OP3: Hollywood and Its Stereotypes

"Mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939)

Only nine percent of black actors were represented in the top films of 2017. This was a decrease from 12.5% in 2016, UCLA reports in their 2019 Hollywood Diversity report.

Black people have fought long and hard to share the same screen as white people. The fact that they are still underrepresented in film shows that the fight isn’t over. But another issue with black actors appearing in films are how they’re portrayed because I bet you out of that 9%, their roles were some sort of stereotype.

In the film industry, minorities are often portrayed negatively or as stereotypes. Slaves, criminals, poverty-stricken, violent and other hardship-ridden lives are all common roles black actors have to portray.

These negative depictions can have lasting impressions on people. As a society, we heavily follow the media and if all we are seeing are black people depicted negatively, these harmful stereotypes and racism will continue to live on.

Now black actors portraying slaves in historical films educate us about some of the pioneers that have gone on before us (which of course is a good thing), but that is not something the black audience always wants to see.

We are more than just our history of slavery.

It all started with the film Gone with the Wind (1939) where actress Hattie McDaniel played Mammy, the house servant. Since then, the term “mammy” has been used to identify the black nanny character in films.

But even before that, there was the horrendous and extremely racist act of blackface. Beginning in the 19^th century, white actors would smother shoe polish or black paint on their faces and paint on exaggerated features to look like a black person. They would use African American vernacular and depict negative behaviors associated with black people such as being lazy, cowardly, ignorant and hypersexual.

Black men are commonly portrayed as criminals, drug dealers and dead-beat fathers. Black women in films are often seen as having an attitude, being single mother who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders and working as a nanny who basically raises the kids. There is also the “magical negro” or black-best friend trope that is evident in films today (I wrote a piece about it, check it out here).

For example, the Bring it On film series depicts the black female characters as loud, sassy and hypersexual. And they almost always portray the black best friend.

Colorism also plays a role here too as darker skin women are seen with much more attitude and uglier than their lighter-skinned counterparts. Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) is the perfect example to understand the issue of colorism in the black community and how black women are shown in film.

Another example of black people (especially black women) being poorly portrayed in film are Tyler Perry movies. Now don’t get me wrong, we all love a good Madea movie. Tyler Perry’s films shaped most of our childhoods. But there is a constant pattern that is evident in his films.

The main character (or one of the other characters) almost always goes through some kind of struggle whether it’s abuse, drugs, poverty or coming from a broken family. In Meet the Browns, Angela Bassett’s character is a struggling single mother who didn’t grow up with both of her parents. Idris Elba’s character in Daddy’s Little Girls was a single father who was falsely accused of raping an underage white girl. Madea’s Family Reunion depicted a woman constantly being beaten by her fiancé while dealing with her controlling mother.

The list goes on and on. While these movies depict the struggles that black people often face in real life, they aren’t true for everyone and we are tired of seeing ourselves depicted this way in movies.

We are not our struggles.

Black people experience love. Black people experience success. We need more movies that portray us in a positive light. The past couple of years, black movies have become less about the

struggle and more about seeing the light of life.

Marvel Studio’s Black Panther (2018) portrays an African king as a superhero. The Photograph (2020) portrays the beauty of black love. Jordan Peele has been successful in creating black horror films that depict meanings much bigger than what we’re used to.

So Hollywood, on behalf of the black community, can we start making films that positively portray us? It would be nice to see us as successful and worthy of love instead of as criminals and going through “the struggle.”