Colorism – Bitch Flicks

Colorism and Interracial Relationships in Film: ‘Belle,’ ‘The Wedding,’ & More

This guest post by Atima Omara appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Race, class, and love are at the center of Amma Assante’s beautifully made film Belle. It tells the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, the biracial daughter of Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman in the West Indies, and Sir John Lindsay, a British career naval officer who was stationed there. Unlike many children who were the product of a slave and a wealthy white man, Dido’s white father took her back to England to be raised with her wealthy white relatives. While set in England, the film is a poignant interpretation of interracial relationships in the 18th century and how color, particularly what shade of “black,” often factored into who you loved and found desirable, a dynamic that affects many portrayals of interracial relationships in film and television.

The unique life and story of Dido Elizabeth was discovered due to a portrait that hangs in Scone Palace that intrigued many, including Belle‘s British director of African descent, Amma Asante, who told NPR:

“You see a biracial girl, a woman of color, who’s painted slightly higher in the painting, depicted slightly higher than her white counterpart. She’s staring directly out at the painter, you know, with a very direct, confident eye. … So this painting flipped tradition and everything that the 18th century told us about portraiture.”

As in real life, Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) grows up best friends with her cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). When they reach their teen years, as is par for the course with any British film reflective of young women’s lives of the period, it’s time to find a husband. As such, they are introduced to the sons of a prominent family nearby, the James Ashford (Tom Felton) and Oliver Ashford (James Norton).

Oliver takes a fascination with Dido, to the chagrin of his brother James. “One does not make a wife of the the rare and exotic, Oliver. One samples it on the cotton fields of the Indies,” James says, yet Oliver dismisses his comments and pursues Dido anyway. But even Oliver’s professed love for Dido and his subsequent proposal are filled with racist undertones, commenting how lovely and intriguing she is in spite of her African heritage. Dido eventually refuses to marry Oliver when she is assaulted by his racist brother and becomes aware that James’ racist sentiments are shared by his mother; that she is only tolerated due to the sizable wealth she inherits from her now dead father.

What elevates Dido to a status where she is even pursued by white men of the British upper class is mostly her money. For example, her cousin, Elizabeth, while white, inherits less money and as a result, is viewed as a less attractive prospect for men of the English gentry looking to make a solid match. Oliver’s comments to Dido highlight that she is palatable due to her mixed heritage, a racial preference known as colorism, a prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group. If Dido had been as black as her mother, she would more than likely, no matter how wealthy, not have been a tenable mate for any member of the British upper class of her time.

The colorism Dido experiences is seen throughout different Western societies that had Black African enslavement as part of its world. Many stories of colorism also exist in American history and folklore and we see how it impacts romantic relationships and in American film and TV. For example, New Orleans hosted Quadroom Balls in the 19th century. The word “quadroon” refers to people of color with one white parent and one half-white parent. These balls encouraged multiracial women to form liaisons with a system of concubinage, known as plaçage, comprised of highly educated and socially refined women. They were unable to find Black men of their own social status, so they became the mistresses of white men.

The film The Courage to Love depicts a representation of this world. Vanessa Williams plays Henriette Delille, a historical multiracial woman of color expected to marry a wealthy white man as her mother had before her. These wealthy white men were attracted to quadroon women because they weren’t so obviously black and these women possessed the training and education to be partners to powerful white men. Some white men would slip away from the city’s balls for whites to attend these afterwards.

Like Oliver, these men of New Orleans who catered to the plaçage system exoticized women of color and by frequenting these balls and taking women of color as mistresses, cemented a colorism caste amongst the Black community that spread throughout the American South. It is important to note that not only did the plaçage system in New Orleans keep multiracial women a certain shade of “acceptable” black skin, but like Belle’s experience growing up with her white father’s noble family, African Americans who obviously were children of interracial relationships benefited financially, creating not only a caste system in the Black community based on the lightness of one’s skin but also on wealth.

These enclaves of lighter-skinned Black communities descended from interracial relationships have been shown in American film. Eve’s Bayou, written and directed by Kasi Lemmons (making her directorial debut), centered around a town in Louisiana’s Black community who claims descent from a French aristocrat and who founded the town of Eve’s Bayou. The residents are primarily lighter-skinned, mixed-raced people. The Batistes who are the center of that town are rather light-skinned with the exception of the father, played by Samuel L. Jackson.

In Harlem Renaissance writer’s Dorothy West’s book The Wedding, West writes about “The Oval,” an elite Black community that lives and summers on Martha’s Vineyard. While Eve’s Bayou was fictional, the Oval is an actual wealthy Black community. At the center of West’s novel adapted in to a film with the same name, a young Black woman named Shelby Coles (Halle Berry) and her fiancé, a young white man named Meade Howell (Eric Thal) come home to visit her family for the wedding in the summer of 1953. Shelby’s family is displeased that Meade is a financially strapped musician, but they are willing to make the most of it. Meade’s own family is displeased his fiancée and her family are Black, which further agitates Shelby’s family.

At the crux of it all are two issues: first, the Black community in which Shelby was raised, a community that is financially successful but primarily light-skinned, so much so, the Coles’ family maid comments “they are all high yellow up here.” Secondly, Shelby’s family questions her about whether this is the marriage she wants due to Meade’s family’s snub. The film centers around the present community reflected in interactions with neighbors and family and the past relationships of Shelby’s ancestors from both her parents and how they have impacted her family.

Shelby’s grandmother was a white Southern woman named Josephine (Margaret Welsh) who married an up and coming emancipated dark-skinned Black man, named Hannibal (Gabriel Casseus). Their daughter, Corinne (Lynn Whitfield), grows up emotionally traumatized from the fact she was never fully loved and accepted by her mother due to Corinne being part Black. Corinne’s emotional trauma is reinforced by her white Southern grandmother, Caroline (Shirley Knight), Josephine’s mother who always says to her great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, “Where is your sun bonnet?” — an item which protects their skin from getting darker. One imagines Caroline impressed upon Corinne, who she helped raise after Corinne’s parents died, the same colorist views.

