The seven-episode Amazon series I’m a Virgo is Boots Riley’s much-anticipated follow-up to his fantastic sleeper hit film Sorry to Bother You (2018). It’s about a thirteen-foot-tall black teenager named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome of Moonlight) who’s raised in hiding by his Aunt Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo) and Uncle Martisse (Mike Epps). Then Cootie literally outgrows his childhood home and ventures out into his Oakland neighborhood, where he discovers just how crazy the world really is.

As a child, Cootie’s aunt and uncle convinced him that he had to stay inside because people are terrified of giants, and they have a special scrapbook they use to illustrate it full of old newspaper clippings about people through history suffering from “gigantism” the glandular overproduction of growth hormone, who were killed in various cruel ways, their organs harvested for public display — clearly a surreal version of “the talk” black parents have with their children about how guarded in their behavior they have to be in public.

Or perhaps it’s not so surreal. In Sammy Davis Jr’s 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can, he described how for a long time in his childhood, his show business family had him convinced that the hostility they encountered while traveling through many majority-white towns was due to the fact that “they just hate show people here.” It was a traumatic interlude in his life when he first began to recognize the real reason for their hatred.