“I’ll Be a Teacher, Just Like Mama”: Miss Vera and the Politics of Racist Education in Little Marvin’s Them

Abstract

Little Marvin’s Them: Covenant (Amazon Prime Video, 2021), the first installment of the anthology series Them, mobilizes supernatural horror to expose the enduring legacies of racism, segregation, and intergenerational trauma in the United States. This paper examines how Them: Covenant uses horror conventions, such as haunted-houses and supernatural monsters as allegories for the structural violence confronting African Americans, and more specifically explores how the series exposes the racialized mechanisms embedded within educational institutions in postwar America. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, this paper situates Them: Covenant within the broader tradition of Black horror, a genre that reclaims horror conventions to expose racial oppression and the persistence of systemic inequality while bringing historically marginalized experiences into mainstream cultural narratives. The paper focuses on the character of Miss Vera, a narrative device through which the series explores how White supremacist ideology shapes the educational experiences of Black children and restricts their access to social mobility through exclusion, surveillance, and psychological violence. Alongside Miss Vera, the paper examines other forms of supernatural "hauntings" in the series to highlight the connections between educational exclusion and broader histories of racial trauma and displacement, challenging narratives of colorblindness and meritocracy that continue to underpin American institutions.