The damage of this colorism wreaks havoc on Corinne’s emotional psyche, who gets an operation to stop herself from future pregnancies, worried that any future children will “look like her father” who was dark-skinned. Corinne’s two children feel its effects: Shelby’s sister Liz (Cynda Williams) is happily married to her doctor husband, Lincoln (Richard Brooks), however Lincoln is dark-skinned. It is clear when the audience is introduced to Liz and Lincoln something terrible happened between Corinne and her son-in-law; Lincoln refuses to attend Shelby’s wedding primarily because he does not want to deal with Corinne. When Liz begs him to come with her, Lincoln snidely says, “That’s right, you need me there to prove a point to your mother, that you are happily married and that your husband is not the barbarian she imagined…I will never set foot in that house. I wasn’t good enough for her then why should I be good enough for her now? I don’t see my skin getting any lighter.”

Perhaps Meade’s family’s snub, and her past mistakes allowed Corinne to be honest with Shelby telling her, “I know it’s harsh when I spoke about you being a stain on your in-laws’ sheets but it’s because I was a stain on my mother’s.” Corinne’s husband and Shelby’s father, Clark (Michael Warren) is affected by family expectations on race as well. Flashbacks show his young love for a dark-skinned Black woman, deemed not the proper image of a wife he needs as an up and coming Black doctor.

Much like Corinne’s parents, Clark’s parents also struggled with their relationship due to color. His father, Isaac Coles (Peter Francis James), a light-skinned man who was a successful doctor and his wife, Ellen Coles (Marianne Jean Baptiste) who is financially successful in her own right, is also dark-skinned. Ellen is also painfully aware of her darker complexion and that it could be a liability to her husband. As a result, Ellen often hides herself away. From his personal experiences, Shelby’s father Clark, worried that perhaps his daughter Shelby is feeling familial or Black society pressure her to marry someone like Meade. He asks her “who has she brought home” that isn’t white or light-skinned that were her dates. He urges her not to make the same mistakes he did.

There is an option for Shelby to marry an eligible Black man, Lute McNeil (Carl Lumbly), a charming newcomer to The Oval. While wealthy and successful, Lute is also a dark-skinned Black man. Shelby has a great relationship with Lute’s three children and despite her engagement, Lute persists in pursuing her and Shelby finds herself attracted to him. Shelby’s mother disapproves of Lute because of his dark skin and his new money. She tells him that despite his financial success, he will “never belong” to the Oval. In the end, Shelby chooses Meade — deciding that class and race are artificial constructs and that love only matters. While I agree with this contention of Shelby’s, one is left to wonder how much of this family baggage affected her in her choices of dating and love.

It is clear that in film and television, colorism still plays a role in relationships, whether interracial or non-interracial. People have criticized the many music videos of hip hop and R&B artists that feature light-skinned or ethnically ambiguous love interests. Hollywood also faces criticism as dark-skinned Black women are more regularly cast as asexual (desexualizing Black women, portraying them with no desires) and never able to find love.

We have come a long way in having honest conversations about this in film and television and even literature. Media has progressed in portraying women of color who are darker-skinned as desirable and sexy to Black and white people, such as Viola Davis’s portrayal of Annalise Keating on How To Get Away With Murder, where she has relationships with a white man, Black man, and a white woman. However, the fact that Davis’s character is still groundbreaking shows just how far we still have to go in representing all the hues of Black women without falling victim to colorism.

Atima Omara is a political strategist, writer, activist who has served as staff on eight federal and local political campaigns and worked for 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 spare time, she reads, watches movies and documentaries, and attends film festivals when she can. Read more of her feminist-friendly film, TV, and media critiques, plus other updates at her personal blog. You can follow her on Twitter.

‘Pinky’ and the Origins of Interracial Oscar-Bait

‘Pinky’ is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience.

This guest post by Hannah Graves appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Twentieth Century-Fox’s Pinky is far from the first Hollywood feature film that depicts an interracial relationship. Despite the evolution of various censorship codes that forbid depicting “miscegenation,” Hollywood has a rich history of mining the salacious or elicit potential from interracial pairing on screen, from Broken Blossoms to Duel in the Sun, Showboat to Imitation of Life. Yet, Pinky was quite distinct in tone from the films that came before it.

Produced by Fox’s studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, Pinky was part of a spate of post-war social problem films that earnestly sought to address topical issues. Studios promoted these films as evidence that their medium was maturing, littering their advertising with exaggerated claims about the power of their pictures. As one of Pinky’s screenwriters, Phil Dunne, wrote in a New York Times article, “What we say and do on the screen in productions of this sort can affect the happiness, the living conditions, even the physical safety of millions of our fellow citizens.” Pinky is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience. It is a tradition that informs films from A Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Monster’s Ball and the forthcoming Loving.

Pinky is about the identity crisis of Patricia “Pinky” Johnson (Jeanne Crain), a light-skinned woman of ambiguous mixed-race ancestry who has been ‘passing’ as white at her northern nursing school. Set in the late 1940s, the film opens on Pinky as she returns to her southern hometown and grandmother, Dicey (Ethel Walters), after feeling a marriage proposal from Tom (William Lundigan), a white Northern Doctor. Back in the South, Pinky reencounters the racism of her hometown and finds herself the victim of police scrutiny and sexual assault. She resolves to leave but finds herself reluctantly nursing a local white matriarch, Miss Em (Ethel Barrynore), who lives in the nearby planation house. Both Miss Em and Dicey challenge Pinky about her passing, arguing she is not being true to her authentic self. When Tom returns, Pinky informs him about her racial heritage and he reiterates his proposal, albeit implicitly on the condition they live away from both of their families and she continue to pass. Finding herself the sole inheritor of Miss Em’s vast estate after Miss Em dies, Pinky successfully fights for her right to the property in court. She decides to reject Tom’s proposal and converts the planation into a clinic for the local African American community where she resolves to live. An unequivocal hit, Pinky was Fox’s top-grossing film of 1949 and its three lead actresses all received Oscar nominations.

