good article on racism against bm/wf on the screen

Too hot to handle

Sometimes, this weariness comes over you that's got nothing to do with tiredness. It's part contempt, part boredom and part real revulsion at the totally predictable.

By Guardian Newspapers, 7/6/2002

Sometimes, this weariness comes over you that's got nothing to do with tiredness. It's part contempt, part boredom and part real revulsion at the totally predictable. (I realise I've set myself up for the quip you're now making, but go ahead and snigger at my expense, anyway.) When I read recently that the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming To Dinner was to be remade, "with a twist", I knew at once what it was going to be. "Oh nooo," I moaned to myself, "it's going to be a black family this time, and their daughter's going to bring home a white man!"

How did I figure that, you might wonder. Why didn't I think that the twist might be the young black son of a middle-class family bringing home a white girl, say? Well, for one very simple and extremely unwholesome reason: that currently in Cinemaland, white men are allowed to have sex with black women until the sacred cows come home, but white women certainly aren't allowed to have sex with black men - or even to indicate, by thought, word or deed, that they find them attractive. This isn't a unique situation - it's happened before. During slavery.

Think about it. Look at Halle Berry: when was the last time she had sex with a black man for the benefit of the paying public, despite having been married to two of them and never, so far as I know, been romantically linked to a white man in her (real) life? She just doesn't. She's there to show her breasts to John Travolta in Swordfish, her butt to Billy Bob Thornton (as the racist prison guard in Monster's Ball who killed her black husband, no less) and heaven knows what to Pierce Brosnan in the forthcoming Bond film.

And thus it has been for a long, lonely time - from Pam Grier with a sob and a sneer in Jackie Brown to Beyoncé Knowles with a knowing smile in Goldmember. Black women exist on screen for the eyes of white men, be they the stars with their swimming pool eyes or the wankers in the cheap seats. On the other hand, when did you last see such fine specimens of manhood as Will Smith and Denzel Washington romancing white leading ladies? Film insiders were nervous when, a decade ago and red-hot off Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer insisted on making the interracial love story (and much more) Love Field. And although, in the opinion of the world's greatest film writer, David Thomson, it was "astounding... her best work yet", the film failed to achieve major distribution both here and in the US. Commercially at least, Pfeiffer's career has never bounced back - America's sweetheart defiled by Jungle Fever. Denzel Washington, on the other hand, has consciously avoided black/white romance in his films.

The few occasions when white women and black men do dare get horizontal on screen tend to be treated as suitable cases for treatment, rather than celebration. In Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, such unions were deeply destructive and alienating, taking the white racist line so far as to adopt the slang for such unions. Imagine Monster's Ball being called Jungle Fever - or even the next James Bond, come to that. But a white man and a black woman? That's "real". A white woman and a black man, however, that's either sick and exploitative (Selma Blair in Storytelling) or shallow and trendy (Claudia Schiffer in Black And White). Or just go all the way and remake Othello.

Black men are a problem for white racists. With the other racial types, they can use un-manning language to put them down because, stereotypically, they're smaller, frailer, more feminine or bookish - Asian, Oriental and Jewish men have all come in for their share of this faint praise. But you can't dismiss the average black man like that. Indeed, as the hourglass white blonde woman can seem the perfection of her gender, so can an athletic black man - think Marilyn Monroe and Sidney Poitier, or the young Cassius Clay. More often than not, they make white men look not quite finished. This may not be fair, but - just as most white women can't live up to the ideal of Monroe - it is a fact.

Physically, it seems, you can't beat them - so, instead, why not try confining cinematic representation of such to sexless jesters, snarling sadists and screaming mimis? (Can it be a coincidence that the most famous drag queen in the world, Ru Paul, is black, and that the most talked-about British black acting debut of recent years was that of Jaye Davidson as - yes! - a transvestite?)

Well, you'd better keep on putting the black man in a dress, whitey, because let him wear a suit and the threat to your supremacy becomes horribly clear - as Poitier in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner or Malcolm X in real life found out. For a start, he'll wear your clothes better than you, and then your nasty little minds will start working overtime and thinking about the other "stuff" he might do better, too. You'll never really know, will you, little man? Keep ogling Halle Berry and pretending that what's sauce for the gander doesn't much interest the goose. Just don't blame me when your wife runs off with Chris Eubank.

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/7-6-2002-21876.asp

 

its a shame noone bothered responding, because i felt this was a very good article and would have liked to get more responses to it.

 

Both black men and women need to realize that they are only put in positions in the media of worshipers of whites that never really get them. Most IR relationships on screen are dysfunctional and short lived usually with the white person dumping the black. Do you really want to see more of this behavior. White man owns the media and will never allow black men to be in normal relationships with white women and white men will always be saving black women from black men. It is a tireless mind game and that is why I do not watch t.v. or go to see these so called IR movies because I know they will either be more of what I said or a new stereotype to latch onto.

 

In agreement with the both of you, we have more to deal with, than we know for sure what's out there.

 

the reason for no responses is probably because so many have protested, screamed and yelled saying Hollyweird has a racism, immoral agenda to globalize American consumerism, dumb down the american populus, attack Christians and religious jews and muslims, continue segregation lite, and promote a mindless, one world thought process.

so what else could we say, it is so obvious
!

 

No one responded to that because it wasn't a strong enough voice. Hollywood just probably around that time put something out there to ignore it. That article makes a valuent point when they brought up the
comparances to slavery.

Hilary Clinton said that the republicans are running the whitehouse
like a plantation. I think, no I know that that is definetley true with
mainstream hollywood. And you know the black actors see it, in fact everyobody sees it but no one is going to do anything about it.

Like I said in the beginning That article didn't get out because it wasn't a
strong enough voice. We need someone on a mainstream television show, or someone to make a documentary-style movie about this in order
to put hollywood bigwigs on the racist table where they belong, or they will
continue to run mainstream hollywood like their little plantation.


So the question is........Who has the guts to be that voice, and say
"Yeah I said it?"

 

I read it and I thought it was some persuasive writing which gave me food for thought!

 

So did I, but not enough black actors in Hollyweird, will ever read it.