Months before Django premiered to movie audiences, Washington became the first black woman leading actor in a television drama series in nearly forty years when she starred as Olivia Pope on ABC's Scandal....a black woman-led show like HBO's Insecure (starring Issa Rae, which owes its success to forerunners like Rhimes) has parodied these dynamics by conflating the romance of Scandal with another television show-the now canceled Underground, based on fugitive slaves-in Due North, a show within a show that sends up the nation's established romanticized cultural imagination of slavery, as well as that imagination's continuing, if questionable, appeal to black audiences.The Obama administration enabled the completion of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016, and facilitated the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Park, which opened in 2017....thanks to Annette GordonReed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (1997), DNA testing in 1998 linking one of Hemings' children to Jefferson, and various films and television shows dramatizing their relationship, Hemings is now included and even centered in our national narratives-even if we do not quite fully grasp the raced and gendered power dynamics informing her enslaved relationship, which began in her adolescence, with the third president of the United States.