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Pinky. Mixed-race and racially ambiguous looking myself, I have always been fascinated by stories of racial passing. In the scheme of things, life turns out pretty good in Pinky, even if the film lacks nuance. Of course, colorism undergirds the film’s efforts to make its contemporary white audience relate to Pinky. Yes, Zanuck cast a white actress as Pinky rather than Fredi Washington or Lena Horne, rightly drawing criticism in the African American press. It is extremely unfortunate that a cranky white matriarch successfully instructs Pinky on how she should racially identity according to the “one drop” rule, a element even The New York Times recognised as paternalistic. And yes, I know, Pinky and Tom don’t end up together and their relationship is unable to thrive, presumably like the unaddressed interracial relationship that resulted in Pinky herself. However, unlike some of her tragic predecessors, Pinky doesn’t drown in a lake, fall off a building, or fall into prostitution because of a doomed romance. Instead, she gets to keep a large piece of property and embarks on a fulfilling career doing desperately needed work, even if the clinic gets Miss Em’s name on it. This is a big deal. It is also very different from Pinky’s fate in the film’s source material.

According to records held at the Library of Congress, and analysed in Thomas Cripp’s Making Movies Black, the NAACP was understandably nervous when they heard Zanuck wanted to adapt Cid Ricketts Sumner’s novel, Quality (1946), for the big screen. Serialised in the Ladies Home Journal, Quality was an offensively pro-segregationist novel with several racist stereotypes. Not least of which was Pinky who, in true tragic mulatto fashion, suffers Tom’s rejection immediately after he discovers her heritage. Things don’t get much better for Pinky from there; vengeful white locals burn down the property she inherits at the novel’s close. Perhaps this darker ending more accurately reflected the realities of race relations in the pre-Loving vs. Virginia South of 1949, but it wasn’t the story Fox wanted to tell about America (or release internationally) during the Cold War.

In their quest to fashion a more uplifting look at American race relations, Fox’s successive screenwriters tried to salvage the material, but often fell back on familiar tropes. Perhaps recognising the limited perspectives of his white male writing staff, or maybe just feeling increasingly under-pressure from those he consulted at the NAACP, Zanuck recruited a young actress, Jane White, to advise on the script. Jane was the daughter of Walter White, the Executive Secretary of the NAACP. A Smith graduate, Jane found herself in a difficult position in her pursuit of theatre work: too light-skinned in appearance for the limited roles for Black women while racist hiring practices exempted her from consideration for white roles. Stuck in this limbo, she accepted the trip out West to consult on the Fox lot.

Working closely with Pinky’s second screenwriter, Phil Dunne, Jane revealed herself whip-smart, opinionated, forthright and funny. I have never had as good a time in an archive as I did at USC reading her notes chiding her male colleagues about their story’s failings. More is the pity that Fox failed to take up all of her suggestions; we might have had something really special if they did. However, Jane was able to make her colleagues see the limitations of the interracial relationship. She argued that Tom should not reject Pinky, as he did in Quality, but rather declare his loyalty to her. In the film, Tom admits that Pinky’s race poses “important problems” but decides they should “face them like rational people.” He explains that as a doctor and a scientist he does not believe “in the mythology of superior and inferior races.” While Pinky is unable, eventually, to accept his condition that they move out West to start their life together, he is very different from the brute of the book. In turn, Jane advocated for additional dialogue that would clarify for the audience how, at the end of the film, Pinky would be fine without this relationship developing. As Jane explained, Pinky’s life had a more important purpose than to be Tom’s wife and this needed to shine through. Ideally, Jane hoped that a young eligible Black man could wait in the wings to round off the love story. However, the limitations of mid-century interracial romance on screen came full circle: audiences and censors would not accept a white actress and a Black man embracing on screen, even if the actress played an African American character. The idea was scrapped. Although eight years later audiences got that embrace in another Zanuck production, Island in the Sun.

Pinky’s love story may seem mild now, but it is worth remembering its initial context; even the kiss between the two white actors who played Pinky and Tom was too controversial in some southern cities, prompting censorship and cuts. Pinky may offer a fairly cowardly white lover and a failed interracial relationship, but Jane White transformed a tragic mulatto story into a film where a heroine parts from her lover without tears to find emotional satisfaction in her professional accomplishments. This may be too chaste and self-sacrificing but it was a markedly better ending for a woman who passed and fell in love with a white man than those that came before and it laid some of the groundwork for depictions of interracial relationships that followed. In the midst of our current inclusion crisis in Hollywood, Jane White’s work serves as a reminder of what can happen when you get a seat at the table. She is why, whatever we might think about Pinky in the final analysis, it is worth remembering.

Hannah Graves is completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Warwick. She is also the website editor and social media officer for the Women’s Film and Television History Network. You can find out more about her work here.

No Place For Us: Interracial Relationships in ‘West Side Story’

‘West Side Story’ could be read as a warning to Latinas: stay away from white men. If María listened to her older brother, obeying his wish to keep her obedient and virginal, María would be safe and free from grief. This notion is exceedingly disappointing, especially considering that there are not many Latina main characters in Hollywood movies.

