Black Womanhood – Bitch Flicks

Written by Max Thornton.

“I never knew.” In a voice soft with wonder and respect, director Rex Miller expresses the sentiment with which he hopes audiences will respond to his biopic about Althea Gibson. “I never knew.”

Miller is likely to get his wish. Unless you’re a tennis buff, or (like me) you live around the corner from a statue of Althea, you may not ever have heard of her. The erroneous factoid still circulates that Arthur Ashe was the first African American to win a Grand Slam, erasing Althea’s legacy.

Statue of Althea Gibson in Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ. Image via Wikipedia. — Statue of Althea Gibson in Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ. Image via *Wikipedia*.

Tennis remains nearly the only sport I have voluntarily watched, but you don’t have to be any kind of sports watcher to be compelled and moved by Althea’s story. It is not (though Althea herself might have wished it to be so) merely a story of athletic excellence, but a tale of race, class, and gender, of how these factors are inextricable in the United States: a story of intersectionality.

The details of Gibson’s career – winning the French Open in 1956, with ten more Grand Slam titles to follow in the next two years – are only a Wikipedia search away. It’s both Althea’s complexities as a person and the broader social context of her life that the film portrays with grace and nuance.

As an African American woman, born in South Carolina in the 1920s, raised in Harlem, Althea might not have been expected to play tennis, of all sports. Then as now, tennis was the sport of the genteel, and it seems to have been very much the hobby of the aspirational classes. Althea began playing paddle tennis as part of the Police Athletic League, and was mentored by Black doctors who were also tennis enthusiasts.

At the time, the structures of the sport tended to exclude those who lacked an independent income, so Althea’s success was as much a matter of transcending economic and class barriers as race barriers (not, of course, that these have ever been fully separable in United States history). And yet, despite being hailed as the Jackie Robinson of tennis, she was extremely reluctant to be a civil rights figure. Althea Gibson was not particularly interested in politics; she was interested in playing excellent tennis.

Winning the hell out of Wimbledon, like a boss.

As a Black woman, of course, her life was inherently, unavoidably political. The Athena Film Festival screening of the film featured a discussion with the director, and the politics of Black womanhood were an integral part of this discussion. For much of the film, interviewees describe Althea’s toughness, her steely determination and hard edges born of a childhood playing hooky in the streets of Harlem; yet in all of the footage of Althea herself, she appears very poised, dignified, and ladylike. Black women in America are subject to stereotyping and exclusion from all sides, and have used their double and triple consciousness to make enormously important contributions to the pursuit of justice. Even a Black woman like Althea, who rejects the burden of explicitly fighting for racial and gender justice, carries within her the multiple consciousness necessary to survive in America.

A second aspect of discussion was the film’s silence regarding rumors around Althea’s sexuality. Miller explained that he consciously chose to exclude all mention of the rumors, because with so little information available (Gibson leaves, it seems, no relatives who might have been able to confirm or deny), he felt he would have been able to do little more than pander to sensationalism. Whether this was the appropriate decision or not is an open question. It is certain that Althea was married to a husband with whom she seems to have been very much in love, but it is not hard to read subtext into her close friendship with British tennis star Angela Buxton. Given that rumors did exist in Althea’s lifetime, their omission does leave a lacuna; and yet, given the meticulousness of the rest of the film and the dearth of certainty regarding Gibson’s sexuality, it is hard to fault Miller for shying away from such speculative territory.

Impoverished and forgotten, Althea Gibson planned to take her own life in the early 1990s. Her friend and tennis partner Angela Buxton galvanized the tennis world to provide financial support, and Althea lived another decade. Hopefully, this fine film will help to ensure that her legacy survives long into the future.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. Blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Anyone who may have seen interviews with Shonda Rhimes, read her forthright speech on diversity on television, or watched her hit TV show Scandal, would not recognize her in Alessandra Stanley’s description of an “angry black woman.”

It would be easy, actually, to become an “angry black woman” after reading Stanley’s New York Times review, but what such descriptors ultimately reveal is how certain critics fall back on readily available stereotypes and misrecognize the complexities of black womanhood.

