Black Families: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Black Families Theme Week here.

Chef!: The Perfectly Imperfect Marital Eroticism of Janice and Gareth by Brigit McCone

Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.


Love & Basketball: Girls Can Do Anything Boys Can Do by Alize Emme

Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.


The Popes and the White Patriarchy in Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal by Jackson Adler

While the show is not overt, at its core the story is about race and gender relations. Race- and gender-specific language is often omitted from the dialogue, yet the meaning is there. Rhimes takes the White patriarchy of America and individualizes its contributors so that neither (most of) the characters nor the audience realizes that they are contributing to harmful White patriarchal norms and internalizing them until the rare moments when they take a step back from the action.


Killer of Sheep A Slice of Life of Watts in the ’70s by Ren Jender

The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”


Desmond’s: Roots, Culture, and the Black U.K. Experience by Lisa Bolekaja

What makes Desmond’s unique is its layered and often nuanced portrayal of immigrant Afro-Europeans and their assimilating progeny that are more closely connected to their African roots than any African American TV show I’d ever seen. It also has a cross representation of class in Black British society by showing retired, working class, upper-middle class, college-educated, college-bound, and not college-bound Black people interacting together all the time. Not only are different classes intermingling, but there are also four series regulars who are white, and their whiteness is not the punchline of tired racial jokes.


Debunking the Missing Father Myth in Happyness by Rhianna Shaheen

While many of the film’s events differ from Gardner’s memoir, the film compensates for this with its extremely authentic and loving portrait of a Black father/son relationship that is rarely seen in mainstream media.


Normalizing the Black Family by Atima Omara

When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”


Smart Guy: Intelligent Black Families and Race-Bending Tropes by BJ Colangelo

The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason ‘Smart Guy’ comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.


Alcoholic Aunts, Homeless Cousins, and Depressed Dads: How Mental Illness Is Invisible in The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Beyond by Keisha Zollar

Black families can be rich and poor and everything in between on TV, but why can’t we show the mental health crises Black families face?


Eve and the Second Sight by Rachel Wortherley

The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.


Black Solidarity and Family in The Retrieval by Jackson Adler

There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society.

Eve and the Second Sight

The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.

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This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.

Eve’s Bayou (1997) begins with the haunting lines: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” With this preamble is the expectation of the tragic to occur. While the core of a majority of Black family dramas involves tragedy in the form of slavery, poverty, or mental/physical abuse, Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut reinvents the way audiences view Black families. On a rare occasion, the story of a Black family is allowed to be told through the eyes of a Black female protagonist. Eve’s Bayou is in part a “coming of age” drama.

The history of the Batiste family of Louisiana lies in their ancestry. Eve, an African slave, saved a French aristocrat, Jean-Paul Batiste, from cholera. In return, Batiste granted her freedom and named the island in Louisiana, after her. In turn, Eve bore Batiste 16 children. Ten-year-old Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett), the story’s protagonist, is named after her and is a descendant of Eve and Jean-Paul Batiste.   The fact that their ancestry is an integral part of their lives reveals several things: the first being that they clearly know who they are in terms of culture. Through the sordid decades of slavery, Blacks in America have little to no knowledge of their genealogy. It is a part of our past that is not clearly defined. However, in Eve’s Bayou, their background is not only acknowledged but embraced. They can often be heard speaking French phrases throughout the film. The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.

The first time audiences meet the Batiste family, we are immediately thrust into a world that is uncharted and unfamiliar for most Black families in motion pictures, as well as the audiences. The hot sound of jazz fills the Victorian mansion, women are dressed in fine satins, and laughter fills the air. The young Eve appears and immediately incites mischief upon her brother Poe (Jake Smollett), while her sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), reprimands them, likening them to William Shakespeare’s Tybalt and Mercutio.   Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson) is their father and a successful, beloved doctor in the community. Their mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is a homemaker, whose beauty is referenced throughout the film. There appears to be a strong family dynamic and they are living the quintessential American dream. Here, the Black family to audiences is “normalized” to a general American landscape. This factor becomes a metaphor for the supernatural aspects—the gift of second sight—of the film. Lemmons forces her audience to see beyond what is generally depicted about a Black family in the 1950s.

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While the traditional family dynamic is important in the film, the coming of age aspect is even more so instrumental to the plot. When audiences first meet Eve, we see through her eyes how she feels marginalized within the family dynamic. She suffers from the classic “middle child” syndrome. Poe, her younger brother, is the quintessential “mama’s boy” to Roz, while Cisely is the clandestine “daddy’s girl” to Louis. Eve finds kinship in her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan). Both share two qualities: their beautiful red hair and the gift of second sight. Not only do Eve and Mozelle see the future, but they are hyper-aware of their surroundings. This becomes especially significant when Eve becomes cognizant of her father’s infidelity. This realization not only disrupts the harmonious father-daughter relationship, but ultimately changes their family dynamic.

Louis’ penchant for adultery is not something that is usually portrayed in stories about Black families. Largely, Black fathers are either portrayed as: physically/emotionally absent or highly upstanding. In comedies, fathers are most likely the source of comic relief, while his wife is the “straight man” and the situational aspects generally focus on him or he is involved in some manner in the resolution. A current example of this is ABC’s Black-ish, while earlier incarnations are The Cosby Show, and The Jeffersons. I think that in Lemmons’ film, as well as Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, fathers are portrayed as loving, yet flawed. Louis is undoubtedly a serial adulterer, but that does not change his affection toward his children.

When Eve discovers Louis’ infidelity she and Cisely begin to either cling to or detach themselves from him. Eve accompanies him on his house calls—once he closes the door in Eve’s face to give a patient what can be presumed “sexual healing.” This later prompts Eve to question, “Do you ever want other children besides us?” Louis assures her by telling her that he loves her mother, but the seed of distrust was planted the night of the party when she witnessed his infidelity in the shed with family friend, Mrs. Matty Mereaux. Cisely begins to cling to her father. She waits up for him at night when he arrives home late from house calls and pours him a drink to assuage his stress. Cisely also contends with Roz, who scolds Louis about his late nights. Cisely sees her mother as the antagonist who is driving her father out of their lives. This anxiety arguably prompts the “kiss of death” that transpires between Louis and Cisely.

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The kiss that occurs between Cisely and her father is what Eve thinks led to his subsequent death. Cisely confides to Eve that one night, she went to comfort her father and a sexual kiss was exchanged. At her resistance he slaps her to the grown and a look of rage filled his eyes. This admission prompts Eve to procure the local witch, Elzora (Diahann Carroll), to cast a spell of death. However, the night that Louis is killed, something within Eve prompts her to attempt to save her father. In going to the town bar to bring him home, it is likely that Eve has reservations about how he hurt Cisely. But it is hard to not believe her sister when Eve has witnessed her father’s distrust on a number of occasions. Yet, it is too late, Mr. Mereaux in a crime of passion, shoots Louis dead, with Eve as witness. This moment leaves Eve forever changed, even more so when she discovers that Louis did not molest Cisely. Rather Cisely’s prominent memory is that Louis hurt her. Symbolically this means that everything Cisely disbelieved about her father to be true.

It is significant that in the beginning of the film, adult Eve states: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” Whereas at the end she says: “The summer my father said goodnight I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14. ” This changing in lines demonstrates that Eve accepts that her father’s death was not of her provocation, but his own.

The death of Louis allows for several new things to occur. It brings Roz closer to her children, it allows Eve to understand that not everything is “black and white,” and most significantly, women continue to be the foundation of their family. Though Poe is the sole male in their household, perhaps upbringing from Roz, Cisely, Eve, and Mozelle will influence him on how to respect women. However, Cisely and Eve are missing years in their adolescence in which fatherly love and influence is key. Yet there is not the sense that the sisters will stray. The indicator of this lies in the final shot as Eve destroys Louis’ letter in which he reveals the miscommunication between him and Cisely. Ten-year-old Eve assumes the role of her ancestor Eve by nurturing her sister. As they stand together, hand in hand, looking out across the bayou, they intend to deal with this situation and future hardships together. Eve’s Bayou ultimately becomes about how women and sisters look beyond tragedy to find strength in one another.

 


Rachel Wortherley is a graduate of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York and holds a Master of Arts degree in English. Her downtime consists of devouring copious amounts of literature, television shows, and films. She hopes to gain a doctorate in English literature and become a professional screenwriter.

 

Alcoholic Aunts, Homeless Cousins, and Depressed Dads: How Mental Illness Is Invisible in ‘The Cosby Show,’ ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,’ and Beyond

Black families can be rich and poor and everything in between on TV, but why can’t we show the mental health crises Black families face?

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This guest post by Keisha Zollar appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.

When watching Black families in film and TV like Everybody Hates Chris, Soul Food, and Bebe’s Kids, mental illness was/is invisible.  I think to myself, which Cosby kid battles with depression? Does Uncle Phil have an eating disorder? And would Dr. Doolittle ever see a therapist?

Are Black families so marginalized in film and TV that we are afraid to show the cracks of mental illness as they actually are?

As many as 25 percent of Americans suffer from mental illness, and some of those Americans are Black.

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Growing up in the early-late 1980s and early 1990s, most of the Black TV families I saw were high functioning, white-collar families with an upstanding father figure who was always around, and there was plenty of food on the table. There were also TV shows like Roc, reruns of Good Times, and other tales of the economic divide where I saw a different Black experience. As a kid, my immediate family was more Cosby than Good Times but I did have relatives who were more Roc than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in their day-to-day lives. Growing up, it felt like TV was holding a mirror up to my family but with one exception: why was no one as sad and anxious as I felt?  Why did no one talk about overwhelming emotions?  The process of dealing with addiction? The pain of divorce?

I also remember the Black movies of my childhood.

My grandparents took my family to watch Do The Right Thing because my Grandma said, “It’s important to support Black artists like Spike Lee.”  I remember the story, the realness, the colors–also what we might call nowadays: “grit.”  My parents would show me Roots, Bebe’s Kids, and Nutty Professor with pride and joy.

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The movies and television I watched as a child inspired me to pursue my own journey in entertainment. Entertainment was/is a noble pursuit of truth, exploration, fantasy, and more.

