MADE IN HER IMAGE

~~ MAE C. JEMISON ~~ Art by Francesco Francavilla

Police brutality isn’t standard sitcom fare.

Nor is it treated as such in Wednesday’s episode of ABC comedy Black-ish (9:30 p.m. ET/PT), which centers on an affluent African-American family living in a mostly white neighborhood.

The episode, titled “Hope,” doesn’t chase headlines so much as it explores how parents often struggle to talk to their kids about life’s thornier issues — in this case, a fictional news story about an unarmed black teenager selling DVDs who is tased dozens of times by a cop.

The episode was inspired by a real-life predicament that creator Kenya Barris faced in late 2014, watching the news with his family when riots broke out in Ferguson, Mo., after police officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“My second-youngest son looked up and said, ‘Why are all these people so mad?’ ” Barris says. “I wanted to say something super inflammatory and my wife felt like she understood where I was coming from. But at the same time, she was like, ‘How can you tell our kids that? They still have to live in this world and haven’t had your experiences.’ ”

“My family is still living in Compton and in Watts,” he continued. “And him seeing how they live and juxtaposed to how he’s living his lifestyle and what he sees going on with young black men around this country and that’s not his experience.”

“Your job — as students who are receiving an education — is to be aware of your privilege. And use this particular privilege called “education” to do your best to achieve great things, all the while advocating for those in the rows behind you.”

NY Times article on Black Film in the early 1990’s titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” by Karen Grigsby Bates

Note: There will be a few blog posts on Pariah and Black women’s directors over the next few weeks as I move like a squirrel with a flashlight trying to finish this paper. I cannot have boss bear calling me trifling.

The trouble with being erased for so long is that you come to think of your erasure as being natural. ~ Lorraine O'Grady in “The Cave, Lorraine O'Grady on Black Women Film Directors”

Last week my homie James asked me why it was significant that Cooper and Rees fundraised to make Pariah when Black filmmakers were doing that waaay back in ‘91.

The early 90’s were interesting years for Black films, but these films were primarily by black men directors featuring the narratives by and large of Black men and boys. To my knowledge and correct me if I am wrong the only films  that had major theatrical distribution that was directed by a Black woman were Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.

The fact that Harris and Dash are the only Black woman from that era that directed a feature length film with major distribution must be noted. Furthermore, the other side of the Harris- Dash coin is the quasi over-representation of Black women’s stories in the recent economic market place.

I say quasi over-representation because we see stories being produce that feature Black women’s bodies but they are not the directors.

Chris Rock, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, Bill Duke and Tim Story are 5 black men who have released films in the last 3 years that feature stories about Black women. Which begs the question, where are the Black women directors, directing features with major distribution?

Then there is the Black Woman Can’t Get a Man industrial complex where “The Washington Post”, “CNN”, “MSNBC”, The Economist, scholars (Ralph Banks) and various other magazines explore possible reasons for the “low” marital rates for US heterosexual Black women. #jesusbeaFence. Every time I look up somebody has some something to say about the Who, Where, When, How and Why about Black women’s dating lives. I personally think that the these stories function as a way to make us seem deviant in this current historical moment.

Have Black women directors of feature films been erased for so long that we consider their erasure natural?

Hortense Spillers says that Black women are the beached whale of the sexual universe and that we are awaiting our verb.

Honestly, when I think about the politics of listening to Black women’s stories I am reminded of a scene in Ava Duvernay’s documentary “My Mic Sounds Nice” on women in rap music. In this documentary there is a moment where Stephen Hill states that in some ways the reason why there are very few Black women emcees rapping is because rap music is a male dominated genre where many of the stories are talking about women, so in other words, why would rap audience members want to hear these women speak back?

~~ HATTIE McDANIEL ~~ Art by Francesco Francavilla

Actress, Radio Performer, First African American to win an Oscar in 1940. #BlackHistoryMonth #Day9