Rhimes has rightly been lauded for bringing much nuance to her portrayals of black female characters in her television shows: the brilliant and assertive Dr. Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy, the ultra competent but vulnerable, wine-guzzling Olivia Pope on Scandal, and now the take-charge but flawed Annalise Keating in the new murder mystery, How to Get Away with Murder. Such characters have demonstrated a wide array of emotions on screen. Yet, Stanley reduced them all to “Angry Black Women.”

Chandra Wilson as Miranda Bailey on Grey's Anatomy — Chandra Wilson as Miranda Bailey on *Grey’s Anatomy*

In her clumsy attempts at praising Rhimes for enabling more complicated portrayals of black womanhood, Stanley revealed the often difficult task of transcending the White Gaze, which has a long history of racial distortion and misrecognition. “Confidence” or any behavior not characterized as servile from a black woman becomes “angry” and “scary.”

These distortions often manifest in other ways too, so that dark-skinned Viola Davis becomes “less classically beautiful” and “menacing” in her sexiness, and Nicole Beharie, who stars in the Fox TV show Sleepy Hollow, is reduced to a “sidekick.” Even when these women land leading roles in their respective TV shows, Stanley reduces their star power (through looks or character status). No wonder, then, when black women assert themselves, appear confident, or fail to merely be “of service,” they can only become the “Angry Black Woman.”

At best, the White Gaze can be challenged on Twitter (see: #lessclassicallybeautiful); at worst, it can get you killed (see: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin). And for black women, in particular, our complex experiences disappear in the crossroads of intersectional oppression. Where racism and sexism meet, we fall through the cracks.

Kerri Washington as Olivia Pope on Scandal — Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope on *Scandal*

This is why so many have been eagerly awaiting Shonda Rhimes’ latest drama to arrive at Shondaland. We know she will feature shows that reinforce black women’s humanity.

In a culture where Janay Rice‘s suffering at the hands of her husband, Ray Rice, was only believed once her privacy was breached by TMZ’s release of a video illustrating her husband’s violence—and not when earlier video showed him dragging her out of an elevator, which merely prompted conversations that she must have “deserved” his treatment (i.e. a black woman’s “anger” instigates domestic violence)—and in a society where Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw can have his bail reduced when he is accused of raping and sexually assaulting eight black women, the “Angry Black Woman” trope makes it difficult to view these women as “victims.”

And even when black women’s bodies become the site on which national outrage and public conversations emerge to address problems such as domestic and intimate partner violence, they are still excluded from the table, as occurred when the NFL’s attempts to form an advisement panel—in the wake of the Ray Rice scandal—failed to include women of color. If we are not readily recognized as “victims,” we are also not recognized as “experts” or sources of knowledge and wisdom. And when we complain of this unfair treatment, we once again become “Angry Black Women.”

Viola Davis as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder — Viola Davis as Annalise Keating on *How to Get Away with Murder*

Of course the media landscape does not have sole power to transform our society and change what ails us. However, media normalizes concepts of race and gender, and any portrayals that advance our humanity can help us unpack our assumptions and challenge the racialized and gendered gazes that we bring to such images.

Will we recognize complex characters when we see them? Or will we resort to convenient stereotypes, as Stanley did in her review? And I don’t wish to only single out this one New York Times writer. Recently, advertisements for Fox’s new TV show Red Band Society, featuring Octavia Spencer as Nurse Jackson, described her as a “scary bitch“; they were eventually pulled from Los Angeles public buses after complaints from community members. Obviously, this rush to stereotype manifests not only in the pages of a widely read newspaper.

We need more diverse stories and more complex characters and images of black womanhood in media. But more than that: We need viewers to push themselves to interpret what they see on screen beyond recognizable stereotypes.

Octavia Spencer in one of the "scary bitch" ads for Red Band Society — Octavia Spencer in one of the “scary bitch” ads for *Red Band Society*

Fortunately, Rhimes has led the way. It’s time the rest of us learn to complicate our views.

Janell Hobson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, and a frequent contributor to Ms.

Tag: Black Womanhood

Athena Film Festival Review: ‘Althea’

Angry or Complicated?: Misrecognizing Black Women