![]() ![]() Has been championed by the likes of cinematic activist Spike Lee. Some other things out of the way: Yes, John Singleton produced. We all know that this film had some built-in traction because the screenwriter,Ĭraig Brewer, is white and therefore automatically controversial. And increasingly, they’re going a step beyond, sanctioning these dangerous stereotypes as not only permissible, but human. What’s most disturbing to me is how willingly critics and other gatekeepers of popular culture routinely reinforce this kind of Orwellian logic. This is a new age the old meanings don’t apply anymore. A pimp isn’t a bad reflection on black folk - he’s our Everyman, our salt of the big-city earth. Such characterizations don’t debase black people, we’re solemnly told, they honor them they tell our essential truths. Instead of non-threatening maids and minstrels, we now have whores and murderous gangstas being marketed as cool, hip and, above all, real. What has changed markedly since the days of Gone With the Wind is the widespread embrace of black pathology, especially black urban pathology, as the standard for representative black images. ![]() But looking at ourselves through the eyes of others and believing what we see isn’t anything new. ![]() Of course, many blacks are themselves solidly part of the mainstream now and seemingly willing to accept the pejorative as status quo - one of the many strange and insidious effects of freedom. Talents to fit an image that it wanted to see.)Īlmost 70 years later, though it has been mitigated somewhat by the black freedom movement and the fitfully successful effort by blacks to seize control of their own media images, “black enough” still means blackness approved by a predominantly white mainstream culture. Of her talents than as an indictment of the industry that circumscribed those Win for Gone With the Wind has, unfortunately, endured less as an acknowledgment That jibed with simple images and social roles acceptable to white folk - domestics,Įntertainers, comic relief and con men. Or character development, but according to a peculiar criterion that really boilsĭown to one question: Is it black enough? In the beginning, that meant a movie Racial confrontation or just plain ignorance, reviewers tend to suspend theirĬritical faculties and evaluate black films not on the basis of story, acting Whether it’s due to a sense of political correctness, low expectations, fear of I’ve long believed that when it comes to judging black movies, the mostĪccomplished film critics - most of them white, it must be said - lose their minds. ![]()
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