Then the economic bubbles of the 1980s-1990s burst and burst and burst…

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”

-Ernst Fischer

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Then in the early 2000s I became an adult; my parents divorced, I struggled with depression and anxiety, I got in therapy, and realized that the TV and films I loved as a child were missing something. Where was the “Real Talk” about mental illness in entertainment? Where was the entertainment that went beyond just telling Black people to pray, to be strong, to avoid sugar and crack cocaine? Why was everyone being so mean about Uncle Phil’s weight in the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

Uncle Phil’s weight in the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air always seemed to be the punchline. Episode to episode Uncle Phil is fat shamed–by main characters, auxiliary characters, and even by himself. Every character on the show knew Uncle Phil had a problem with food. The adult in me kept thinking, “Why did no one acknowledge Uncle Phil’s cries for help, his risk factors for diabetes, his possible food addiction?”

Then I thought about Hillary’s shopping addiction!

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And of course The Cosby Show…

Denise Huxtable was the “wild child,” or a character on TV who was crying out for help.  Denise was a beloved character that couldn’t hold onto a job, then disappeared on the show to go to college, dropped out of college, ran off to Africa, married a man unknown to her parents, then showed up on the Huxtable doorstep with her own family, then tried school again and didn’t finish (the order of events in Denise’s life isn’t fully accurate but I’m painting an impressionistic portrait of Black media from my POV, there you go Super Cosby Fans).

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Now there is Theo Huxtable, who struggled with a learning disorder: dyslexia.

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It was a liberating moment on TV to see a main character struggle with education, not because he was “dumb” as a character trait, but because he was flawed. In the episode where Theo found out he had dyslexia he was overjoyed because he had a diagnosis; it was TV saying it was OK to have a learning disorder. It felt like The Cosby Show said it was OK to see if you had learning challenges.

I remember thinking while watching the show when it aired, “This is important, and it’s OK if I have dyslexia too.”

As an adult I know I don’t have dyslexia, but I’m still waiting for my TV moment on an important Black show to describe what I do have: depression and anxiety.

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Getting diagnosed has changed my perspective on watching film and TV.  I see the PTSD that poverty can cause in cartoon movies.  I see eating disorders where I used to see “harmless” fat jokes.  I see the stress of being Black in America but no mention of eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic disorder.

Now I watch these shows and I think, maybe I’m making up all this mental illness in the Black community, but then I look at Surgeon General’s reports and check out pages like this.

House of Payne shows the ravages of addiction with a recurring crack-addicted mother, and a few other shows seem to tackle addiction but it seems the vast majority make mental illness invisible.  It feels like Black TV and film wants us to ignore or pray away the fact mental illness exists.

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Black families can be rich and poor and everything in between on TV, but why can’t we show the mental health crises Black families face?

My desire to see Black families explore mental illness in media is not about victimizing the oppressed in media.  I just want to see my own Theo moment on TV; maybe some little Black teenager who is smart and capable, but is sad and cries too much goes to see a nice doctor with her parents.  This little Black girl gets tested and gets diagnosed as being depressed and she runs home to tell her parents about her depression.  Her parents hear the word “depression” and are relieved at a diagnosis and the audience empathizes and learns, and everyone is OK.

 


Keisha Zollar is an actor-writer-comedienne. Keisha has been seen on Orange Is The New Black, Celebrity Apprentice Season 14, The Today Show, College Humor, Comedy Central, MTV, UCBComedy, and numerous web-series.  Currently, Keisha in post production for An Uncomfortable Conversation About Race and she has recently directed her first interactive sketch called Neggers.  She is proud of her latest series In Game, a diverse web-series about LARPing (nerd stuff).  Learn more at www.KeishaZollar.com.

Black Solidarity and Family in ‘The Retrieval’

There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society.

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This guest post by Jackson Adler previously appeared at his blog, The Windowsill, and appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. Cross-posted with permission.

Chris Eska’s independent film The Retrieval (2013) is a coming of age/road trip/period drama in which a young teenage boy named Will and his uncle Marcus are forced into working for white bounty hunters to “retrieve” escaped slaves during The American Civil War. There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society. Will needs the money not only to get by, but also to reunite with his father. He and Marcus know that if they do not do as they are told, they could very well be murdered by their employers. When Marcus sees that his nephew is beginning to feel empathy for Nate, a man they are hired to “retrieve,” Marcus points to Nate and says, “That’s money.” Marcus encourages Will to see fellow African Americans as less than people for the sake of his own gain, as well as to make it easier to set aside his guilt.  However, Will learns solidarity through his interactions with other African Americans in the film, and creates surrogate families in spite of the pressures of white patriarchy. Though most of the film focuses on Will, Marcus, and Nate, women play crucial roles in the story. It is mostly through the example of women that Will begins to understand that African Americans need to support and stand up for each other.

The escaped slave whom Will betrays, played by Charissa Jarrett.
The escaped slave whom Will betrays, played by Charissa Jarrett.

 

At the very beginning of the film, a white woman with a shotgun offers safety on the Underground Railroad to Will, thinking he is a runaway slave. Once hidden, a Black woman offers him some of the little food she has. He betrays these women, but the memory of his betrayal haunts him and sets the foundation for his actions throughout the rest of the film, particularly toward Nate. Marcus and Will tell Nate that they were hired by his sick brother to help him travel south safely in order to visit his brother before he dies. This is a lie, as the brother is already dead and Will’s and Marcus’ true employers have evil intentions, but Nate believes it and goes on the journey with them out of loyalty to his brother. When Marcus is shot and killed by a white soldier, Will realizes he has to make up his own mind about what to do. While Nate and Will are traveling, a second Black woman accepts them into an all-Black camp in the woods, giving them food and a feeling of community. While there, Will meets a girl his age and they share an emotional connection. Will is offered the chance to stay with this community, where African Americans look out for one another and are one family. Though he and Nate end up travelling on, Will has become more humanized by the camp, and encourages Nate to visit his “woman,” Rachel, whom he was forced to leave years before at the risk of re-enslavement or death.

Will (Ashton Sanders) and Nate (Tishuan Scott)
Will (Ashton Sanders) and Nate (Tishuan Scott)

 

Rachel’s new “man” is the one to first greet Nate, accompanied by Will, at Rachel’s house. There is no animosity between Nate and this man as they talk, but a warm and sad understanding – no explanations needed. While left unsaid, it is the White patriarchy that broke up Nate and Rachel, and Rachel is not blamed for finding comfort in someone else. When Rachel and Nate see each other, Rachel is at first upset that Nate never came back for her to help her achieve freedom – “Why now?!” However, each understands that the other has had to make a new life for themselves. Once again, no explanation is needed, and no blame to be had between them – only upon the hateful and harmful society in which they live. Will soon finds he is not just an observer in this, as Rachel asks Nate, “Are you responsible for this boy?” She says that Will and Nate sound so much alike that they might as well be father and son, though she knows they aren’t. This comment seems to resonate with Will. It also seems to touch Will when Rachel mothers him for a bit, checking his clothes and hair. For a moment, it is like the three of them – Rachel, Nate, and Will, are family. Shortly after this scene, Will attempts to bail out of his assignment, but is scared into doing so when his boss confronts him. Will is aptly named, as it is his will to do right by his fellow African Americans, especially Nate, that eventually makes him turn against his employers. However, when he does so, his boss and his posse are already approaching. Nate, knowing that Will faces death if his boss finds out about the betrayal, stabs Will in the leg to make it look as though Will tried to keep him from running. Will’s attempt to save Nate results in Nate saving Will’s life. Though Will’s actions do not spare the life of his newfound friend and father figure, Nate dies with dignity and on his own terms due to Will’s actions. At the end of the film, Will returns to Rachel, who takes him in.

Black families are still torn apart by systems that were built on the backs of slavery. African American women are still especially marginalized. In America, Black families are still heavily oppressed and pushed to make difficult choices. Police violence threatens their lives, and low minimum wages keep their children hungry. The Retrieval is incredibly relevant to today’s world, as solidarity is needed behind every movement, and every person needs the welcoming warmth of a family. In the film, Will learns what a Black family truly is – one of solidarity and support in the face of those who would break and oppress them.

 


Jackson Adler is a transmasculine aromantic bi/pansexual skinny white middle class dude with an Auditory Processing Disorder and a Weak Working Memory who enjoys cartoons, musical theatre, and vegan boba drinks. Jackson has a BA in Theater, and is a writer, activist, performer, director, teacher, and dramaturge.

‘Smart Guy’: Intelligent Black Families and Race-Bending Tropes

The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason ‘Smart Guy’ comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.

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This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. 

As a proud child of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to grow up with some of the best sitcoms on television. Perhaps my nostalgic love of these shows have clouded my view on whether or not these shows were any good, but I still stomp my curmudgeonly feet around and shout, “These kids today don’t know good TV!” I grew up in a lower-middle class family in an extremely diverse community, so I’ve always been exposed to multi-cultural families. Hell, my mom named my (white, red-headed) sister after a guest-starring character she loved on Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper. Disney Channel used to show re-runs of a lot of shows I loved growing up, and I distinctly remember running home off the bus to make sure I wouldn’t miss the “newest” episode of Smart Guy.

I. Loved. Smart. Guy. Growing up, I was a gifted child, so T.J. Henderson was a boy after my own heart. He was living the life I always dreamed of having. I probably wasn’t high school smart at 10 years old the way he was, but all I could think about was how awesome it would be to outsmart all of the older kids that picked on me for being so little. T.J. had a super-hip older sister named Yvette who was a staunch feminist and loved the fine arts. I saw a lot of myself in Yvette, even at a young age. T.J.’s older brother Marcus was the big man on campus, and I idolized how cool he was. The patriarch of the family was Floyd Henderson, the most caring father on TV (next to Danny Tanner of Full House), but was way, way cooler than Danny Tanner could ever hope to be.