This guest post written by Olivia Edmunds-Diez appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

I grew up watching mainstream movie musicals. From The Sound of Music to Grease, my five-year-old self’s dramatic play ranged from pretending to be a Nazi to swiveling my hips singing along to “Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” Oh, the joys of blissful ignorance. But the one movie musical I was not allowed to watch as a child was West Side Story. My mother always passed it off as “too sad and too violent.” As a stereotypical first born, I knew better than to question my mother’s infinite wisdom. It wasn’t until I turned fifteen that I finally sat down to watch West Side Story, and promptly cried through the entire second half, wailing about the deaths. My mother responded with a simple, “I told you so.”

Despite my strong emotional response, I would continue to watch West Side Story over the years. It quickly became one of my favorite musicals, and I would even see it on Broadway (with my mother!) when it was revived in 2009 with Lin Manuel-Miranda adding Spanish to both the book and lyrics. It is unsurprising that I would love this musical so much, for as a Latina theatre major, how could I resist the infectious score, vibrant costumes, and astounding choreography? But it wasn’t until college that I really started to look at the musical’s content, and quickly grew displeased with what I found. My favorite colorful musical about people who looked like me became a musical about racism, sexism, and colonialism.The love story between Tony and María, that I used to admire so, became depressing. After all, María’s life goes downhill once she meets Tony.

Colorism is very much alive in West Side Story, to the point that the film casts white actress Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican María. Heaven forbid that an actual Puerto Rican be cast! Granted, this casting choice was partly related to Hollywood wanting a big name to draw bigger box office numbers. But because this Romeo and Juliet interpretation features a white boy and a Puerto Rican girl, there is the chance that their mixed-race union could result in mixed-race children. The horror! To ease the minds of Hollywood’s target white audience, Wood was considered a great substitute to allow white audiences to delve safely into the Puerto Rican barrios. After all, María isn’t really Puerto Rican, she’s just a white girl with an on-again off-again Puerto Rican accent!

Of the two featured Puerto Rican women, María is the virgin trope to Anita’s whore trope. María’s virginity is emphasized to make her a safe choice for Tony, lest our white knight be swept into a ‘dirty’ Puerto Rican’s bed. One obvious manifestation of this is her white dress for the dance. Despite María’s wishes for a shorter red dress, like her role-model Anita, Anita ensures María’s virginity by keeping the dance dress white and at a ‘respectable’ length. Anita’s hard work pays off as the white knight Tony only has eyes for María, who visually stands apart from the crowd.

One alarming component to West Side Story is that María does not feel pretty until noticed by a white boy. This is unsurprising, given María’s wish to fit in with mainstream American culture. Living under her older brother’s protective gaze, María longs for independence. Much like Cinderella, all she really wants is a night off and a fancy dress. María is largely uninterested in boys, shunning her brother’s chosen mate for her, until she stumbles upon Tony at the dance. Suddenly, María’s independence flies out the window. Over the span of 72 hours, María gets ‘married’ in an adorable play-wedding that quickly turns serious, has sex for the first time, and becomes a widow.

Within West Side Story, everyone stands against María and Tony’s interracial relationship. Anita makes it clear that she thinks María is out of her mind, and Tony’s boss, Doc, tries to persuade Tony that his interracial relationship will never work. It is interesting that this is one clear distancing move from Romeo and Juliet, in which the Nurse and Friar Lawrence quickly come around to support the couple. But when race enters the picture, Anita, Doc, and the other characters cannot support María and Tony. In the song “Somewhere,” our main love duo sings about a magical place far away where they can be together. They plan to run away to this “Somewhere.” But it is clear by the end of the film that “Somewhere” does not exist, as María and Tony will never be free from racism.

West Side Story could be read as a warning to Latinas: stay away from white men. If María listened to her older brother, obeying his wish to keep her obedient and virginal, María would be safe and free from grief. This notion is exceedingly disappointing, especially considering that there are not many Latina main characters in Hollywood movies. West Side Story came out in 1961, and remains celebrated and remembered to this day. The take-away, then, for Latinas, is to heed our families’ advice and stay within our culture. Maybe someday, interracial stigma will dissipate. But until then, “Somewhere” seems to be the only place interracial couples can live happily.

Olivia Edmunds-Diez is a senior at Northwestern University, double majoring in Theatre and Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a certificate in Theatre for Young Audiences. She loves cats, Beyoncé, and spends her free time listening to the Hamilton cast recording on repeat. You can find her on her blog, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

Call For Writers: Interracial Relationships

Are depictions of interracial relationships on the rise due to a diminished stigma around interracial dating? How much is colorism still in play? Do the success of shows with racially diverse casts and the growing success of dark-skinned performers mitigate colorism? How do the very real and present ramifications of slavery and colonialism affect these interracial dynamics?

UPDATE: We will be postponing this theme week until February 2016. So please keep sending us your pitches and submissions!

~~Our theme week for December 2015 will be Interracial Relationships.~~

Representations of interracial relationships in film and on television have seen an increase over the years. It is ever more common to see, in particular, a Black female lead or love interest dating a person (usually a man) of another race (often white) (Scandal, The Bodyguard, Parenthood). Many such productions give little mention to the interracial nature of the romance. Colorism (the practice of favoring lighter skinned people of color over darker skinned people of color) is often at play in these scenarios, as the most successful women of color in Hollywood cast to play out romances with white characters frequently have lighter skin. Conversely, race is often a major issue in productions featuring Black male characters dating white women (Jungle Fever, Othello, Save the Last Dance).

