The Natural Order

"The Natural Order," the title of the episode, refers to what Tracy and Liz eventually agree is "a world in which [they] both get preferrencial treatment" because Tracy is black and Liz is a woman. I'm not sure what I think about this episode. Don't get me wrong-- it was hilarious. I love Jack's sarcastic and high-maintanance mother, who says of her married boyfriend Paul, "it's Florida. It's like it's still the 70s down there. When you find a guy like Paul, who can drive at night, you don't pass that up." Gotta love that. Anyway, back to my point. Here's the backstory: Tracy gets frustrated that Liz and the producers of the show are treating him like a child, so demands that he be treated like everyone else. Liz accepts the challenge, and Tracy accuses Liz of being treated specially because she's a woman. Liz has a series of shenanigans ["don't patronize me with your Celtic slang!"] about ways in which she is treated differently,  like usually having a man help her change the water cooler, holding back farts, being excused from Lutz' fake bachelor party, Jack "needing to have a conversation with [her]. With a man, [he] can be more direct." Tracy gets bored with actually working rather than doing the fun things he used to do, and then they have this exchange: [only the first half is relevent]

Tracy sent the monkey in his place earlier in the episode with this message: 

Dear Racist Liz Lemon,

I've sent this monkey because this is how you treat me. 

Like a  white whiskered gibbon put on this earth to do nothing but dance around your amusement and reduce the insect population of Malasia.

The gibbon was pretty effective in making Tracy's point, but Jenna's adopting it later had implications I can't decide were intentional or not. Some things are meant to be symbolic and others just to be funny, and I'm not sure about this one. We read Tony Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" in my English class, in which she talks about the use of blackness and what she calls the Africanist presence in American literature as a foil or easy, go-to metaphor. She highlights four ways in which Africanist characters function in American literature.

1. As surrogates and enablers for plot and character development. (It convinces Liz and Tracy to reconsider their feud about equality)

2. As a contrast to modernity. (Tracy uses it to make his point about how he's treated. Remember the outrage when the NY Post used this racist/ stereotypical metaphor in an editorial cartoon?)

3. To reinforce the implications of whiteness. (Jenna adopts the gibbon to have someone to love her: "Now somebody loves me!" and uses it for media attention and to further her career. One of her media ploys is to give Little Jenna (that's the gibbon) a human-baby doll to care for... possibly an allusion to slave wet-nurses raising the mistress' children?)

4. A narrative that can be manipulated as a means of meditation on one's own humanity. (Anyone meditating? If so, I guess the episode did it's job!)