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One of the biggest criticsms people seem to give Smart Guy, is that it’s “racist” against white people. First of all, “reverse racism” doesn’t exist, so I’m not going to even go into that argument. However, critics tend to site Marcus and Mo’s (Marcus’ best friend) white pal Mackey to be one of the major reasons the show is “racist.” Mackey is one of the few major white characters, and he’s a giant doofus. He consistently tries to “fit in” with Marcus and Mo, usually to no avail, and had a tendency to respond to his failures with, “It’s because I’m white, isn’t it?” The entire cast would nod their head in agreement and the canned laughter would play. Smart Guy isn’t racist, but it wasn’t afraid to race-bend a “token” character usually reserved for a Black man on a sitcom, and instead attach the attributes to a white character. The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason Smart Guy comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.

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Smart Guy definitely fell into the “Huxtable Effect” of making Black families palatable for white audiences at times, but it was never afraid to point out the indifferences and injustices Black families face on a day to day basis compared to white folks. It was a safe and “beginner’s guide to systematic racism” for white audiences. For example, in the episode “Working Guy,” T.J. gets a job working on (at the time) a brand new product called a DVD. As expected, Marcus is invading T.J.’s new gig and T.J. is left to explain to his coworker (an old white guy) to ignore Marcus, because he’s just T.J.’s brother.

“Oh, I get it – it’s a Black thing,” the guy exclaims. He raises his fist. “Righteous!”

“No, he’s my actual brother,” T.J. explains. “Same house, same parents… similar genetic coding.”

This is a common situation of a white person trying to relate to a Black person with limited knowledge of their culture, as well as the ever-popular trope of an older person trying to interact (and failing) with a younger member of society. However, Smart Guy’s influence is something far more important than allowing black families to be seen as something other than token.

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Unlike many sitcoms, Smart Guy focused on a single-parent household. In particular, Smart Guy focused on a household headed by a single, Black father. For the last two decades, the media has tried to paint Black fathers as absent, neglectful, and violent. Smart Guy showed a Black father not only successfully raising three children on his own, but also managing to keep the needs of his wildly different children in check. We all know the importance of representation, but the fact Smart Guy was picked up by The Disney Channel after its WB cancellation is absolutely vital to its existence. This means that Smart Guy was thrown onto one of the most popular and wildly accessed channels for children at the peak of its popularity. The people who grew up watching Smart Guy on their televisions as children are the same people who are now of voting age.

Smart Guy was also a little bit ballsier compared to shows like The Cosby Show. T.J. was a child of the new millennium, and the show wasn’t afraid to explore things like internet predators, systematic racism (like shoplifting accusations), and pre-teen sexual awakenings. At only 51 episodes, Smart Guy covered more topical situations than just about every other show on television at the time.

The ever popular statement of “racism isn’t something you’re born with; it’s something you’re taught” rings especially true for the audiences that grew up watching Smart Guy. By allowing children to see a Black family as something other than what Fox News wants to make them out to be, it gives children a starting point to develop their own beliefs and understanding of families that may look a little different from their own.

 


BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

Normalizing the Black Family

When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”

This guest post by Atima Omara appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.

In 12 Years of Slave, the theme of family is a tie that binds throughout the story. While the film depicts the life of Solomon Northrup, a freeman captured and sold into slavery, and his struggle to get back to his life and his family. 12 Years also reflects the lives of other slaves he meets who too are separated from their families. 12 Years is very tightly focused on the systematic dehumanization of Black people in the American South during slavery. This film defines the subhuman view of the Black family in the antebellum South that remained pervasive post the Civil War and into the 20th Century where its effects have filtered into many films and TV shows.

12 Years A Slave is an autobiographical account told from the perspective of Solomon Northrup, after his capture into slavery. While sitting in his first prison, awaiting to be moved into the South, Solomon meets another slave, Eliza, who was essentially treated as a wife by her previous slave owner with whom she also has two children. After his death, Eliza and her two children are sold away and it is there, awaiting the auction block, she meets Solomon. When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”

TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE

 

Director Steve McQueen beautifully wove in the humanity of Northrup and the other slaves, which made their enslavement that much more heart-wrenching. When Eliza still sobs days later on the Ford plantation because she misses her children, Solomon tries to silence her. She chides him, “Have you stopped crying for YOUR children?!” He retorts, “They are as my flesh…..I survive…I will keep myself hardy until freedom is opportune.” And Solomon does, ingratiating himself to his Master, William Ford, for his work, he receives a violin in which he engraves the name of his wife and children. They are never far from his mind as he tries to desperately find ways to become a freeman again.

Eventually, because Eliza’s crying becomes to annoying to Mistress Ford, she is removed from the plantation. Mistress Ford’s dismissive comments and subsequent removal of Eliza from the plantation is reflective of the antebellum’s American South’s view of the Black person and the view of their family. There was the economic and biblical justifications for slavery, but eventually enslaving other human beings birthed an American ideology of race inferiority.  Nineteenth century US Senator John C. Calhoun famously said, “Never before has the Black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”

In the minds of white slave owners and their supporters, slavery was a favor to Black people, who could not have lives of their own or feel loss or pain. This ideology is understandable when you consider the horror of what they were justifying. To acknowledge the humanity of Black people would have forced one to acknowledge that slavery was wrong.

Through the evolution of American film and later television, we see the variations of this view that the white slavers have of their Black slaves filter into the lens of white directors, producers, and writers of films and TV shows featuring Black people and their families.

The film that has the distinction of being the first 12-reel full motion picture film in America is D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915. Commercially successful, the film was controversial due to its portrayal of Black men as unintelligent, barely human and sexually aggressive. The first talking motion picture in 1929 was Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, where Jolson performed as a white actor in Black face, recalling the minstrelsy

With those promising precursors films, films in the 1930s hardly shifted. With Gone with the Wind or The Littlest Rebel, audiences never knew the stories of the Black slaves who were supporting characters to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara or Shirley Temple’s little Virginia Carey. Scarlett’s Mammy (played by Hattie McDaniel) we know nothing about, whether she had husband, children, or siblings. Nor do we know much of Virgie’s Uncle Bill (Bill Robinson). Because Mammy and Uncle Billy do not need a family, because their duty is to serve their white families.

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From the 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” these images of Black people and their families improve barely, especially when theaters refuse to show films with prominent Black leads. Look at the 1950s interpretation of Imitation of Life with actresses Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. At first glance, it is a story of two single women raising their daughters together. Lana Turner’s Lora is a struggling young actress with a daughter who befriends Sarah, the daughter of Juanita Moore’s Annie, who is a homeless Black widow. Because of the girls’ friendship, the women move in together. While you do see the humanity of Annie and the love she has for her daughter Sarah, you realize you don’t see much of Annie’s life outside of that. Annie becomes a maid to Lora and her daughter and is a momma to Sarah. Like Mammy or Uncle Bill, we know little of Annie’s friends, if she ever finds love again, in comparison we do see the love life of Lora’s, her friends, and her career become successful.

The height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the conscience shift of the country raised awareness as to the plight and actual humanity of the Black American. With that it brought in some changes and new opportunities for Black characters in film. Actors like Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, and others challenged the perception of the Black experience in film. In 1961, Black playwright Lorrain Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, about a young Black man (Sidney Poitier) trying to find a better life for his family became a film. Behind the scenes it was a play that almost never happened, because it was a predominantly African American cast it took a long time to secure funding for its debut. And even with its final success on Broadway there was much argument between critics who were primarily white as to whether the experience was “universal” or particular to African Americans.

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While the movie industry addressed race glacially, television as a newer medium moved at a faster pace in providing more opportunities for Black family portrayal. In 1968, CBS debuted Julia, with Black actress Diahann Carroll as its lead. It was the first show to depict a Black woman in the lead of a show that was a non-stereotypical role. Julia was a single mother and nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam. Today, it’s considered “groundbreaking.” Then, critics (again mostly white) derided it for not being “realistic.” Used to seeing nothing but Black poverty on the news, critics held Julia up to that as the standard for Black American life. The Saturday Review’s Robert Lewis Shayon wrote that Julia’s “plush, suburban setting” was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.” Other critics implied the show was a “cartoon.” Unsurprisingly, Ebony Magazine, whose magazine’s readership and staff are Black Americans, appreciated its significance in showing a “slice of Black America.”

The 1970s brought more Black family focused television; of significance was Good Times and The Jeffersons, both where productions from white liberal showrunner Norman Lear. The portrayals of the Black family vastly improved, if by virtue of the fact that they were getting time on major network television, some shows still would never entirely escape the stereotypical trope in the 1970s.

Good Times featured actors Esther Rolle and John Amos in the lead roles. They played Florida and James Evans, heads of a working class Black family who live in housing project in Chicago. Notably, African American writers conceived the idea and the initial script of the show Norman Lear picked up. Actors Rolle and Amos signed up for the project, interested in a regular series with a Black working class family at the center. Not too long into the show, one of the children of the Evans family, JJ Evans, became a popular character for his phrase “Dy-NO-mite” and his funny antics. As the show progressed, it increasingly focused on him and crazy antics, which recalled the days of Black minstrelsy shows in the early 20th century, where usually white actors in blackface exaggerated real-life Black circumstances in a cartoonish way and reinforced stereotypes of Black people. The Evans family, particularly JJ, became subject to the long line of stereotypical portrayal of African American family life much to the chagrin of actors Esther Rolle and John Amos. Behind the scenes Esther Rolle left the series in frustration and John Amos was fired.

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Lear’s The Jeffersons in comparison was an improvement upon Good Times, in that it showed a working class Black family, who made good and moved to the wealthy neighborhoods of New York. Even though the show took on political topics, it is notable for featuring more of the everyday life of this Black family with its colorful patriarch George Jefferson, played by Sherman Helmsley. The show enjoyed a successful 10-year run. In some ways, The Jeffersons was the grandfather of later Black family-centered shows like The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with Sherman Helmsley reprising his role as George Jefferson to appear on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

As the 1980s dawned there were more Black family-centered shows like 227 and Amen, but one would be remiss in not mentioning the The Cosby Show in the 1980s, which came out of already established comedian Bill Cosby’s stand up act about his family. The Huxtables were an upper-middle class Black family who lived in Brooklyn. Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) and Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad) were the parents to their five children. The show was revolutionary for the Black family because it was distinct in featuring the everyday occurrences, drama, and humor of family life. The Cosby Show occasionally dealt with serious issues like dyslexia or teen pregnancy, but it was not a show that focused on racial politics; indeed, that may have been the point. Some criticized the lack of discussion around race or racial politics in the series, fearing that white audiences who embraced the show would consider “racism” a thing of the past. What is certain is that The Cosby Show was viewed as seminal in Black family portrayal on television. When it ended in the early 1990s, there was an influx of Black family-centered comedies that were greenlighted for major network television like In Living Color, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family MattersRocHanging with Mr. CooperSister, Sister, and the list goes on. Notably many of these shows had African American creators or writers, which allowed for more Black family storytelling.