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is ~~Friday, Dec. 18, by midnight~~ Friday, February 19, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Othello

The Bodyguard

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Jungle Fever

Scandal

Orange is the New Black

Jessica Jones

Devil in a Blue Dress

The L Word

Belle

Monster’s Ball

Dear White People

Pretty Little Liars

Save the Last Dance

The Flash

Grey’s Anatomy

Love Actually

The Feast of All Saints

Sense8

Made in America

Fools Rush In

How to Get Away With Murder

White Men Can’t Jump

The Fosters

Girl Fight

Mississippi Masala

Corrina, Corrina

Romeo Must Die

Jackie Brown

The Vampire Diaries

Parenthood

‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

She’s Pretty for a Black Girl: ‘Dark Girls’ and Colorism in America

I can remember an episode of ‘Chappelle’s Show’ (a sketch series that offered some valuable commentary on race and race relations in America) where Paul Mooney says, “Everybody wanna be a nigga, but nobody wanna be a nigga.” How does this seemingly crude sentiment translate to reality? to a social framework? To color? What he means is this: being Black is still considered “cool” and trendy by some, and it can be a mark of power and subversion. On the other hand, those who find race to be an accessory are more than happy to avoid the consequences and negative stereotypes associated with blackness, such as prejudice and discrimination. ‘Dark Girls’ investigates what causes colorism, how it’s begun to poison Black women, and how Black communities can heal from it.

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

I can remember an episode of Chappelle’s Show (a sketch series that offered some valuable commentary on race and race relations in America) where Paul Mooney says, “Everybody wanna be a nigga, but nobody wanna be a nigga.” How does this seemingly crude sentiment translate to reality? to a social framework? To color? What he means is this: being Black is still considered “cool” and trendy by some, and it can be a mark of power and subversion. On the other hand, those who find race to be an accessory are more than happy to avoid the consequences and negative stereotypes associated with blackness, such as prejudice and discrimination. Dark Girls investigates what causes colorism, how it’s begun to poison Black women, and how Black communities can heal from it.

A 2011 documentary, Dark Girls details colorism in America, particularly amongst the Black female population. Since learning about this phenomenon in college, I’ve been fascinated by this idea that the darker your skin, the more poorly you’re potentially treated not only in America, but across the globe. Dark Girls touches on stereotypes such as dark-skinned girls coming from impoverished communities, or even simply having too much “attitude.” The film is a touching and inspiring examination of blackness, with layers of social and psychological insight, culminating in a poignant conclusion that urges dark girls to “rise,” to reclaim what’s been forgotten, oppressed, or effaced.

Before I evaluate or scrutinize anything: I don’t know the Black experience firsthand. I’m not Black, so I always approach the subject of race with caution. Watching this film won’t make me “get” the Black experience, and neither will reading Malcolm X or watching a Tyler Perry film. It’s insulting and reductive to assume that we can absorb the struggles of an entire people simply by exposing ourselves to a piece of art or media, such as a dramatic performance or a book of poetry–these things must be lived. To reduce a whole race to a 70-minute film like Dark Girls is to limit ourselves. In short, I admire Black women and the strength they embody, I find “ethnic” hair aesthetically pleasing, and I’ve dated Black and Hispanic men who were absolutely guilty of practicing colorism.

In the opening scene, a little girl tells us that she doesn’t like to be called “Black” because she’s not: a nice preface for the negative connotations we can attribute to that one word. Several people interviewed, most of them psychologists, explain the “paper bag test,” which dictates that if your skin is lighter than a brown paper bag, you’re considered beautiful, but if you find yourself darker than the bag, you’re dark and unattractive, and thus undesirable. This seems an unnecessary exercise in masochism, but hey, women also have the “pencil test,” which lets us know if our boobs are too saggy to be considered sexually attractive (see Breasts, another great documentary where women are interviewed topless). How very queer to think of mundane items like pencils and paper bags as tools to assess we all are or what we’re worth.

A drawing that reflects such tragic self-doubt at a surprisingly young age.

One psychologist explains that Black women who experience insecurity about their color cannot count on Black men to “liberate” them from this “slave mentality”: that lighter-skinned Black women are more desirable than dark Black women. Those of us who saw Django will recall that Broomhilda is light-skinned, which meant that she was a house slave (or a “house nigger”); darker slaves worked largely in the fields since they were considered less valuable or unpleasant to look at. This observation brings to mind the popular idea that “good” black men are difficult to find; one participant even explains that she knows black men must exist who are capable of giving her a family and a pleasant life, but she fears they all must be in prison.

Black women are generally insulted when Black men declare their romantic and sexual preference for white women.

To help offset some of the negative commentary in this short film, we meet many articulate and upfront men who explain that they actually prefer dark women for a variety of reasons: Black women are sexier or have nicer skin, dark-skinned men want dark babies with other dark women, and even “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” Whether or not we agree with any of the men interviewed, we have to appreciate their honesty and willingness to share their feelings about race, color, and Black women on camera. Some Black women we meet speak to the sexualization of their bodies and their refusal to allow men of any racial background exoticize their skin color. Some of these women also report that while Black men reject them, white men revere them and their blackness. While much of this film focuses on racial issues in the United States, it discusses the global prevalence of colorism in countries where we wouldn’t expect such behavior, such as Thailand or the Gambia.

Actor/Comedian Michael Colyar says, “I really believe everybody wants to be Black except Black folks,” a thought that echoes Paul Mooney’s. The Black experience seems to be coveted and glamorized, despite the knowledge that racism runs rampant. “They call us colored–but–but–but we always our color, whatever color we are, if we come out, we brown, we always brown, we end up brown. White people, when they’re born, they’re pink, when they’re mad, they’re red, when they’re cold, they’re blue, when they die, they’re gray. Them the colored people!” Clearly, Colyar offers some much needed humor to an otherwise sober look at colorism and what it means to be a dark woman. Just as Chappelle’s Show utilized humor to diffuse the racial tension it unveiled, comedy seems to be the most effective antidote (besides education!) when combating everything from racism and misogyny to political strife.

