Man in the High Castle is over. The journey through a world where Nazi Germany and imperial Japan won world war two and conquered America has concluded. The most interesting part of this season was not the confusing ending, but the show’s willingness to explore race in a way it hasn’t previously.

I’m thinking specifically of the Black Communist Rebellion (“BCR”). It’s a group of black revolutionaries fighting against the Japanese occupation of America’s west coast. They want to expel the Japanese invaders and then set up a separate state for black people.

While many other Americans quietly acquiesced to Nazi or Japanese rule in the show’s alternate timeline, the blacks had no choice but to resist. There is a moving scene where BCR members go around the room sharing the names of concentration camps they had lived in and family members lost. Resisting was risky; they could die if caught, and there was a high chance of getting caught. But not resisting would have brought certain death. Under Nazi ideology, blacks were sub-human and subject to extermination.

The show raises interesting questions about what they’re fighting for. At first, it’s a separate state for blacks of the sort that Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey envisioned. They don’t even want to work with white resistance groups. At first glance, this behavior might be hard for viewers to sympathize with. Aren’t they engaging in the same racially exclusive thinking the Nazis are? The answer is complicated. Whites resisting the Nazis and Japanese are fighting for America as it was before the war. They had liberty and the ability to manage their own affairs. The blacks, on the other hand, did not in the same way. Their experience was of segregated water fountains, unequally funded schools, sharecropping, and in not-too-distant-memory, debt peonage and slavery. Fighting simply to go back to the way things were was unappealing.

Man in the High Castle subtly acknowledges this in the alternate universe. John Smith, reichmarshall of Nazi-occupied America, uses recently-developed technology to travel to an alternate world where his son Thomas is still alive. One morning, John takes his son out for breakfast at a diner in Virginia. We get a glimpse of what their life would have been like if Thomas had not been euthanized as defective because of his genetic condition. A group of blacks come in and sit at the lunch counter demanding to be served. The diner refuses and then the blacks experience violence before getting arrested. Thomas berates his father for not saying anything. Tellingly, neither did any of the other whites.

This accounts for the debate about using the American flag as a symbol as the season is ending. Lemuel Washington recovers an American flag and suggests using it as a symbol to unify all Americans under Nazi rule. But the BCR’s leadership refuses. For them, the American flag can never be a symbol of freedom and liberty. To them, it only symbolizes America’s failure to live up to its promise before the Nazis set foot in the country.

Indeed, there was a need to reach out to other racial groups. After the Japanese end their occupation of the Japanese Pacific States, the Nazis plan to invade. As a small minority group (many of whose members have been exterminated), there just aren’t enough blacks to fight off the world’s most powerful empire. If that weren’t enough, the Nazis on the show pandered to racial prejudice to win public support for their invasion. They sent bombers over the west coast that said “[r]esist Your Negro Overlords, The Reich is Coming!”

In real life, the Nazis used blacks in their propaganda. They did it to bolster the morale of the home front and instill fear of what a foreign occupation would mean.

Failing to resist could lead to scary-looking black men violating “pure” German women. Of course, pandering to racist prejudice against blacks is a familiar tactic in politics. Within living memory for some of the black characters on the show was reconstruction, the brief period after slavery where blacks in many southern states exercised real political power.

Opponents used race in an attempt to scare and scandalize whites into voting against republican rule. Delegates at Arkansas’ constitutional convention warned about the dangers of black men going after white women. One delegate claimed that a constitutional amendment banning amalgamation was necessary because a black man from his neighborhood had recently kidnapped a white woman. He said the measure was necessary to protect “poor white trash, if you please, as they have been styled by some…from further social degradation.” He warned that black men would acquire land, money, and position in society and then “insidiously make their advances to these unfortunate and helpless persons [poor whites]” and then “mislead and misguide them [] into error and folly…”

And, just as the Nazis on the show—and in real life—tried to sow fear of black leadership, so did reactionaries during and after reconstruction. Trying to undermine black judges—hard as it is to believe, there were black judges on the bench in southern states just years after slavery ended—writers opposed to reconstruction spun wild tales. In one case, when a black judge was told that he had not charged the jury (lawyer speak for providing instructions before deliberations), the judge allegedly said “Gemmen of de Jury, I charge you half a dollar apiece and you must pay it before the case goes on.”

Another newspaper described a black Arkansas judge as “a true type of the old plantation negro” who was “one of the many ignorant persons to whose hands Radical prejudice of the State has given the administration of the law.” The judge’s courthouse was allegedly “his own log cabin, humble as a shanty.” When interrupted by a plaintiff, Brown allegedly replied “hold on dar Mr. Clerk, go on wid de court; I knows de law.”

A delegate at Texas’ constitutional convention argued for making only a handful of judicial districts for the election of judges to ensure a white majority in every district. Having any district with a black majority would “destroy the hopes of fifteen counties and put them under negro rule…by forcing upon them [whites] a set of district judges elected by the negroes of those districts.” Black officials were treated as ignorant and an affront to basic dignity. Whites were supposed to be embarrassed to have such blacks ruling over them. This is the same embarrassment the Nazis wanted to exploit on the show.

The show wasn’t perfect on race. Although it was very moving to hear BCR members go around a circle and share portions of their life story, it would have had more impact to show flashbacks. The show could have shown life in America before the Nazi invasion. It would have packed a real emotional punch to show one of them, say, going through side entrances of a store or learning from hand-me down textbooks in segregated schools with inadequate resources, and then being herded into a Nazi concentration camp.

Still, I’m glad the show chose to seriously engage with race this season.