We have come a long way in the normalizing of the Black American family, but given the diversity of the Black American family experience, it is clear we still have a long way to go in Black family storytelling.

 


Atima Omara is a political strategist of 10 years who has served as staff on eight federal and local political campaigns and other progressive causes. Her writings focus on gender, race, and politics but also how gender and race are reflected in film and popular culture. In her sparetime, she reads, watches movies and documentaries, and attends film festivals when she can. You can find more of her writing at www.atima-omara.com. She tweets at @atima_omara.

Debunking the Missing Father Myth in ‘Happyness’

While many of the film’s events differ from Gardner’s memoir, the film compensates for this with its extremely authentic and loving portrait of a Black father/son relationship that is rarely seen in mainstream media.

This guest post by Rhianna Shaheen appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. 

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) is a film based on the true story of Chris Gardner, an on-and-off homeless father turned self-made millionaire. While many of the film’s events differ from Gardner’s memoir, the film compensates for this with its extremely authentic and loving portrait of a Black father/son relationship that is rarely seen in mainstream media.

In 1965, Senator Moynihan employed the stereotype of the absent Black father in a report on Black poverty in America called The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. In it, he blamed absent Black fathers for the socioeconomic inequalities faced by Black communities. Although his racist, sexist, and classist arguments have been debunked again and again, this myth is still just as pervasive in today’s media. On the news, film, and TV, Black men continue to be criticized and scrutinized for being violent, abusive, or missing. It is therefore very rare that blockbuster films like The Pursuit of Happyness are ever made.

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Set in San Francisco in 1981, we follow Chris Gardner (Will Smith) as he struggles to balance fatherhood with his contract business selling bone-density scanners. While he’s sold most of them the business no longer make ends meet for rent or daycare, creating added stress for his wife Linda (Thandie Newton) who works as a hotel maid. When Chris meets a stockbroker one day he decides to look into the job opportunities at Dean Witter.

While Chris sells scanners he must also jump through a ridiculous number of hoops just to impress the manager, Jay Twistle (Brian Howe). After personally delivering his resume, Chris only manages to get Jay’s undivided attention (and a job interview) when he solves a Rubik’s Cube in a short cab ride home. How messed up is that?

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In fact, his search for the American Dream becomes more and more like a nightmare: hippie girls steal his scanners, parking tickets get him arrested, the IRS seizes his earnings, and cars hit him in the street.

But these are the sacrifices Chris will make to protect his son’s happiness.

When he lands the internship at Dean Witter and finds out it’s unpaid, Linda reaches her breaking point. She leaves him and their 5-year-old son Christopher (Jaden Smith) for better opportunities in New York. It’s not an idealized fatherhood, but his actions are always validated in the film, no matter how drastic. While Chris may not be able to provide financially for his son, he is able to give him the emotional support that he needs.

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One of my favorite scenes (and the most heartbreaking) comes when Chris and his son find themselves homeless, forced to sleep on the subway floor. It’s a traumatic experience. How does any parent even begin to explain that to their child? Instead, Chris turns the dirty subway into his son’s imaginative playground where dinosaurs roam and the restroom is their prehistoric cave.

Never revealing his circumstances to his colleagues, he continues to work tirelessly at his internship until one day they offer him the coveted full-time position. He has finally achieved happiness.

It’s a sympathetic portrayal of Black fatherhood that also demonstrates the severely limited life opportunities that poor Black people faced in the 80s and continue to face today. But does the film know that?

While Hollywood can sometimes surprise us with these positive representations, they never quite gauge the complexities of race and class in these narratives.

Chris is often the only Black man on screen, and in a room full of white corporate businessmen his Blackness is never acknowledged.

As Diane Shipley from Bitch Media writes:

“The movie shies away from any exploration of intersectionality and the fact that Gardner is black isn’t acknowledged (he’s much poorer than the Huxtables, but he lives in a similarly ‘post-racial’ world).”

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This isn’t too surprising when you consider that the real Chris Gardner blames “place-ism” rather than racism for his early hardships. In an interview he says, “He didn’t have a college degree or parents who were professionals. He didn’t play golf or have a network of well-to-do friends who could be prospective clients.” While all of this may be true, Happyness suggests that these were the only obstacles in his way.

Even producer and star Will Smith admits, “In this film, racism is conspicuously avoided.” It’s a conservative pursuit to happiness that feeds the harmful myth used by many GOPers that poor Black people don’t work as hard as white people. And if only they did then maybe they would be just like Chris Gardner and not unemployed, incarcerated, or uneducated at higher rates.

While Chris is poor, Black, and a good father, the film also does nothing to address the crippling socioeconomic disparities that affect other Black men like him. From the beginning, Chris says:

“I met my father for the first time when I was 28 years old. I made up my mind that when I had children, my children were going to know who their father was.”

Chris may debunk the missing father myth in his own individual story, but he does little to hold the system behind it accountable. According to Donna Peberdy’s Masculinity and Film Performance the film stresses:

“that the power of the individual is limited and that change is also necessary on a political level. […] Despite personal sacrifices, Chris ultimately relies on the brokerage firm to help him achieve the American Dream. Foregrounding individual responsibility can be seen as a political manoeuvre to take the emphasis away from government accountability.”

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This can be seen quite literally when the film diverts all social anxieties with a clip of President Reagan delivering bad news about the struggling economy.

Yes, this is a film for all audiences, but it was made especially accessible for white audiences. The first time I saw The Pursuit of Happyness I was 15 years old. I sat in a theater with a mostly white audience in a conservative military town. As a young white girl, I laughed, cried, cheered with the audience through my then “colorblind” lens.

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I remember the film’s marketing hook banking on Will Smith’s new persona as the “family man” and his real son Jaden Smith playing his movie son. Even in many of the interviews, Will stressed the Smith family values of “communication, education, and truth,” as if to sell the film on the authenticity of his own fatherhood.

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Another issue is the negative portrait of the mother (the film’s only female character). The mom has her shit together. When things get tough she provides for the family by pulling double shifts for four months. Chris, on the other hand, does not work overtime. Instead, he has invested all his life savings into the risky enterprise of overpriced bone-density scanners. When Linda leaves the picture, the filmmakers and Chris seem glad to be rid of her:

Chris: “Get the hell out of here. Christopher is staying with me.”

Linda: “You’re the one that dragged us down. You hear me?”

Chris: “You are so weak.

Linda: “No. I am not happy anymore. I’m just not happy!

Chris: “Go get happy, Linda! Just go get happy.”

I’m sorry, isn’t happiness what this whole film is about? Why must the Black mother be the villain? Why must one positive representation of Black fatherhood forgo that of the mother? And why on Earth would you make the white savior stockbroker more likable than her? Even when his son asks about his mother’s absence, Chris says, “mom left because of mom” omitting himself from any blame. I understand that the focus of this film is a father/son relationship, but a film should not need to reinforce the “patriarchal order of things” in order to achieve that.

While The Pursuit of Happyness is an extremely rare and accomplished narrative, it’s important not to overlook its flaws. Its powerful portrayal of a father/son relationship both on film and in life is extremely valuable in shaping future media. However, with Black films still struggling to break Hollywood barriers–both at the box office and the Oscars–it becomes imperative that we get these stories right, even if they aren’t deemed popular by the mainstream.

 


Rhianna Shaheen is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Fine Arts and Minor in Film Studies and Art History. Check her out on twitter!

 

‘Desmond’s’: Roots, Culture, and the Black U.K. Experience

What makes ‘Desmond’s’ unique is its layered and often nuanced portrayal of immigrant Afro-Europeans and their assimilating progeny that are more closely connected to their African roots than any African American TV show I’d ever seen. It also has a cross representation of class in Black British society by showing retired, working class, upper-middle class, college-educated, college-bound, and not college-bound Black people interacting together all the time. Not only are different classes intermingling, but there are also four series regulars who are white, and their whiteness is not the punchline of tired racial jokes.

Desmond's: DVD Collection Seasons1-4
Desmond’s: DVD Collection Seasons 1-4

 

Written by staff writer Lisa Bolekaja as part of our theme week on Black Families. 

The first Black family sitcom (with under-aged children) I ever saw on TV was Good Times. For the majority of Black Americans raised in the 70s, The Evans Family was supposedly America’s first real exposure to a Black nuclear family on television, albeit one in extreme poverty living in the projects. I distinctly remember my mother and step-father sitting down with me to watch people who looked like us eating grits, turnip greens, or ribs on an old second –hand kitchen table the way we ate our own regular southern foods. Black families were such a rarity on television that Good Times became event viewing–the original must-see-TV in my neighborhood. The Evans family wasn’t as rich as The Brady Bunch, but they did go through comedic shenanigans that were solved at the end of the episode.

At the time I wasn’t aware of the problems actors James Amos and Esther Rolle dealt with trying to focus more attention on the family and not the stereotyped antics of J.J. (White producers and white writers wanted to up the ante on the clownish, uneducated, slapstick behavior of J.J, who eventually became the main focus of the show.) Good Times still had a nostalgic place in my heart. I used to own a Jimmy Walker J.J. Evans doll where you pulled the string in his back, and the toy would yell “Dyn-o-mite!” back at you. Even today, if TV Land or Centric plays re-runs, I will stop and watch it. On the heels of Good Times, came What’s Happening? and of course, the 80s brought the NBC savior/juggernaut, The Cosby Show, the 90s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and in the new millennium, The Bernie Mac Show, Everybody Hates Chris, and now Black-ish.

But I’m going to write something that may hurt some Black Americans’ feelings.