Dark Girls also references the absence of dark-skinned people on television; it’s this invisibility that suggests that these people don’t exist for the rest of us. Colyar goes on to say, “Usually when you see Black people on TV, we’re on our way to jail or we’re rapping or we’re in sports. You don’t get to see us in a positive light continuously.” Colyar’s astuteness here demonstrates just how both racism and colorism are perpetuated quietly via our seemingly innocuous television sets.

This woman used to worry that her children would be too dark, but tearfully says that she now loves her beautiful “chocolate baby.”

We come full circle as the documentary ends with the same little girl from the opening scene, the beautiful little girl who already struggles with her skin color, believing that Black equates to “bad” and “ugly” while white equals “good” and “pretty.” This girl represents future generations of dark girls who will hopefully embrace their color and challenge Western beauty ideals.

Colorism seems to be a misguided attempt to better understand your own self-appointed rank of blackness while belittling others in the process. This practice is maybe prevalent amongst the Black population due to a lack of self-esteem, one’s own self-loathing, or misdirected anger that is perhaps meant for hegemonic masculinity or non-Black cultures. Because women and Black people are still oppressed, it’s especially problematic when Black women become oppressors of one another; solidarity, at times, can be an illusion if colorism continues within Black communities. While the little girl we meet–perhaps unnamed because she represents every dark girl everywhere–relies on her family to encourage her, we should all be cognizant of our own inclination to attach negative stereotypes to something as superficial as color. I was glad to see that Dark Girls concludes on a hopeful note: that you are not beautiful in spite of your color, but beautiful because of it.

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Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

Women of Color in Film and TV Week: A Girl Struggles to Survive Her Chaotic Homelife in ‘Yelling to the Sky’

Written by Megan Kearns.

Yelling to the Skystruck a visceral chord with me. I related to it in a way I often don’t with films. I’m not a biracial woman growing up impoverished, who turns to selling drugs as a means of survival. But I grew up with an absent father and a single mother struggling with mental illness, feeling trapped by my surroundings, desperate to break free.

All the actors give stellar performances in this emotionally raw and gritty film. Zoe Kravitz in particular captivates with a nuanced, powerful performance as the smart, struggling Sweetness O’Hara, trying to survive in a whirlwind of turmoil. Sweetness and her older sister live in a troubled home with unstable, unreliable parents: their white father, an alcoholic and their African-American mother who suffers from mental illness.

Yelling to the Sky opens with a jarring scene. Sweetness is getting bullied and beaten up in the street by her classmates. Latonya (Gabourey Sidibe) taunts her for the lightness of her skin and her biracial heritage – briefly raising complex issues of race and colorism. But she’s rescued by her older sister Ola (Antonique Smith in a scene-stealing powerhouse performance) who we see, as the camera eventually pans out, is very pregnant. This juxtaposition of a brawling pregnant woman, a fiercely protective sister, makes an interesting commentary on our expectations of gender.

Sweetness’ unpredictable father Gordon (Jason Clarke) vacillates between affectionate charisma and volatile violence and rage. He verbally and physically abuses every woman in the household. He tries to make amends for his deplorable parenting later in the film. But since he’s caused so much trauma, it might be too late for forgiveness.

Unfortunately, we never really learn about Sweetness’ mother Lorene (Yolanda Ross) who seems numbed by medication and/or depression beyond Sweetness asking if she was hospitalized in a mental institution when she “went away.” I wish the film had explored more of their relationship.

While I was disappointed the film didn’t explore mother-daughter relationships, it does show the bonds of sisterhood. The relationship between Sweetness and Ola is my favorite part of the film. We see the girls joke, play, challenge and comfort one another. Both rely on one other for support. Ola leaves home to live with her boyfriend, leaving Sweetness to fend for herself alone. But she’s not the only one trapped. Months later, Ola must return home with her baby, now a single mother. Her dreams of escape nothing but nebulous memories.

Yelling to the Skyis a searing portrayal of one girl’s pain. Of her frustration at being confined and trapped in a world not her choosing. Sweetness doesn’t focus on her education or her future. She deals with the immediacy of her pain. She starts selling drugs as a way to make money. She numbs herself with drugs, alcohol and surrounding herself with a cadre of bullies and drug dealers. Sweetness desperately yearns to escape. But where to? Where can she go?

Mahoney said she wanted to evoke feelings of claustrophobia when Sweetness spent time at home. And she succeeds beautifully. You feel just as trapped as Sweetness, chained by loneliness, fear and desperation. When she’s out in the streets, it feels frenetic with drunken stupors, drive-by shootings and drug deals gone wrong.

Zoe Kravitz as Sweetness O’Hara in Yelling to the Sky

Is the film perfect? No it definitely falters at times. I wish we had learned more about each of the characters. It feels very much like a snapshot, a voyeuristic peek through the window into their messy and complicated lives. Just when you’re lured in, the window abruptly closes. But the biggest flaw? I wish it had more deeply explored the issue of race without resorting to stereotypes.

A painful history of colorism and skin shade hierarchy— dark vs. light skin — exists amongst black women. When the media portrays black women, we often see women with lighter skin, straighter hair and more Caucasian features. Both L’Orealand Ellephotoshopped black to make their skin appear much lighter. The media often whitewashes black women, continually perpetuating the unachievable attainment of the white ideal of beauty. “The myth of black beauty” and the preference for lighter black skin can be traced back to slavery.

While light-skinned biracial and black women possess privilege, they may also face a backlash and be deemed not “black enough.” While the jarring opening scene of Yelling to the Sky certainly alludes to this, it is never explored further. Instead, the film resorts to racial stereotypes: “dark(er)-skinned black people are mean and like to victimize light(er)-skinned black people,” “girls/teenagers/women who are “authentically” black are bad” and “interracial relationships are dysfunctional.”

