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Even with Oscar buzz and record-breaking box office success, “Precious” isn’t likely to blow up the careers of its female stars. Black actresses still have a hard row to hoe. Just ask Angela Bassett—and Cicely Tyson.
With Precious, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are attempting to change both the Oscar game and what audiences have come to expect from black movies.
Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire, is extremely powerful, but I sincerely doubt it will change anything for black actresses in Hollywood. The film is strong, but not that strong.
Even if totally successful on every level—from box office receipts to a cultural shift away from the paralysis of self-pity—Hollywood will continue to go along as it has gone. Too many people are satisfied with the cardboard darkies that supposedly represent black women on film in the past.
When one looks at Byron Hurt’s Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes or his equally important Barack & Curtis, the problems with the media depictions of black women should become clear. Most people, black, white or whatever else, should be disturbed by the reduction of black women into beautiful but lascivious sperm buckets, overweight hams or abrasive bitches “deserving” of beat-downs. This caricature of black womanhood is as far removed from life and human dignity as molasses are from the taste of salt.
There seems to be no appetite for the combination of toughness, intelligence and unpretentious empathy seen in the real-life Michelle Obama. (Especially when she could not hold back tears as she listened to Joe Biden speak of his dead wife at the Democratic Convention. Or as she was moved, voice quavering, by the depth of feeling shown her by those girls of every color in London.)
But that fascination with Mrs. Obama’s humanity doesn’t, and won’t, transfer to black actresses in Hollywood.
Black women need not be angels any more than men need to be, but the greatest power of art is through its summoning or emblazoning of humanity. Yes, I said it: H-U-M-A-N-I-T-Y. It’s hard to believe it now, given the tacky commercialism that so dominates what we presently see in almost anything supposedly “authentic” and black.
It is a wonder that so many black actresses have waded through this stereotypical muck with their dignity intact. Take the beautiful and extremely talented actress Angela Bassett. No one has known what to do with her gifts because there is not interest in the humanity she can bring to a part.
George C. Wolfe and I once discussed what Bassett brought to Lady Macbeth when she delivered each of her monologues in an unprecedented style very close to arias. No one noticed; no one cared. Had they, Bassett would have had the same kind of parts as the few white actresses who are hired for their actual abilities. If the majority of good white actresses are rightfully whining, you know how it is across the color line.
Gabby Sidibe better enjoy her fame while she can because black actresses never have less than a hard row to hoe. Even if the inner life they bring to characters is as beautiful as they are physically, they have little chance.
Kerry Washington was astonishingly human in Our Song. So were Jurnee Smollett and Meagan Good in Eve’s Bayou when they were kids a decade ago, and were superbly contrasted by the adult complexities and magically differentiatedpresences of Lynn Whitfield and Debbi Morgan. The same is true of Tasha Smith, who is one of the finest but rarely mined talents in Hollywood. Smith has the range to convince us that her character is lowerthan a snake in wagon tracks or is as full of veiled sentiment—not sentimentality—as the as wildly obnoxious wife in Why Did I Get Married? Nothing seriously good has happened for any of these women in artistic terms.
Obviously, proven talent does not matter. It is a problem older than Cicely Tyson, who was also once young, beautiful and incredibly talented, but her career, for the most part, was pissed away by the system. Movies by almost anyone other than Kasi Lemmons show no interest in the layers of humanity that we have all seen every year of our lives in the black, brown, beige and bone-colored women we have known up closer than almost any close-up isever given the intention of showing.
That is the problem, and it is everyone’s fault until enough Americans make it possible for Hollywood to believe there can be commercial success in truly human roles for black women. When and if that happens, the culture of the entire world will benefit.
Stanley Crouch is a New York Writer and author of numerous books, including The Artificial White ManConsidering Genius andDon't The Moon Look Lonesome. He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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I just wonder if you are aware that those of us women who are not, as you so gingerly describe as "fat, disgusting, eeeewwww, elephant manure" and all the other names you've called women whose physical appearance you don't like, find your attitude as unattractive about you as you find those women you hate. Have you a clue?
This is not the only time you've chimed in on your tastes in women, so we all have a clear idea that you hate big women. Okay, we get it. Must you spew it with such hatred and over and over again?
I'm just saying, don't be surprised that the women that YOU find attractive enough for you, may not be attracted to your hateful personality at all, no matter how you look. I think you even mentioned that once in a post long ago... something about pretty women not giving you the time of day? I'm just saying... I do not wonder why. Yeah, then I think you said, 'I'm outta here forever." Missed us, huh? Or, you have no one in real life who wants to listen to your hatred?
All I ever hear are Black people are this or they're not that, then tell me what constitutes an authentic Black Woman? What does she look like? How does she act? How does she speak? What is her lifestyle?
When we see the imagery or read books that depict the lifestyles of wealthy or affluent Black Women, some people want to think these women don't exist. All Black Women are not from the ghetto or of the ghetto. And if they are from the ghetto and rural America, the ignorance in which many are often conditioned to accept is no longer present in their mind-set.
It will take Black Women to change the imagery of what the world sees of who we are and not leave it solely up to black men or Hollywood. The only way black men should be allowed to do this is that they show our true diversity in which we live and Black People begin to have the maturity to accept the truth of what, who and what we are.
We don't need the approval of the dominate culture to determine who we are and it's time that we start self-defining who and what we are. We keep waiting for everyone else to do something for us that we can do ourselves.
When people don't know who they are, other's will define it for them and it's time to change that concept.
Miss Sidibe exist and just like modern media has rendered us as invisible it appears that most of you would like to do the same to her. I'm glad there are individuals who live outside of enclosed minds and are loving this movie, even when some black individuals don't.
BTW, I've read that she has 2 or 3 new movies on the horizon. When we start loving our true selves, then maybe others will do the same.
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They sure DO! But we have the likes of Oprah and Tyler to produce these films and keep our Black Stars WORKIN!
I agree that Bassett is a great actress, and I look forward to the next time I see her on screen. She was the best thing in Malcolm X in my opinion. I kept waiting for her to come back. Even in Spike Lee's movie, she was underused.
The human female body is beatiful in it's shape. Fifty extra pounds of flab is an unaesthetic augmentation, and let's be real, unintentional. Can't stop eating that garbage, and no longer beholden to a man to tell you how you are looking. Most American chicks are fat because they follow consumer culture eveywhere it leads them, and they lack the discipline to stop and make the hatd adjustments when they start getting fat. Sizism?!? Enough of this wimpy, everybody's-a-winner garbage. This part of the cause of the mortgage crisis. Average income single women wanting houses and children without the "burden" of a husband. And if you say that's because of a lack of good men, well, you raised them, single moms!
You make a lot of unverified claims about balt without any clear reason. There are plenty of people who like dark skin and non-euro-centric (euro-morphic?) features and would not find Ms Sidibe attractive. If you wish to say people ought be more body-blind in love and attraction, fine, but your supposition that someone finding Ms Sidibe less than physically attractive is clearly coming form a place of ethic insecurity or bigotry borders on the absurd.
This is especially galling inasmuch as balt was making an entirely correct point that sizism is an entirely true phenomenon that has real observable effects on it's victims. I can only resume you are seeking to downplay this truism.
Eeewwww! Have you no shame! Why don't you publish pictures of piles of elephant manure? No difference, same effect!