What a 21-Year-Old Comedy Can Tell Us About Anti-Racism Protests

In times of high emotion or intense passion, it can be helpful to try and understand current events by triangulating them with less provocative parallels. Such is the case for people trying to make sense of the protests and riots growing across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

In the 1999 cult favorite, Office Space, there’s an iconic scene in which the three main characters steal a printer from their office building, drive it out into a field, and beat it to death. While the Geto Boys’ “Still” plays over the scene, the three grown men in business-casual wear stomp on the printer, then attack it with a bat, and eventually pound on its inert, mechanical remains with their bare fists.

The printer’s crime was its constant malfunctioning. It was a persistent source of frustration and irritation. As a result, the characters were pushed to the brink and eventually snapped.

The printer scene was an allegory for a pervasive disease in American work culture, in which American businesses — white-collar and blue-collar, alike — prioritize efficiency, profit, and customer service over the well-being of workers. Office Space contemplated what rebellion would look like for workers who couldn’t bear the frustration any longer.

Although on its face the movie little more than a period piece intended to lampoon 1990s office culture, it turns out that Office Space may be instructive for thinking about how frustration can slowly build and eventually explode in rage.

It should be obvious where I’m going here.

In the last week and a half, a liberal white woman in Central Park tried to abuse her whiteness to get a Black man arrested for asking her to put her dog on a leash. A white man in Minneapolis tried to eject several Black men from an office gym that they were perfectly entitled to use. And George Floyd was murdered by four nonchalant police officers who kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while he begged for his life.

In the last month, Breonna Taylor was killed in her home in Louisville, KY by police exercising a no-knock warrant in plain clothes. They were serving a warrant for a person who did not live in Taylor’s home and who had already been arrested hours earlier. We also saw the video of Ahmaud Arbery being hunted and killed in Georgia by three white men. Local law enforcement allowed the killers to walk free until public pressure caused them to reconsider.

In the last three months, Republicans have aggressively pursued voter suppression measures designed to make it harder for Black voters to cast ballots. In Wisconsin, for example, Republican lawmakers blocked efforts to allow voting by mail, even though voting in person risked spreading COVID-19. Of course, COVID-19 has killed disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown Americans, and the President’s response even after learning of the racial disparity was to encourage the country to resume economic business-as-usual. At the President’s encouragement, white protestors descended on state houses across the country — armed to the teeth — to demand that states roll back stay-at-home orders, all without meeting the slightest resistance from police.

The theme of these news stories is unmistakable: in real life, every day, white people feel justified in exercising power that negatively affects — and often directly targets — Black people. This is a minuscule sample of insults and assaults from a very short timeline. Whether they want to or not, Black people have to manage white feelings because Black Americans can’t count on justice from the police or the courts.

The steadily-increasing frustration from a malfunctioning printer in Office Space resonates with viewers because it speaks to a widely-shared experience: the accumulating pressure that builds from minor irritations in daily work life. When the main characters steal and vandalize a printer, it’s cathartic, even for people who don’t have to deal with recalcitrant office printers.

But as the movie makes plain, killing the printer doesn’t solve the underlying problems — it just temporarily releases some of the accumulated pressure. The movie dramatizes a fundamental disease that can’t be solved by casual Fridays, company-sponsored sheet cakes, tightly-regulated regimes of flair, or one dead printer. And, in fact, treating the symptoms of the disease without addressing root causes only intensifies everyone’s misery.

The persistence of racism, racist violence, and institutional indifference (or worse, institutional sponsorship) in the American justice system is not a malfunctioning office printer. It’s much more damaging, much more painful, much more dangerous, and too often, much more deadly. Like the frustrations of the office printer, however, the pressure builds with every instance of malfunction.

Office Space is funny because it exaggerates the rageful consequences of a malfunctioning printer. But it speaks to a real sense of frustration that can come from minor irritations. And people who identify with rage at a printer — however amusing it is intended to be — must be able and willing to see how the persistence of racism, even in what seem like minor instances, can ultimately build to an explosion of fear, pain, and anger.

Given the unrelenting menace of injustice in Black communities, the current rageful uprisings are not an exaggerated response.

I understand that people don’t want to see protests, riots, looting, fires, clashes with police, ruined businesses, graffiti, and so forth. But this is a predictable consequence in a culture and society where racial pressure has been allowed to build in the way America has allowed it. As the protests carry into a second week, we’re witnessing one of the lessons from Office Space playing out in America’s cities and towns: treating the symptoms of a broken system without addressing the root causes only intensifies the misery.

In the next few weeks, the protests may be quelled. But treating the symptom won’t address the underlying cause. If we want to prevent protests of the sort we’re seeing now, we can’t be satisfied with quieter streets. We need better laws, better institutions, better cultural habits that recognize and value the members of our society that have long been its least cared for.

The best way to deal with riots is to make a society where people don’t feel pushed to the brink and eventually explode.

Office Space doesn’t have a useful solution for making a better world — in the movie, the most debased character starts a fire and flees the country with hundreds of thousands of stolen dollars. The point, ultimately, is that if we don’t figure out how to build a better system, we can’t be terribly surprised when some people feel like their only recourse is robbing the company and lighting the buidling on fire.