I cringed seeing Sidibe depicted as the dark-skinned, mean, overweight bully terrorizing a lighter-skinned petite girl. When the roles reverse and Sweetness beats the shit out of Latonya, I get the sense that it should feel like vindication for her earlier torment. But it feels empty and hollow. But maybe that’s the point, that retribution and violence are empty and hollow. As this is a semi-autobiographical film, perhaps these circumstances transpired in writer/director Victoria Mahoney’s own life, especially as she’s a biracial woman. But as these racial stereotypes occur over and over in media, it would have been great to have them deconstructed or not appear at all.

We don’t see enough female protagonists, women of color in film or female filmmakers of color. We don’t see enough films exploring issues of gender and race. And we should. In an interview, Mahoney (a promising new filmmaker who is certainly one to watch) shared her inspiration for the film:

“Stemming from my teenage obsession with Chekov’s Three Sisters and a connection to the theme of “manufacturing illusions in order to sustain day to day life.” I related on a gut level to the notion of joy and opportunity, existing elsewhere while in the same breadth knowing it was a lie. The illusion of “one day it’ll be different” is what kept me alive and smashing that illusion might’ve been my death. Putting this film out is important because (yet another generation of) young people are facing the exact same isolation, confusion, neglect, inquiry, desire, and heartache. All these years later, there’s little to no progress or solution. Adults have become freakishly focused on ‘self’, so much so, that we’re failing our responsibilities to participate and aid in the development and advancement of young people’s spiritual and intellectual growth.”

This is what I related to and why I’m so thankful for Yelling to the Sky. I may be a white woman and I may not have made the same choices Sweetness made, but it showed me I wasn’t alone. It felt cathartic watching.

My childhood existed of treacherous terrain to navigate. My mother was preoccupied by her own problems. I never knew what I was walking into when I went home. So I focused on the future. I clung to the hope that one day things would be different. That was the sole reason I survived. It’s the one thing that kept me going. While my mind was fixated on the future, my actions were grounded in the present. Like Sweetness, I skipped classes and almost didn’t graduate high school for I wanted to numb my pain. It’s this delicate dance of present angst and future hopes that Mahoney captures so well.

Sure, some people may find Yelling to the Sky bleak or hopeless. It’s heartbreaking to watch Sweetness spiral out of control. Sweetness clamors to escape, to break free. Yet there’s nowhere to go. Echoing real-life, the film ends with ambiguity and uncertainty. You don’t know how her life will turn out. Sweetness’ story – her struggle to survive amidst the chaos swirling around her, desperate to cling to any semblance of community – is one worth telling. And it’s one we don’t see often enough.

The Zoe Saldana / Nina Simone Biopic Controversy Illustrates the Need for More Black Women Filmmakers

(L-R): Zoe Saldana and Nina Simone; image via Black Street

When Zoe Saldana was recently cast as legendary singer Nina Simone in her upcoming biopic, the decision ignited a firestorm of controversy. People have vehemently criticized the decision. Not because Saldana isn’t a skilled actor (she is). But because her skin is much lighter than the music icon.

I’ve wanted to write about this topic for awhile now. But how can I, a white woman, do justice to the complex issue of race?

I’ll never know discrimination or oppression based on the color of my skin. But I realized that while the whitewashing of Hollywood remains an ongoing conversation in the Black community, it’s not a discussion amongst everyone. And it should be.

Nina Simone’s daughter Simone spoke to Ebony about why skin color should matter in the casting of her mother’s biopic:

“I can guarantee that the sense of insecurity and the questioning of one’s beauty that results from a grownup telling you that as a child you’re too black and your nose is too wide, remained with her [her mother Nina Simone] for the rest of her life.”

At The Huffington Post, Nicole Moore writes about Nina Simone and the “erasure of black women in film”:

“Because Simone’s blackness extended as much to her musical prowess as to her physicality and image, it’s perplexing that the film’s production team, led by Jimmy Iovine, expects anyone, particularly in the black community, to (re)imagine Nina Simone as fair-skinned, thin-lipped and narrow-nosed? I guess if you look at Hollywood’s history of casting black female roles, especially in biopics, it’s not all that surprising.”

Hollywood has a massive race and gender problem. Black women’s bodies belong to a dichotomy suffering from either fetishization or erasure. When Black women appear in media, which doesn’t happen nearly enough, they suffer from stereotypes of mammies, jezebels and sapphires. And too many producers and directors clearly don’t understand the nuances of race, thinking any person of color will suffice.

Clutch Magazine’s Britni Danielle writes about the biopic and Hollywood’s massive misunderstanding and insensitivity when it comes to women and race:

“In the past few years Hollywood has consistently gotten it wrong when it comes to telling black women’s narratives. From the questionable choice of casting Thandie Newton as an Igbo woman in the film adaptation of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun and Jennifer Hudson as Winnie Mandela, to Jacqueline Fleming, a biracial woman, playing Harriet Tubman, when other people are in charge of portraying us, it seems like any brown face will do.”

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates also finds the “bleaching of Nina Simone” problematic and reinforcing systemic racism:

“But this casting (with no shot taken at Saldana) manages to both erase the specific kind of racism Simone contended with and at the same time empower it.”

Most white people probably don’t realize the painful history of colorism and skin shade hierarchy — dark vs. light skin — Black women continually face. When the media portrays Black women, we often see women with lighter skin and more Caucasian features. Both L’Oreal and Elle photoshopped Black women — Beyonce and Gabby Sidibe — to make their skin appear much lighter. In film, advertisements and magazine spreads, the media often whitewashes black women, continually perpetuating the unachievable attainment of the white ideal of beauty.