The best Black Family sitcom in my non-humble opinion is a little-known gem from across the pond that debuted in 1989. A show about a Black British/West Indian family running a barbershop in Peckham, London, it was called Desmond’s (created by Trix Worrell) and you need to buy it on DVD and watch it right now.

Desmond’s on the surface looks like any early 90s family comedy that served up plenty of corny jokes, familiar plots we’ve seen in similar family shows, and raucous studio audience laughter. What makes Desmond’s unique is its layered and often nuanced portrayal of immigrant Afro-Europeans and their assimilating progeny that are more closely connected to their African roots than any African American TV show I’d ever seen. It also has a cross representation of class in Black British society by showing retired, working class, upper-middle class, college-educated, college-bound, and not college-bound Black people interacting together all the time. Not only are different classes intermingling, but there are also four series regulars who are white, and their whiteness is not the punchline of tired racial jokes.

 

West Indians and West Africans on the same show. Porkpie (Ram John Holder), Desmond (Norman Beaton) and Matthew (
West Indians and West Africans on the same show. Porkpie (Ram John Holder), Desmond (Norman Beaton) and Matthew (Gyearbuor Asante)

 

I was lucky to catch Desmond’s in the early 90s when Black Entertainment Television (BET) started airing re-runs in the states. I was cooking a box of mac ‘n cheese and flipping channels when I saw some Black actors I didn’t recognize. I had to turn the volume up to hear their voices because their patois sounded like the Jamaican folks I partied with at my local reggae dancehall. I watched every single episode BET aired.

Desmond Ambrose (Norman Beaton) was a popular calypso singer back in his native Guyana who immigrated to England with his beloved wife, Shirley Ambrose (Carmen Munroe). Desmond’s plan was always to work and live in England and then retire back to his native Guyana and build his dream home. Once settled in Peckham, Desmond and Shirley had three socially mobile children who were part of a wave of first generation Guyanese/Black Brits.

 

Tony (Dominic Keating), Desmond Ambrose (Norman Beaton0 and Shirley Ambrose (Carmen Munroe)
Tony (Dominic Keating), Desmond Ambrose (Norman Beaton) and Shirley Ambrose (Carmen Munroe)

 

Shirley Ambrose has spent more than half her life in Peckham, and has no desire to return to Guyana. Her children are British, and she often fusses with Desmond about not sharing his dream of returning back home. Home is with her children in this new country. Their oldest son Michael (Geoff Francis) is a bank manager, a Buppie, and social climber. He fancies himself cultured, classy, and sometimes above his West Indian Roots. The middle child, Gloria (Kim Walker) is a college student, fashionista, and later in the series a professional writer who always calls Michael out on his pretentious behavior. Then there’s the youngest son Sean (Justin Pickett, my favorite), the first black teen geek and computer coder I’d ever seen on TV. What makes Sean special is that he is a computer whiz without being the cliché nerd, and he is a rapper and a D.J. He is smart, cool, and respectful of his parents and culture. Imagine Will Smith’s Fresh Prince combined with Carlton sans the corniness of both characters and you get an authentic Sean. So refreshing.

 

Sean (Justin Pickett) explaining coding to his father Desmond on those big ass old school desk tops in the 90's.
Sean (Justin Pickett) explaining coding to his father Desmond on those big ass old school desk tops in the 90s.

 

Desmond’s takes place inside a barbershop in a sometimes rough working-class neighborhood. The Ambrose family (without Michael) resides in an apartment above the shop, and three of their regular friends (and occasional customers) hang out there most of the day with them. One regular is Desmond’s Guyanese childhood friend and former band mate Porkpie (Ram John Holder).  Another regular is Lee (Robbie Gee), a boxer and unofficial adopted son who often peddles goods inside and outside the shop. Still another drop-in is a West African from Gambia named Matthew (Gyearbuor Asante) who brings in his African culture and a grand sense of African pride. Matthew is also a university student who never seems to ever finish his studies, although he has been a student for many years. What I enjoy about Matthew is a new view of African characters. Often in Black American shows (especially the early TV shows in the 70s) African characters are made fun of, whether it is their names, food, or skin color. They are often depicted as being poor and overly grateful to be away from their homelands. Not Matthew. He has a superior air about him and comes from a wealthy family. He’s always chiding the West Indians that they need to respect their elder culture (Africa), while at the same time giving off the impression that he is delighted that West Indians have retained so many Africanisms in their own New World culture.

 

Matthew sharing an old African saying with Desmond, Shirley and Sean.
Matthew sharing an old African saying with Desmond, Shirley and Sean.

 

Desmond’s allowed me a peek into the world of my Black cultural cousins who wound up in England instead of the States. I learned West Indian history, I saw how Blacks over there also code-switched their language when they spoke among themselves and among outsiders. One minute the family would speak British Standard Vernacular English, and the next minute, flip into Guyanese patois, or even Black British Rude Boy Slang. This code-switching reminded me of my own people in the States where many of us speak Standard American English at work, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) at home or among friends, and can also slip into Southern Creole languages like Gullah (Geechee), or New Orleans Creole.

While Desmond’s was re-running in America, I was listening to a lot of British neo-soul music like Soul II Soul, Sade, Loose Ends, Tricky, Omar, The Young Disciples, and especially the songs of Caron Wheeler the singer whose voice put Soul II Soul’s sound on the map. Listening to Caron Wheeler’s album U.K. Blak, which was the title track, I was given a mini-history of how so many new West Indian immigrants landed in English ports. Caron Wheeler sang:

Many moons ago
We were told the streets were paved with gold
So our people came by air and sea
To earn a money they could keep
Then fly back home
Sadly this never came to be
When we learned we had just been invited
To clean up after the war
Back in ’49 never intended to stay here
Who could afford to leave these shores

UK Blak, ending the silence now
UK Blak, letting you know that we’re about

 

The opening credit sequence of Desmond’s shows actual black and white film footage of Blacks from the Caribbean on large British ships sailing into English ports after WWII. I watched Desmond’s, listened to Caron Wheeler sing some history to me, and felt an immediate connection to the characters on the show. I love Desmond’s more than most popular Black American shows I grew up with. It tells me more about my own history and roots from the viewpoint of my figurative cousins across the big water. Think about that for a minute. Every African American from enslaved America was merely one random port stop from being British, Brazilian, a Caribbean Islander, or a North American. Like Desmond’s people, African Americans migrated too, going North and West within America, leaving family back home in the deep south. Like Desmond’s people, we have strong roots in the south that some of us want to cut off and forget, and some of us have actually returned to retire there. A reverse migration. A returning to the old culture that sustained so many of us in the dark days from the Civil Rights struggles and back beyond that.

The younger siblings, Gloria and Sean, showed me that there was a cultural exchange of Black music and styles from the U.S. From the posters on their bedroom walls of Ice Cube, The Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff, Whitney Houston, and mentions of Michael and Janet Jackson, to the Malcolm X hats and T-Shirts that marked the debut of Spike Lee’s X. Rap music mixed into the ragamuffin sounds of Black England. The cultural cousins have been keeping in touch. As young Blacks in the States were calling out sexism and homophobia in rap culture, an episode of Desmond’s demonstrated that it was an issue in British rap too. Sean has to push back on his best friend Spider for selling rap/dancehall mash-up music that is sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic, making Sean’s openly gay university buddy Bernie feel uncomfortable around the school. Sean demands a safer space for his gay and female friends, even if it means cutting Spider out of his inner circle.

 

Gloria (Kim Walker) and Sean listen to their father impart West Indian wisdom to their Bicultural upbringing.
Gloria (Kim Walker) and Sean listen to their father impart West Indian wisdom to their Bicultural upbringing.

 

The show itself is available for purchase on DVD, but for only Seasons 1-4. A few years ago I was hunting for any copies of the series last two seasons. Luckily, I found Seasons 5 and 6 on YouTube. Desmond’s was a show that could’ve gone on for at least three more seasons. Unfortunately, the star of the show, Norman Beaton, died on a trip to visit his family in Guyana. There was an attempt to keep a part of the Desmond’s legacy alive with a spin-off series called  Porkpie with Ram John Holder, but it was short-lived, lasting only two seasons.

 

Actor Norman Beaton (Desmond Ambrose) passed away after Season 6.
Actor Norman Beaton (Desmond Ambrose) passed away after Season 6.

 

Ram John Holder was given his own spin-off series called "Porkpie"
Ram John Holder was given his own spin-off series called “Porkpie”

 

Just to entice any potential new fans, you will spot some familiar faces in some of the episodes. The very cute white barber/ stylist Tony was played by Dominic Keating who later went on to star on the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise.

A brother-in-law of Gambian forever-student Matthew was played by Joseph Marcell, who later gained American fame playing Geoffrey the butler on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And for some real fun, if you watch an early episode called Veronica, you will see the child actress Amma Assante who grew up to direct the phenomenal movie Belle from last year.

Bet you didn't know Amma Asante, director of "Belle" was a child actress who appeared on "Desmond's"
Bet you didn’t know Amma Asante, director of Belle, was a child actress who appeared on Desmond’s

 

Do yourself a favor. Come ‘round the shop and listen to some Soca. There will be tea and toast and good times. I promise.

 

Tea, toast, and good times with the Ambrose clan and their extended family.
Tea, toast, and good times with the Ambrose clan and their extended family.

 

 

‘Killer of Sheep’ A Slice of Life of Watts in the ’70s

The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”

KillerOfSheepCar

Written by staff writer Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Black Families. 

When I was a kid in the ’70s, Happy Days, which took place in ’50s, was one of the most popular shows on TV; my sixth-grade teacher showed daytime reruns to the entire class during lunch as a method of crowd control. My mother, who had grown up during the 1940s and ’50s told me, “The ’50s weren’t really like that.” I think of her whenever I see films (like the execrable Inherent Vice) that take place during the time I grew up. The differences between the ’70s and now are deeper than just a matter of hairstyles, fashion, and phones.

