying to find their voice in the system; it’s about evil tech barons against rich white families, or an outside working-class kid trying to move against the odds and rise to the top. Black people are never in this world, and we are never given psychological character assessments that flesh us out as people, as three-dimensional creatures navigating a tense, tedious, high-pressure environment.

That’s always shocked me because our storylines are practically pre-written. Me and my friends talk about this all the time. A day in our lives as business journalists gives all the stakes, backstabbing, ups and downs that would make for TV gold. But it’s a story that’s never told — whether because the pen writers don’t know how or because they just don’t care. So I was happy to see someone notice us in the character of Harper. Calculated Black girls were having their moment. And it was normalized, too.

It was also nice in the early seasons that her ally was another minority and we were able to see how two people of color interacted with each other without the gaze of white characters around. There needs to be a form of the Bechdel test for people of color, where we can see at least two minorities having a conversation, with each other, about something other than white characters or in the presence of white people. “Industry” doing this early made it clear that these were not stock minority characters — we were in for a showdown.

“Industry” has become famous for pushing its characters to the brink and I hate to say that I was rooting for Harper to collapse at times. Only because it wouldn’t be realistic if she weren’t on the edge each moment of the day. I liked seeing the show mentally push Harper to the brink of sociopathic insanity because that’s what it feels like trying to keep pace in an industry like finance, business, and tech, where nearly everyone around you clearly has some form of personality imbalance. For Harper to win and rise at the bank, she must become like them and then some, as she must also outpower each systemic structure designed against her as well as each person standing in her way.

She’s reckless, insecure, and naive; she thinks fast, smiles, waves, backstabs, and does everything she’s supposed to do. Yet she still doesn’t land on her feet. At the end of season 2, it seems she fails against the system, in a moment that felt like watching an opponent overpower a star tennis player, who can’t run fast enough to return the ball, losing what was already the longest rally in the match. There are many days like that, where you leave the court just exhausted. I knew, come this latest season, that Harper would be better. She already seems calmer, her skin is clearer, she dresses better, and her hair looks healthier.

To me, her hair has always been an indicator of her mental state. She started out with braids, a protective hairstyle, a young little girl who needed protection. She moved on in season 2 to the corporate slicked-back bun as she became more comfortable in the job. There were moments of the messy afro, the outgrown braids, a polished blow-out, and in this new season, a pixie cut that seems to symbolize her rebirth as a Phoenix. She was fired from her last job but has now found a new one. She’s dressing more quiet luxury, and attending big-named conferences. Her calculations have become much more savvy, but she’s still just as witty and ruthless. She’s learned, in other words, how to better play the game, even when her insecurities are still just as present.

You know, it’s always quite interesting how Harper’s race is hardly spoken about in the show. There are just some aspects of her life and the way that others treat her that I imagine seem quite familiar to Black audiences, even though it’s not explicitly described. Something I caught early on was how little we know about Harper. What brings this little American girl to London for a shot at the big leagues? Sometimes, and this could be a total projection, but being Black and working up those white corporate ladders feels like an out-of-body experience, one in which you must always explain exactly how and why you are there. You are supposed to have a story, a clear one too, that helps people make sense of you.

Harper doesn’t make sense to me. She has the wits to get around but doesn’t have the story to back her up. Why is she here? She didn’t graduate from college and lied about it to get a job. She doesn’t have much of a family and her class origins seem murky at best. She’s a floater, someone existing outside the context of the norm but is still here anyway. The show hasn’t really told us who she is or how she’s made it there — you just know she has a past she’s running from a future she’s working hard to refine.

Her story seems almost like a reinvention, which, when I first started in the industry, I felt somewhat inspired by. There is a mystery that surrounds Black people whom others can’t pinpoint properly. It’s a power to wield in a society that likes to keep tabs on us; that likes us invisible yet overexposed. You never quite know what a character like Harper has up her sleeve.

Anyway, I thought I would write about Harper because I was somewhat sad this season that she wasn’t in it as much. I know this was overall good for the show for character development, and I do think it sets Harper up for much more success in the future seasons, but this season right now is the show’s most-watched season, after its bump to a Sunday primetime slot. Does the new audience know how brilliant Harper is since they haven’t got to see her much this season? Did they go back in watch? Did they, did you!?! Let me throw a tantrum just for a moment.

I liked Harper as a center character much more than Yasmin. She’s so much more interesting to me, and even Yasmin’s best moments to me, were when she stood in contrast to the others around her. It’s probably because her life follows an already over-told and over-analyzed path. She’s a poor, little rich girl, falling for a sad noble boy, who is lost, looking for love in his life. The country estate in London is nice to look at, and the jocking of power is always fun to watch. I liked Harper because she came across like nails on a chalkboard. I found it tantalizing to follow this thriller showcasing us in an industry that has never centered us before. Yasmin, in comparison, is kinda boring — it’s nothing I haven’t seen before (but granted, I spend a lot of time watching insane movies and TV shows — anyone a fan of “Titane?”).

My favorite episode this season was the one with Rishi, obviously. And I loved any time Eric graced our screens. I loved the moments when race and class collided in a way that it felt like the audience was suffocating alongside the character on screen.

But, like I said, all of this needed to happen. The show is brilliant, the writing the brilliant, and the characters in the show, in their own special ways, are all brilliant. Harper, objectively, is just the best one. And she needed a break this season. She needed to breathe, regroup, and astutely re-grasp her life.

I wanted to say that it felt like her character was overlooked; that I got nervous this season because I know how disposable Black people, nonetheless Black characters can be; that perhaps her overlooking is simply symbolic in some way. But I don’t think that is true. For some reason, deep down, I think that the show is one of the rare cases in today’s TV age of a series that is simply pacing itself.

We are going to see Harper again. And when we do, we better duck.

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💫Kitty Talk💫

• Financial Times, “Schizophrenia: the new drug set to tackle the ‘cancer of psychiatry’”

• Financial Times, “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa”

• New Yorker, “The War Crimes That the Military Buried.”