At The Daily Beast, Allison Samuels writes about “the myth of black beauty” and skin color:

“Skin color and its importance around the world—and particularly in the African-American community—has been a hot-button issue for generations. The debate over skin color and its painful origins dates back to the days of slavery, when lighter skin often equaled a better overall quality of life. With more pronounced European features, bearers of a lighter complexion were also considered more attractive than their darker-skinned peers. Possessing this trait was believed to open the cracked doors of opportunity ever wider.”

Due to white privilege, white people don’t agonize over their skin color. We don’t have to worry if someone will harass us or follow us around in a department store, thinking we’re going to steal merchandise simply because of our skin. If we move, we don’t have to worry about finding neighbors who don’t like us because of our skin color. We don’t have to fret over something as simple as putting on a Band-Aid which won’t match our skin tone.

My point is this: we don’t ever have to think about race. Sure, we can if we want to. But we don’t haveto. And therein lies the privilege.

But Spectra, an amazing Afrofeminist writer, asserts the dark vs. light skin in the Zoe Saldana/Nina Simone biopic debate misses the point about Black women in the media. She poses that Black women must create media in order to reclaim and tell their own stories:

“The hard truth is this: if we spent more time creating media instead of criticizing it, there’d be way more diversity in representation, and way more stories and perspectives to which white people can be more frequently held accountable.

“Pushing for ownership of both the infrastructure and content that portrays our lived experiences – that is the crux of the issue; not just the politics of light vs. dark-skinned actresses. So, whereas I am completely on board with calling out the colorism behind the biopic’s casting choices (and the harmful message that’s being sent to young, dark-skinned black girls everywhere by having a light-skinned woman play Nina Simone) there aren’t enough strong lead roles written for women of color in Hollywood for me to fairly tell Zoe Saldana, a hard-working, talented brown woman to ”sit this one out.”

Here at Bitch Flicks, we talk a lot about the need for more female filmmakers and women-centric films. One of the takeaways from the Zoe Saldana/Nina Simone controversy is that we desperately need more women of color filmmakers.

The Help crystallizes Hollywood’s problem with Black women. Sure, we see strong and complex Black women telling their stories of discrimination and hardship to writer Skeeter (Emma Stone). But even in a film containing the inarguably talented Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer giving phenomenal Oscar nominated and Oscar-winning performances, it still remains a racially problematic film. Even in a film that supposedly champions Black women, it ultimately revolves around a white female protagonist’s perspective.

While women filmmakers don’t merely depict female protagonists, when more women are behind the camera, we tend to see more women in front of the camera. Looking back at this year’s movies, female-fronted films such as Brave, The Hunger Games, Prometheus, and Snow White and the Huntsman graced the big screen. We saw women-centric indies like Your Sister’s Sister, Take This Waltz, For a Good Time Call… and Bachelorette. We even witnessed strong women in male-dominated movies like Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises and Black Widow in The Avengers.

But when you look at the female protagonists — aside from Beasts of the Southern Wild, Sparkle, The Lady, Girl in Progress and Celeste and Jesse Forever which all featured women of color in lead roles — you’ll notice their overwhelming whiteness.

Perhaps if we had more Black women filmmakers, we would see more nuanced and diverse depictions of Black women on-screen.

Now, that doesn’t mean white women and men can’t or shouldn’t write strong, complex Black female characters. But it does mean white people have to stop appropriating Black women’s narratives, especially if we’re not going to take the time to attempt to understand the intricate and painful complexities of the light vs. dark skin stigma. And we’ve got to stop pretending we live in a post-racial society. We don’t.

We need more films from Black women directors like Ava DuVernay, Dee Rees and Julie Dash. But we aren’t seeing enough Black women in front of or behind the camera. In her Women and Hollywood cross-post, Evette Dionne wonders “Where are the black women film directors?” She explores the “exile of black women film directors” by studios that refuse to fund their work.

“So black women, one of the most sought after audience demographics for movie studios, aren’t behind the camera providing insight into our culture. This leads to a misrepresentation of the black community on the silver screen. Often, we are caricatures of ourselves, as evidenced in Jumping the Broom and other projects, which leads to resentment for what the media machine represents in our communities.”

When a young Black female tennis player is told she’s too fat to receive funding, when the Swedish Minister of Culture and rapper 2Chainz eat racist cakes of dismembered Black women’s bodies, when the media cares more about criticizing Olympic gold-medal winning gymnast Gabby Douglas’ hair than her performance — we as a society clearly have a fucked-up, racist and misogynistic problem denigrating and oppressing Black women.

Last year, I had the overwhelming privilege of meeting one of my feminist idols, Professor Melissa Harris-Perry (squee!!). After her brilliant and empowering speech on her must-read book Sister Citizen, she graciously stayed afterwards and spoke to each and every person. When I finally got my chance to talk to her, I gushed about how much I loved her and how she needed her own TV show (and this was BEFORE her fantastic MSNBC weekend show was announced!). I also asked her how to be a good ally to women of color. She gave the simplest yet hardest advice of all. Listen. When in a room with women of color, she said to be silent, listen and let them speak for themselves. When you find yourself in a space with no women of color, that’s when you need to speak up.

So we white women (and men) need to speak up against racism.

When people talk about the need for more women in media — sadly, they often mean white women. Many of us who write about the need for women’s representation in film or women-created media feel satisfaction when we see white female leads on-screen and white female writers and directors. But that’s got to change. We need films to portray women of all races, created by women of all races — not just white women and think we’ve somehow achieved some semblance of equity.

White women and men filmmakers need to realize the damage they wreak when they only cast light-skinned Black women (if they cast women of color at all), especially in a biopic of a famous Black woman with dark skin.

It’s time for us white women to listen. Listen to black women. Listen to their needs and wants and support them from the sidelines. We can’t merely be satisfied when any woman stands on-screen. Black women must be behind the camera, telling their own stories.