Movies aren’t miracles
I have long believed that film has the ability to change the world. I wrote in my 2002 and 2004 applications to graduate schools in film and dramatic writing that I wrote scripts “with the intent to provoke a time of serious comtemplation in the life of everyone who heard [my words].” I believed that [...]
Pick your paternalism poison
In his column, “America’s obsession with missing white women,” Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts asserts that the incessant news coverage of the latest young, pretty missing white woman is a “back-handed compliment” and the latest form of a “certain condescending paternalism” that casts white women as helpless damsels in need of rescue or of protection. I [...]
At school with the boss’s kids
One day at the grade school That had been ordered To desegregate only, Virginia saw the red clutch bag On my desk next to hers. She did not comment; she only Stared at the purse long enough To indicate she remembered That her mother had cheerfully put The purse in a shopping bag, piled some [...]
Paying respect to The Help
I’ve grown up attending wakes and funerals for people of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations. At these sad memorials marketed as visitations, going-home celebrations and extemporaneous family reunions, I often saw white people who were somewhere around the age of my mother and her siblings. I wondered who they were and why they were [...]
In Defense of The Help
Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help Since the movie’s release on Aug. 10, there has been an abundance of criticism about The Help. The first outcry of historical and cultural inaccuracy I read came from The Association of Black Women Historians. They saw the maids as “a resurrection of Mammy,” and [...]
Defining Oprah
The Oprah Winfrey Show episode that serves as a defining moment for me is one I didn’t see, and the memory of this moment isn’t exactly a good one. It happened some time between 2004 and 2007. I assume the subject of the show had to do with either sex or interracial dating [...]
Why black men should see Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
If you’ve ever gone to a Tyler Perry play or movie and returned home feeling like you paid to see black men receive a collective slap in the face, this play is your answer. There’s no light-skinned, and/or blue-collar hero saving the abused woman from the evil dark-skinned and/or professional man. No choir will sing. There will be no weddings and no one will come to Jesus at the end.
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