Any performer or artist knows that being paid for your craft is a lifelong journey in itself. Consumers of artistic expression often think that the life of a creative is easy — easier than what? Not creating, I suppose. When you are looking for a job, you aren’t necessarily able to find your dream job simultaneously with finding your first job, or the second. For some people, their entire lives will be filled with jobs that are not the contents of dreams and best case scenarios. This is caused by a number of factors, including qualifications and personal decisions, but more importantly, including the essence and intentions of the systems we navigate.
The options.
What are they based on? The conversations I’ve heard on how black women and other women of color are portrayed in the media are alarmingly based around how actresses should decline roles. This sounds very similar to the debate of rape being the result of what women wear. I have no space in my life for people who blame the recipients of the symptoms of broken systems and subjective societies. When it comes to acting roles, the options for most women of color are strictly within the context of the antiquated portrayals and representations of them which have saturated American media going back to its inception.
A time when black women were seen as accessories to white life.
I welcome any commentary on this, but if it is of the style of victim-blaming and shaming, I simply shall not respond. If you look at 90 percent of the portrayals of blackness in mainstream media, they are viewed almost as mirror images of the “classic portrayals” of black people. Society has, in many ways, failed to grasp the true complexity and humanity of black people because of this. We can talk about how that same mainstream media shoots out stereotypical images of women, diluting our understanding of the similarities and tethers binding us all together. We can talk about how women of color receive some of the most brutal parts of this sloppy presentation of existence. We can talk about how black women are almost always the recipients of the worst of this treatment. But I will not entertain conversation around blaming actresses of color for needing to work.
Quality of life boils down to access and opportunity, understanding and growth.
Struggle is inherent. I have listened to the radio, watched the television and scrolled the Internet for almost three decades now, seeing the same stuff. If I want to be a performer who portrays uplifting roles but only offered jobs as a character who lives a life of a drug dealing womanizer, but have to eat and know in the core of my soul that I am meant to perform, you’d have me quit my passion whilst on the journey of finding the roles that portray my people correctly? Nah, you live your life and let them live theirs. Stop shifting the discourse with distractions and deflections and call it out so that it can change. This isn’t a matter of inspecting the decisions of performers of color. This is a matter of dire need to inspect the institutions behind mainstream media; the thought processes behind their casting processes and, more importantly, the narratives placed on mainstream platforms before the eyes of the world that it entertains. This is coming to terms with the implications of years of blatantly false or ignorantly inaccurate representations of women of color on our society’s treatment of them. This is realizing that the majority of us have been impacted by these caricatures in a manner only time, focus and deliberate unlearning can truly alleviate. This is realizing that entire demographics of people have no knowledge of the experiences of people different from them beyond what they see, hear or read via mainstream media. This is understanding the correlations between that fact and the social conditions of the present day which has kept us in those of the past, depending on how you wish to see it.
Our society glorifies these presentations.
We give awards for the leading role as a drug dealer who compares himself to King Kong (Denzel Washington, Training Day). Or the single black mother who sleeps with a prison guard who oversees the execution of her husband and needs somewhere to place all of her lingering sexual and emotionally unstable energy (Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball). We’ve created the mentality where people think that films and music can introduce them to the lives of the people depicted, even make them experts in the knowledge of those others’ cultures, and then use stereotypes and other misinformation to ensure there is never any true understanding. These images saturate almost every channel to the point where people outside of the groups depicted think they’re knowledgeable, and to where many within the groups struggle with an identity crisis and frustrations as their own existences interact with the consequences of faulty representation.
And no, this isn’t me speaking for women of color. This is me, a black man, saying that this is wrong. The stupid reactions and ignorant assessments of the situation are disgusting. Period.
I live in Boston, where Paloma Valenzuela wrote and directed a web-series called Pineapple Diaries, centering around three Dominican women who are portrayed as real people, not demeaning or dehumanizing exaggerations. There’s Brown Girls, a series about a South Asian-American woman coming into her own queerness and a black woman struggling with commitment issues written by Fatimah Ashgar with the sole goal of further defining intersectional feminism. These are just two examples, which I learned about today, from a friend, when I asked. My friends aren’t real housewives of American stupidity, stereotype and misogyny. Call my sisters by their names and not some pseudonym given by Ray J, Flavor Flav, the mechanisms funding such ignorance or the consumers mimicking it.
My mother is a beautiful woman both inside and out and graces the rooms she walks in, in a multiplicity of ways. She is not a mammy, nor a jezebel or any other of the simplistic representations of black women. And I shall nip the whole “he feels this way only because he’s related to black women” sentiment in the bud. False. I just know what’s right and what’s wrong. In a world where we’re told of blurred lines and facts being based on what you want them to be, we need to start saturating the wavelengths with counter-narratives and truths that ring as loud as said ignorance. I’m tired of seeing people have to exist in a world where we have to cope daily with reality’s distance from the totems and principles we idealize yet hide behind, treating them as though they're fantasized. Let’s make and keep it real.
The video that got me on this thought track.
Much Love.
Happy Holidays,
Jo