We can see that difference clearly, and beautifully, in Black writer-director Charles Burnett’s haunting first film, Killer of Sheep, shot on weekends in the late ’70s in the Watts section of Los Angeles (the cinematography, which features painterly black and white images, is also by Burnett). More than once we see kids (with no adults around; most kids in those days–including those in the suburban, mostly white neighborhoods where I grew up–were “free-range kids”) playing in groups in dusty, hazardous-looking outdoor spaces which reminded me of the bombed out ruins the London boys of the WWII-set Hope and Glory play in, right down to one boy using a tool to make a dangerous item go “bang”–in Glory, it’s a hammer and nail to a stray bullet. In Sheep, one young boy uses a plumber’s wrench to bang at the strip for a toy cap gun to set off its small traces of explosive material. The ruins in London were because of enemy bombing. In Watts they might have been a vestige of riots in the 1960s or just a sign of many cities’ general neglect of their Black neighborhoods. But the children do have the run of the place; the film captures an era before gun and police violence made the streets fatal for many of them. When one boy tells another he’s going home to get his BB gun, I couldn’t help thinking of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who, a few months ago, police shot and killed in a playground just for carrying the same item.

The neighborhood’s busted-up fences, dilapidated cars, and a garage with a big enough hole in the door that children slip easily in and out through it seem to have etched themselves into the careworn features of the title character, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders, a familiar face from small and “guest-star” roles on ’70s and ’80s television). One woman tells him he’d be handsome if he smiled once in a while.

Stan works at a slaughterhouse (we see the animals first alive then killed, skinned and decapitated on the assembly line) and lives in a small one-story house (decades before the internet chic of “tiny houses“) with his wife and two children. We see that the family doesn’t have much, but like a lot of other low-income people, Stan points to others who are worse off. He tells an acquaintance, “Man, I ain’t poor. I give away things to the Salvation Army. You can’t give away nothing to the Salvation Army if you’re poor.”

KillerOfSheepDogHead
Stan’s daughter (Angela Burnett) and a friend

 

Stan has to have a long discussion with a man and his array of family members to get a car motor for the amount of money he can afford. He and his friend painstakingly carry this heavy, unwieldy conglomeration of metal (the muscles in the arms and chests of the actors, when most people didn’t go to the gym, shows evidence of the hard, physical labor many Black men did for work at the time) down a couple of flights of stairs, resting more than once along the way and hoist it into the back of his friend’s pickup truck, which injures the friend’s finger. Stan asks, more than once, if they can push the motor all the way toward the cab but his friend says it will be fine where it is. When his friend starts driving the motor immediately falls into the street, sliding downhill a little. They both agree it’s ruined, so they drive away, leaving the motor where it fell.

Stan has a beautiful wife (Kaycee Moore who would later appear in Daughters of the Dust) who cares for and loves him, but she can’t make him forget his troubles. He dances with her to Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth” (“What good is love/ Mmmmmmmm/ That no one shares”), but is too melancholy to have sex with her. She’s jealous as she watches him freely accept affection from their young daughter (Angela Burnett) in a way that he won’t with her. The audience understands that with the daughter the pressure’s off, but his wife cries as she watches the two of them.

Stan yells at his son (Jack Drummond) for being “country” when the son asks his Mom for money, specifically because he calls her “madea” (a form of address for mother figures Tyler Perry did not invent). The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”

KILLER OF SHEEP (1977)
Kids leap across the gap between building roofs

 

No director has captured as well as Burnett does here the dynamics of children (of any race) at play. Stan’s daughter, for no particular reason, wears a cartoon dog mask as she stands in the house and goes outside (the way one of my best friends when we were about her age used to wear a long, blonde wig). In one moment, among a group of boys, a pretend fight turns into real one in which someone gets hurt. Kids leap back and forth between two low buildings about six feet apart in a way parents (and directors) would never, ever let happen now. We see children try to advance in the pecking order and find themselves literally beaten down afterward. A young boy on a bike tells two older girls doing The Bump on a street to get out of his way, but the two girls and their friends gang up on him until he runs away, leaving his bike behind.

One of the scenes most evocative of the ’70s I knew features Stan’s daughter playing on a cluttered floor with her (white) baby doll as she sings along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons” on the radio, making up her own nonsense lyrics to replace the more sexually suggestive ones of the song (as kids today do with hip-hop lyrics). Filmmakers so rarely just hold back and let us see how little girls play, especially when they are by themselves. And this scene with different music and maybe a different doll (for me it was Barbie or Dawn dolls) could have come from the lives of young girls through the ages.

As in real life, the film has neither a happy ending nor a tragic one. A day at the racetrack is derailed by a flat tire. Stan goes in for another shift at the slaughterhouse. We again see the living sheep and the assembly line. As we hear “This Bitter Earth” once more, I burst into tears.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nXw-8MXhVE” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

The Popes and the White Patriarchy in Shonda Rhimes’ ‘Scandal’

While the show is not overt, at its core the story is about race and gender relations. Race- and gender-specific language is often omitted from the dialogue, yet the meaning is there. Rhimes takes the White patriarchy of America and individualizes its contributors so that neither (most of) the characters nor the audience realizes that they are contributing to harmful White patriarchal norms and internalizing them until the rare moments when they take a step back from the action.

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This guest post by Jackson Adler previously appeared at his blog, The Windowsill, and appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. Cross-posted with permission.

Shonda Rhimes’ TV series Scandal is a political thriller about “fixer” Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington), who gets scandals in Washington, DC “handled.” All of the characters in the show have terrible flaws, do terrible things, question what is right, and whether the ends truly do justify the means. While the show is not overt, at its core the story is about race and gender relations. Race- and gender-specific language is often omitted from the dialogue, yet the meaning is there. Rhimes takes the white patriarchy of America and individualizes its contributors so that neither (most of) the characters nor the audience realizes that they are contributing to harmful white patriarchal norms and internalizing them until the rare moments when they take a step back from the action. Some of the characters claim to be colorblind, while others experience the effects of race in their everyday lives the way Black families across the country experience it.

Neither Olivia, nor her parents, nor the people she loves are free from this. The central relationship of the show is between Olivia Pope and U.S. President Fitzgerald (Fitz) Grant, with whom she has an ongoing affair. When Olivia, whose influence and position as a powerful African-American woman has often been challenged, confronts him about whether or not he is using her and in a position to control her (“I’m feeling very Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemmings about this”), he skeptically responds, “You’re playing the race card on the fact that I’m in love with you?” and says that a comment like that “belittle(s)” their relationship and is “insulting and beneath [her].” “We’re in this together,” he says. However, he is in a more powerful position than she is, and he uses it. When he wants to speak with her and she doesn’t want to see him, he sends a private jet and secret service to collect her and bring her to him. He seems to claim to be colorblind in how he sees their relationship, and that he thinks of himself as just “a man,” but in other scenes proclaims himself as “the Leader of the Free World” in order to privately intimidate others and get his way. He says he would “give up” his position and influence to prove his love for her and start their life together, but each time it comes down to it, he chooses power – he chooses to be president instead of a loving and loyal husband to her.

Rowan (Joe Morton) confronts Olivia (Kerry Washington)
Rowan (Joe Morton) confronts Olivia (Kerry Washington)

 

Olivia’s father, Rowan, is often the one to point out these problems in their relationship. Rowan calls Fitz a “spoiled, entitled, ungrateful little brat,” to his face, and says that he is not “a man” but “a boy.” Rowan reminds Olivia that “[white] power got [Fitz] elected” in the first place, and that Fitz will always choose his white male power over her well-being. Fitz’s words and actions are highly reminiscent of white #AllLivesMatter hashtaggers who are stubbornly ignorant about the dangers of being Black in America, and of members of the GOP who say that Obama supporters use “the race card” (thereby attempting to silence the argument) when they treat Obama worse compared to how they would treat a white president. Olivia’s parents call out Fitz’s behavior, but while Rowan mostly verbally attacks it, her mother Maya physically attacks it.

Maya Lewis (Khandi Alexander)
Maya Lewis (Khandi Alexander)

 

Olivia’s father, Rowan Pope, achieved a powerful position in the government as Command of a CIA subdivision called B613, through sheer ruthlessness and brain power. Olivia calls her father and his position “the thing that goes bump in the night” – he is someone who does all the behind the scenes dirty work (including assassinations) for the government. He was the first in his family to go to college, and got his daughter into “the best schools” through his own hard work. He regretted not spending more quality time with her when she was younger, but – in Rhimes’ riff on the narrative of the absent Black father – he was not very present in her life because he was so protective of her. He kept her from seeing the terrible things he did as a part of his work and his attempts to gain influence, and ended up sending her to the same boarding schools as “the children of kings” because of it. One of the main reasons Olivia achieved her powerful place in DC is because of him, and he never lets her forget it. While Rowan technically works for the government, unseen but literally calling shots, Olivia’s mother, Maya Lewis, is a terrorist mercenary whose main goal is to take out the patriarchy/white male presidency of the United States. While Rowan pushed Olivia to participate in/assimilate into the government/patriarchy in order to further herself and gain influence of her own, Maya wishes Olivia was not involved in it at all, and says she wished “better for [her].” In one scene, Maya only refrains from blowing up the president and his family because Olivia puts herself in the way. Though Rowan and Maya have very different approaches in how to deal with the government/white patriarchy, they each remind their daughter that being colorblind will only lead to her getting hurt before she even realizes what has happened – “Whose victory do you think they will fight for [when it comes down to it]? Whose body do you think they will bury?”

Olivia’s relationship with her parents is beyond dysfunctional, but her parents still love her very much and make their love known. Rowan alternatively helps Fitz and her other love interest, Jake Ballard, due to Olivia’s affection for them. However, Olivia believes her parents are dangerous and cannot always trust them, let alone support them in their violence. When Olivia teams up with Fitz and Jake, two white and powerful men, to assassinate Rowan, he gives her the benefit of the doubt. He provides her with a gun and the chance to kill him in order to test her loyalty to family, as well as race. The gun turns out to be bullet-less, so Olivia does not succeed in killing Rowan. However, the pain in his face and entire body is evident in the scene as he says, “Are you kidding me?!” He is angry and deeply hurt that his own daughter would have killed him were the gun loaded. For the first time, he tells her “Now you’re on your own.” Olivia turns away from Black patriarchy, but her actions benefit white patriarchy.

