White Women: Five Films You Need To See Yesterday
I feel very conflicted about being at home right now. As much as I feel like I should be outside, blocking streets, making space for Black people as they reclaim these very streets: I simply can’t. I live in a household where a COVID-19 infection could be deadly.
Pre-pandemic, I was trying to hone down the amount of time I spent on social media. Obviously, we’ve all found ways to connect digitally. For that, I’m grateful. In the wake of the protests surrounding illegal, racist police killings, and the clear amount of people who are also making the choice to remain sheltered in place, I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern amongst my fellow white women.
I see a lot of people in my position (stuck at home, white, middle-aged) trying very hard to wade in and impress upon everyone, including Black people, the weight of their own relevance. I see a lot of white women, particularly Gen X (me) or older who don’t have enough of a context or an education to have earned a place in this conversation…yet.
If that sounds like you (and seriously no judgement if it is) the Black community and the activist community alike need you to some spend time educating yourself. We need you to:
- Learn how to actively listen before you start speaking presumptively about race
- Don’t force your Black colleagues to “educate you” about race and racism. You’re a white ally. That’s actually YOUR job.
- Remove yourself as the subject of the narrative or the hero of your internal struggle
- Cancel your conversations about your inner revelations. Stop having them. No Black people need to hear about how much you’re growing right now. Save that shit for your white friends.
- Make yourself as small as possible, and donate your privilege and your resources.
Right now — and again this is if you’ve just started to notice the actual struggle of Black people — we all need you to spend some time educating yourself. Sure it’s important to tell people what you’re learning and to share those resources (that goes double if you’re young). Us middle-aged white ladies, though: if you just woke up to this, you clearly have some catching up to do
Taking yourself out of the conversation is hard. It takes practice. It requires humility. I can’t say this enough: it requires CONTEXT. So, watch, read, listen.
Five Films You Must Watch
Yes, some of these are old. The historic context of how a few of them sit in history is precisely why I’m drawing your attention to them now. And they’re all (mostly) available online.
Paris is Burning (1990)
This landmark documentary is the reason that we can all enjoy the show Pose three decades later. Watch it because you need to learn now that the vocabulary that we all take for granted didn’t just originate from Black people. It originated from Black queer people.
This documentary came out when AIDS was wreaking the havoc on the gay community (that echoes the impact of COVID-19 today). Everyone alive should see this film once. I’m not giving you any more information than that (outside of the fact that it took seven years to shoot it). To give you any more information about it is to rob you of the experience you’ll have seeing it for the first time. It is breathtaking. It is in a category of its own. It’s not like nothing you’ll see before or after it.
Available on iTunes and other streaming platforms.
The Brother from Another Planet (1984)
Back in 1984, when John Sayles made this film, Black people were scarcely allowed to tell their own stories, and Sayles has always been interested in using all the cash he made working inside the Hollywood system as a writer to create films as a writer/director work that amplified the plight of others. (If you want to see a truly legit film about the history of the American labor movement, you could do worse than his 1988 film Matewan.) In the case of his landmark film Brother, he also used a portion of a MacArthur Fellowship arts grant to fund its paltry production budget. (I think he got all of $35,000 a year for five years…so it wasn’t like that was even a ton of money in the 80s.)
This movie introduced me (and most of the world outside of New York theater) to the brilliant Joe Morton (yes, that Joe Morton). I was a teenager when I first saw it and it’s probably one of the reasons that I didn’t understand how racist early 80s America was. I reasonably thought that if men like Sayles were casting men like Morton in roles like this, then the world (reasonably, I thought, I was a teenager remember) was changing. It wouldn’t be the last time I learned how wrong I was about white people.
The summary of the film on IMDB hardly does it justice: “A mute alien with the appearance of a Black human is chased by outer-space bounty hunters through the streets of Harlem.”
In is conversation about the struggles of inner Harlem, the film is not subtle. When he made the film, Sayles had very little experience as a director. Still, he helped usher in the indie aesthetic that other New York directors vaguely his juniors (I mean specifically Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch) would use to greater success later. That Sayles was a pioneering storyteller is specifically what makes this film so remarkable.
I challenge you to find another sci-fi film from that era shot on a shoestring that puts a Black man in this gaze. It’s not the greatest film of its era. But as a white kid growing up in the midwest of the 80s, it blew a hole in my consciousness that would later become filled with Black imagery created by Black people. (Lessons — all of them — have to start somewhere. I’ll always be grateful to Sayles that he, through his urgency and insistence as a storyteller, delivered this narrative to teenaged, midwestern me).
Among the many reasons I’m insisting that a lot of you look back and understand context through not just any film, but this actual film, is because of how blackness was discussed at time. Worth noting: there weren’t any Black film critics to react to the piece of proto-Afrofuturism in real time. The reviews were largely condescending and oblivious to the film’s (albeit somewhat “gaze-y” and obviously white version of) actual blackness. Of note: while the film’s director isn’t Black, its cinematographer Ernest Dickerson is. He would go to on to have a massive cinematic influence and body of work with Spike Lee and shoot the films Do the Right Thing and Malcom X (among others).
