Black History Month Cut Short After White Couple Forgets Passwords To Streaming Services
LOS ANGELES, CA—Echo Park residents Macy Portland and Kelvin Hootley were about to spend their Sunday evening educating themselves with movies highlighting the history of black people when they realized they had forgotten all the passwords to the wide range of streaming services that Hootley personally pays for monthly and on time. Now, the couple thinks it's March 1st.
“My friend from work, whom I don’t speak to outside of work hours and is actually just my assistant, Lance Johnson, is African American," said Hootley as he searched his notes app for the note that contains all his passwords. "I value Lance so much that I figured I would do my part and learn more about what black people had to go through. Also, he asked for a raise and because we decided not to give him one. I’m sure he’ll appreciate what I’m doing in replacement of that."
Portland, a freelance celebrity dog masseuse, explained what had happened that night.
“We both discussed it over hor d'oeuvres and ultimately decided to start by watching the 2011 film The Help since it was the first movie to come up when we googled 'black people in movies.' As soon as we went to put in the password for Hulu, our minds went blank. We tried every single other service like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, the list goes on and on and on... and on."
When asked about how Hootley was able to access the yet-to-be-released streaming service Paramount+, Hootley replied, “Oh, my dad’s frat brother is a VP there. Both are members of the illustrious Kappa Dappa Phi brotherhood. As am I. Still a proud brother. HOO-HAH! I respect that you unknowingly prompted me to tell you about how I still associate my personality with my college fraternity. It means a lot.”
Hootley said he sought out various forum websites to figure out how to reset the passwords. He went on sites such as Quora, Reddit, and Yahoo Answers to ask multiple forum users. While unsuccessful at first, Hootley eventually was referred to a thread on Reddit about resetting the passwords but was then immediately distracted by "trolling comments" made by other users.
“There were people on there telling me not to watch “The Help” when I mentioned it in my question. They said to watch other films such as “13th”, “Selma”, and “42”. Two of those movies are just numbers so it was obviously a bunch of hateful white people trying to dissuade us from learning more about black people and their history. I’m shaking just thinking about it. We need to go after those guys, not the corporations.”
Right after that, Hootley claimed his phone died, restarted, and had wiped itself of all internal storage, resulting in the thread disappearing from his phone’s web browser. Hootley and Portland are still looking for answers.
“If anyone out there has any idea on how to help us, please do. Man, I mean, from what I read at the beginning of the summary section on the Wikipedia page, The Help sounds incredible. Hopefully, one day, in the future, maybe next week, possibly, we’ll find a way to watch it and see Emma Stone perform what seems to be the most emotionally tiring role in the entire film.”