Jake Ballard (Scott Foley), Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), and President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn)
Jake Ballard (Scott Foley), Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), and President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn)

 

Olivia is constantly asked to choose and re-choose sides, and race is not something she can or even is allowed to ignore in those decisions. Her father particularly challenges her to think in terms of race and familial loyalty in his numerous aggressive monologues. Meanwhile, her mother does what she wants regardless of what anyone thinks – even shooting and killing her white male lover when forced to choose him or give up her goals. Olivia despises the aggression of her parents, and loves the white men in her life who continually hurt and use her. Her dream is to go to Vermont with Fitz, settle down and “make jam” in their perfect home in a small town, but she has come to realize that her dream of Vermont might never become a reality. Fitz is drawn to the presidency/power, and Olivia is compelled to continue being the powerful “fixer” that she is – firmly establishing herself as an African-American woman in control of her own destiny. The Pope family loves each other, but their different approaches to white patriarchy turn them against each other. Whether or not Olivia will “fix” the white patriarchy, or continue to inadvertently contribute to and be crushed by it, remains to be seen – though I’m certainly hoping for and excited to see the manifestation of the former. Scandal challenges the members of its audience to think of institutionalized and internalized patriarchal norms, and how best to face them – and to what lengths they will go to do so.

 


Jackson Adler is a transmasculine aromantic bi/pansexual skinny white middle class dude with an Auditory Processing Disorder and a Weak Working Memory who enjoys cartoons, musical theatre, and vegan boba drinks. Jackson has a BA in Theater, and is a writer, activist, performer, director, teacher, and dramaturge.

‘Love & Basketball’: Girls Can Do Anything Boys Can Do

Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.

This guest post by Alize Emme appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. 

“I’m gonna be the first girl in the NBA,” proclaims a young Monica (Kyla Pratt). “No, I’m gonna be in the NBA,” replies a young Quincy (Glendonn Chatman). “You’re gonna be my cheerleader.” Breaking down the idea that women can’t play sports, can’t do the same things men can (like in that late 90’s commercial) is the overarching theme of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s debut feature film Love & Basketball (2000). This is the kind of movie you can watch, like I did as a teenager, and think, “what a nice love story” and it’s not really about anything more. Or, you can take a step back, and with a more seasoned eye, find a story that is rich with nuances about race, gender, and relationship roles and realize Prince-Bythewood’s artful commentary is so subtle you’ve spent the past 15 years just really enjoying this movie about a sports romance.

Love and basketball and so much else
Love and basketball and so much else

As a film that revolves around 12 years in the lives of two African-American basketball stars, Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) and their neighboring families, it’s not really about basketball. “It’s about emotion,” as Robin Roberts says during a brief cameo. Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.

This isn’t a Black film either. This is the Grey’s Anatomy approach to storytelling before Grey’s Anatomy existed. You look at these characters with a colorblind eye, only seeing their passion and emotion for basketball and each other. Race is directly mentioned a grand total of one time: at the start of the film when the two family’s matriarchs first meet. Nona McCall (Debbi Morgan), mother of Quincy, has just brought over a “freshly baked” cake for her new neighbors and Camille Wright (Alfre Woodard), mother of Monica, is happy to receive her. Nona explains their neighborhood at one time was “a little more mixed,” and jokes, “that was before the Black people down the street became the Black people next door, OK!” Camille, dutifully playing the role of good little domesticated housewife, looks at Nona with utter confusion – OK what? – before an embarrassed Nona quickly switches gears and that’s that.

Economic status is also never mentioned though it’s clear that both families are affluent. Both homes are spacious and have pools; the McCalls have a basketball court in the backyard. These are not struggling families; the passion Monica and Quincy share for the game comes from the heart, not the motivation to achieve a better life.

For the majority of the film, we see this very strained relationship between Monica and Camille. Monica is a basketball-obsessed, jersey wearing, make-up free tomboy whose mother “doesn’t know where [she] came from” because she “acts different” than her dress wearing, hair-styling sister and Camille, the classic country homemaker. Monica is our feminist heroine who personifies the idea that feminist women look down on women who choose more traditional roles. Camille has a longstanding belief that her daughter is disappointed in her “prissy” lifestyle, telling Monica she’s “a female superstar athlete whose mother is nothing more than a housewife.”

Misconstrued thinking creates nearly a decade of strife for these two women until it finally arises that Monica’s only shame for her mother lies in Camille’s inability to stand up for herself at home. Indeed, we see Camille falling deep into a submissive role with her husband. Camille has spent a lifetime silencing herself so her “husband can feel like a man.” The flip side of this coin is that Camille consciously put her life dreams on hold so she could “be there” for her family and create a loving home environment. But most importantly, we learn each woman was merely seeking the approval of the other. While Monica would rather “wear a jersey than an apron,” she wanted her mother’s approval both on and off the court.

Next-door to the Wrights, across a small grassy patch of lawn, resides the McCall family. Led by patriarch Zeke McCall (Dennis Haysbert) we find here another relationship being tested. From a young age Zeke has instilled in Quincy a resilience and confidence geared toward shaping a boy into a man he can be proud of one day. Quincy treats his father’s words as gospel and views him like “he [is] god.” Prince-Bythewood introduces this theme of “My Father Was a God” early and often throughout the film. Quincy wants to be just like his father, play for the same pro ball team, and wear the same number on his jersey and around his neck. But it is tantamount to Zeke that Quincy not be like him, to focus on school and not “care about the team.”

“'Can’t’ should never be in a man’s vocabulary.”
“’Can’t’ should never be in a man’s vocabulary.”

 

The crumbling of this immortal facade, the fall from grace, comes from the affirmation that all the years Zeke spent being the hyper-masculine bread winner, shutting out his wife, and running to business meeting after business meeting, were all actions masking a love affair which has now evolved into a paternity suit. What really gets to Quincy is that his father, his hero, addresses the accusation of infidelity head-on with a bold face lie. A lie their relationship will never recover from. The outcome is a harsh unveiling for the young phenom; he loses trust in all around him and no longer has an accurate idea of who his father was, and by extension, who he is himself. It’s clear to us that Zeke’s steadfast molding of Quincy was deeply rooted in the mentality that Zeke “just couldn’t” be that man himself. Quincy’s big revelation, and arguably a revelation many young men face, is that he can no longer try to be his father. He “needed ball when [he] was trying to be like [his] pop,” and now that the curtain has lifted, he must redefine himself on his own terms.

Young Monica and Quincy
Young Monica and Quincy

 

The relationship between Monica and Quincy, while romantic and passionate at times, is Prince-Bythewood’s way of knocking down long enduring stereotypes about women in sports. Monica challenges everything Quincy thinks he knows about girls and life in general. He has never met a girl who not only knows how to ball, but balls better than he does. Monica won’t ride on the back of his bike and would rather have Twinkies than his apology flowers.

Monica is a ball player, and she knows how to “show emotion” on the court. But she continuously finds that those around her view her passion as aggression. If Monica were a guy, she’d “get a pat on the ass,” but because she’s “a female” she gets told to “calm down and act like a lady.” There is a huge double standard exposed here. Not only are men, on and off the court, encouraged to be aggressors, they are rewarded for it. But when a woman does the same, she’s seen as this negative force, a beast that needs to be tamed, which those around Monica try to accomplish.

“I’ve loved you since I was 11, that shit won’t go away.”
“I’ve loved you since I was 11, that shit won’t go away.”

Despite Quincy being a serial offender of treating women like objects, he does share this very specific friendship, turned romance, with Monica. She gets him like no one else can. But the double standards in their relationship become clear when they arrive at USC to start their basketball careers. Quincy expects Monica to handle the spoils of his success, i.e., the friendly female fans eager to cheer him on, but he will not let her off the hook when she chooses a starting spot in her game versus “being there” for him. He’s already told her it doesn’t matter if she’s “not known as the first girl in the NBA,” she’ll “get more play” being “Quincy McCall’s girl anyway,” so it’s not surprising when he further diminishes her dreams by forcing her to make this decision.

Monica has spent her freshman year struggling on the court, she hasn’t had the “red carpet” treatment like Quincy, and when an opportunity finally does arise, her boyfriend guilt trips her. The idea that women must make this sacrifice between career and relationship is so antiquated but still so accurate. In a great twist of irony, Quincy, who has spent his childhood hearing Mom complain about how Dad doesn’t make time for her and always puts basketball first, accuses Monica of the same behavior and uses that as the catalyst in his hasty decision to break-up with her. Equally interesting, Monica at this point has fallen into a more submissive role in their relationship and blames herself for its demise, pleading, “Whatever I did, we can fix this.”

Lathan and Prince-Bythewood
Lathan and Prince-Bythewood

 

As someone who grew up going to sports camps, I heard girls comment daily that they wanted to play in the NBA. So, it was completely lost on me that Monica’s constant repetition of “I’m gonna be the first girl in the NBA,” was because there was no WNBA at the time. There is this prevailing idea throughout the film that these female players are good enough to be playing with their male counterparts, but instead are relegated overseas where, as Monica finds, it’s alienating, uninspiring, and also, unfair.

At the end of the film, Prince-Bythewood has shown us the struggles a Black woman faces when entering a highly competitive arena, the breakdown of a Black father/son relationship, a Black mother who has finally given herself a voice, and a Black relationship that through time and maturity is able to advance into its own sort of “Destiny,” all while never feeling like these are Black issues. But mostly she has taught us that women can do anything men can do. This could be any woman’s triumphant story. The film’s final scene shows Monica as the starting guard in the newly formed WNBA while Quincy and their young daughter clap for her on the sidelines, begging the question: Who’s your cheerleader now?

 


Alize Emme is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU and tweets at @alizeemme.

‘Chef!’: The Perfectly Imperfect Marital Eroticism of Janice and Gareth

Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.

Janice and Gareth's stressful ideal
Janice and Gareth’s stressful ideal

 

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Black Families.

If I had to point to one screen marriage that shaped my childhood ideas about marriage’s potential as positive partnership and intense intimacy, it would be Janice and Gareth Blackstock on the first two seasons of the British sitcom Chef!. The original writer, Peter Tilbury (working from star Lenny Henry’s concept), left after two seasons, and the final season’s crude divorce drama only highlights what made Tilbury’s vision so brilliant. In the final season, Janice is not a fully rounded partner, but an obstacle and challenge for Gareth. Where her constructive criticism was a form of protective support, it is now scornful nagging and abandonment. Her desire for a child is now her main motivation and source of conflict with Gareth. The third season’s Janice is the irritating, castrating and baby-crazy screen wife that viewers have seen a thousand times before; the contrast illustrates everything that was subtle and human about Janice’s original characterization.

From a racial perspective, Chef! might be compared to The Cosby Show, as portraying an exceptionally talented, sophisticated, and wealthy Black family. But where the Huxtables effortlessly “have it all,” somehow combining two careers and a large family with inhumanly minimal friction, the Blackstocks acknowledge that their lifestyle demands real sacrifice. Janice had to leave a flourishing career in the city to accompany Gareth, after his promotion to head chef of a prestigious, rural restaurant; she is outspokenly frustrated and eager to work again. When the restaurant has financial problems, the couple must sacrifice their house and car to buy it, admitting that the resulting tension “feels like you’ve eaten a lorry-load of All-Bran.” They are childless, and the conflict between their workaholic careerism and their hopes for children is openly explored. Each has a defensive facade of toughness and hyper-competence, but their scenes together explore the toll that this facade takes and the vulnerability it conceals. The sitcom’s central comedy is the farcical exaggeration of Gareth’s intimidating facade – “totally driven. We’re talking severe personality disorder here” – and its contrast with his inner softness. The perfection of Janice and Gareth’s marriage is not based on a perfection of their lives or personalities, but on their shared concept of marriage as a space of solidarity that accepts flaws and conflict.

That model of acceptant marriage is the bedrock of the show. In the opening credits, the lyrics “I’m the best, so do not test, the top of my profession” play over a montage of Gareth’s hyper-competence – working out and preparing the immaculate tools of his culinary trade – broken only when he briefly strokes the glossy picture of Janice that hangs in his locker, as though for reassurance. This image of her face comes before Gareth’s own face, underlining her importance to the show. Janice’s character can be read as rewriting the Sapphire stereotype, exploring the loving foundations of constructive criticism and the emotional intimacy of openly expressed frustration. Gareth’s farcical posturing can equally be read as parodying hypermasculine models of Black manhood, as much as bad-tempered celebrity chefs, while his sensitivity and capacity for nurture is his character’s true strength. The show’s unusually erotic portrait of monogamous marriage compares with the marital eroticism of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” which, along with the self-identified feminist’s proud adoption of Mrs. Carter as a title, radically rejects stereotypes of absent fathers in the Black community. John Legend’s “All of Me” video showcases similar aesthetics of marital eroticism, while that song’s description of loving “perfect imperfections” is a good summary of Janice and Gareth’s relationship. But reducing their relationship to a cultural trend of Black marital eroticism would be far too limiting: it is, quite simply, television’s most perfectly imperfect marriage.

Living the rustic, bourgeois drea
Living the rustic, bourgeois dream

 

As well as the strain of hyper-competence, Chef! confronts the cultural tensions in narratives of Black exceptionalism, mainly through Everton, Gareth’s never-really-liked-you-anyway-probably-flush-your-head-down-the-toilet-as-soon-as-look-at-you old schoolmate, who shares Gareth’s working class, British Caribbean background. Though Janice and Gareth help Everton, by offering him an unpaid apprenticeship in Gareth’s kitchen, it is clear that this is owing to the restaurant’s desperate finances, with Gareth particularly reluctant to take Everton on. On the surface, Everton fills the familiar role of goofy sidekick. Actually, although his unfamiliarity with restaurant etiquette causes some farce, he is capable and acquires skills steadily as the series progresses. The comical embarrassment that Everton causes Gareth is less a reflection of his foolishness than of his culture.

Gareth squirms at Everton’s pride in Caribbean cooking, having fully internalized cultural messages about the superior prestige of French haute cuisine and frequently boasting of his two Michelin stars. He automatically assumes that Everton is a “dope-head” (the marijuana belongs to a white co-worker) and fiercely attacks him for it, separating himself from that cultural stereotype with a barked “I hate dope-heads!” Gareth’s intense rejection of his own culture is rooted in personal conflict with his parents. Again, this tension is expressed in culinary terms: his mother’s neglect is illustrated by her incompetence as a chef, or perhaps by Gareth’s bitterness over that incompetence, while his father abandons the family for a short-order cook. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, young Gareth answered “an orphan.” Janice becomes insecure when Gareth shows admiration for the cooking skills of pretty, blonde sous-chef Lucinda, though he is otherwise “Mr. Monogamy.” Dominant stereotypes of Black life – absent fathers, neglectful mothers and attraction to blondes – are all slyly embodied by the show’s cooking metaphors, giving complicated symbolic resonance to Gareth’s determination to master society’s most prestigious cuisine.

Gareth’s broadly accented Caribbean father is introduced in the first season’s “Rice and Peas” finale, goading Gareth into trying to cook Caribbean food. The master chef is humbled by being forced to learn from Everton, highlighting his detachment from his roots, while Everton reveals a genius for Caribbean cookery that rivals Gareth’s own skill at haute cuisine. By the end of the second season, Everton has become a confident chef who combines Caribbean influences and haute cuisine, unapologetically owning his cultural identity but refusing to be limited by it. However, this is only made possible by the opportunity the Blackstocks have given him; their strained and self-conscious hyper-competence is a necessary first step to wider cultural change. Through Gareth’s complex relationship with Everton, Chef! foregrounds the tensions of so-called “choc ice” (British for “oreo”) cultural positions, without simplistically condemning them. The show’s Wikipedia entry commends Chef! as “a landmark programme in the sense that Henry plays a character who just happens to be black; the fact of his blackness does not limit the narrative or the audience the series reaches.” This misses the point. Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.

Janice Blackstock: wet, snotty bawler
Janice Blackstock: wet, snotty bawler

 

Back to Janice. Janice is all kinds of awesome as a character. A brilliant businesswoman, she is practical in all the ways the flamboyant artist, Gareth, is not, but shares his preoccupation with status. Janice is hilariously open about her materialism, yet prepared to sacrifice everything for Gareth if absolutely, absolutely necessary. Both Janice and Gareth are self-conscious social performers, but the basis of their relationship is their shared recognition of that performance’s artificiality, by no more than a quirk of a smile or a raised eyebrow. Their affinity, beautifully shown in their common flaws as much as in their virtues, creates the deep understanding between them. Janice is strong, but this doesn’t prevent her from admitting weakness: “I’m going to be brave in a minute. But, just right now, I’m going to break down completely, OK? I don’t mean a dignified tear or a trembling lip, I’m talking wet, snotty bawling!” With a sharp-tongued wit of her own, Janice may often play the foil to Gareth’s shrieking manbaby, but she is allowed to be his equal in comedy as well as in business. Gareth is also allowed to be Janice’s equal in emotional vulnerability: “I’m not going to cry because I’m a big boy now, but if I wasn’t, or if I was a ‘New Man,’ we could be talking wet, snotty bawling here.”

The Blackstocks’ relationship is physically intimate; Janice’s frustration is a running gag as Gareth’s workload leaves him too tired for sex, but the couple’s sex life remains “well above average.” Indeed, jokes about Janice’s sexual frustration only highlight how much more sex she’s depicted getting than other sitcom wives. It is less spectacular intimacies, however, that make the relationship convincing: Lenny Henry and Caroline Lee Johnson capture the subtleties of body language that convey affection and mutual reassurance in long-term relationships. Secure in this foundation of bodily affection, the Blackstocks are free to argue and vent their frustrations openly. Much of their relationship’s conflict springs from Janice’s sense of being neglected by her workaholic husband; that is, it is fundamentally rooted in the pair’s deep love for each other. When the final season’s (male) writers attempted to create drama by escalating the couple’s rows into full-blown separation, they could do so only at the expense of Janice’s character, flattening her into unsympathetic coldness. While this season shows how important Janice is to Gareth, through his devastation when she leaves and his desperation to win her back, that demonstration was unnecessary. Chef! wasn’t another clichéd show about a man who doesn’t appreciate what he has until it’s gone. The co-dependence of Janice and Gareth was fundamental to all their interactions.

Such co-dependence may be criticized. Janice would struggle to pass a Bechdel test, as she relates so exclusively to Gareth, though I see this as reflecting her rural isolation and the sacrifices she has made for Gareth’s career. Janice regularly complains about her loneliness, career frustrations and feelings of neglect; the insufficiency of a life that revolves only around her husband is core to her role. Such a portrait, of female frustration with the confines of a dependent role, can be as valuable as portraits of ideal female solidarity and independence. Janice needs a sense of vocation, which she gains by managing Gareth’s restaurant. Janice also needs friends and interests beyond her husband, which is explicitly addressed in the Tilbury-scripted episode Private Lives. In the finale of Chef!, Gareth’s underlying issues, his cultural identity crisis, and neglect of his private life, are tackled as he must sacrifice a trip to Paris to fly instead to Jamaica with Janice and work on their relationship. But the (so very male) writers of the final season are mistaken to interpret Janice’s relationship as the source of her frustrations. It is Janice’s life that is constricting, as she shares Gareth’s conflict between her materialist ambition and her emotional needs. But her marriage is a model of mutual support and open communication.

This is classic “patriarchy hurts men, too”: if a woman is understood only in relation to men, this means her male partner must be unfairly burdened with sole responsibility for her entire psychological well-being. The fact that the (oh so painfully male) writers could see no solution to Janice’s problems but a choice between divorce or more sex, with a romantic holiday to Jamaica thrown in, points to deeper problems in our concept of relationships and female roles. A chance for Gareth and Janice to grow as individuals, within the supportive framework of a relationship that needed no repair, would have been the more perfect ending for this perfectly imperfect marriage.


[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVBSKVsr0a0″]

Janice and Gareth: they’re the best, so do not test.

 


Brigit McCone has unrealistically gendered catering expectations, since her father was the chef at home. She writes short films, radio dramas and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and she now lives off baked potatoes.