So, said another way: in 1983, John Sayles cast two present day crucially important Black artists in Hollywood to both star in and shoot his directorial debut in a movie where Harlem is the main subject. You may forgive him now if the product feels clunky in hindsight. In its day: I assure you that it was nothing short of revolutionary.
Because a Black critical lens was unavailable at the time, its critical response then was tepid and whitewashed. In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio suggests that more time should be spent focusing on the film’s goofy antagonists (played by Sayles and a young David Strathairn). “The movie would have benefited from more attention to the bounty hunters, whose difficulties with Harlem culture would have balanced the Brother’s strange ease of assimilation,” he wrote from the cozy-ass vantage of a white guy in 1984.
So, did you get that? The film would be better if it focused more on the two white, male characters than on Morton’s confused, disoriented, mournful and meditative performance. (Also, no. The film would have benefited from more money and an era that embraced Black directors, you dick.) Professional, noted asshole Vince Canby of the New York Times wrote: “Supporting Mr. Morton are more than a dozen character actors for whom Mr. Sayles has written some very good, wacky incidental scenes and dialogue, most of which are more entertaining than the principal plot line.” Are they, though? (Answer: no. They’re not.)
Wouldn’t it be great if there was one piece of film crit from the era from a single Black person to discuss how race is discussed in this film starring an actual Black person? Yeah, so…there isn’t. There is this, though: a 2002 interview with Sayles about the importance of this particular film. Sayles himself says here that many of the Black people on the crew, all of whom were from New York, had never stepped foot in Harlem until the film’s production).
From the vantage of 2002, the film made a lot more sense, or at least it did to writer/interviewer Gil Jaewietz:
“The bold, colorful cinematography by a young Ernest Dickerson and the powerful, subtle performance by Joe Morton (as well as the rest of the uniformly excellent cast) help the film create a mood and atmosphere beyond both its budget and the mechanics of its excellent story. As a science fiction film, The Brother From Another Planet couldn’t be more firmly grounded in reality.”
Available to rent on iTunes (and presumably elsewhere).
Crooklyn (1994)
I spent a fair amount of time looking for a list of movies with a young Black girl in the lead or that feature leading Black girls of any kind that were released during my young adulthood that wasn’t also directed by Spike Lee. There’s one. I shit you not it’s Sister Act II starring Whoopie Goldberg and the young Black “star” is Lauryn Hill. She’s not the film’s lead (which is why I put that in quotes) but at least she’s in it. This was the same era where Halle Berry who made her debut in Lee’s 1991 movie Jungle Fever , playing a literal crack ho. (That isn’t to take away from how well she did just that. She slays.)
You can count the number of films that featured Black women in prominent roles in the 1990s on one hand.
To discuss a movie where (A) the Black girl in it isn’t a fucking slave and (B) the narrative is told from the girl’s perspective and that perspective isn’t about being the “child of struggle” and (C) isn’t directed by Spike Lee that was released during the first decade of my adulthood is impossible because it doesn’t exist.
There is one film and one film only that fits that bill. And it’s Crooklyn.
The feminist pop culture site Bustle describes Crooklyn as “one of the first films told primarily from the perspective of a black girl” and it didn’t exist until I was 24. I’m not alone in saying that Spike Lee is an uneven director. I think that Do the Right Thing is in a league of its own. I have no doubt that he he changed the world.
I frankly think that Crooklyn is his best, most important, and most seminal film for the very reason that it’s the story of a middle class Black family told through the eyes of that family’s only girl.
I saw it in the theater in 1994 with my best friend (then and now) who is Black. We were surprised we liked it as much as we did mostly because we just hadn’t liked a Spike Lee film in its entirety since Do the Right Thing. (In particular, we hated how utterly misogynistic and broken the message is in the aforementioned “Fever”).
The movie is simple. It’s about the Lee family, and the script was co-written penned by Lee and his younger sister, Joie. Crooklyn’s lead actor, Zelda Harris, was a staggering choice, a lightning-smart piece of casting, and turns in a remarkable performance for an actor of any age. It was the first time my best friend had ever, in her life, seen a part of herself on a movie screen…and she was twenty four years old. Joie Lee is only about 6 years older than I am, so her character is firmly rooted in our era.
Because the movie is about Troy (a stand in for Joie), a little Black girl from an educated family who is growing up navigating contrasting the world of her neighborhood ( Brooklyn) and her southern Black family. The film jumps us into a completely different aspect ratio when Troy visits her grandparents in the south (we thought that some shit was up with the projector at the time).
I felt the same way when I walked out of that movie as I did when I saw Thelma and Louise only a handful of years earlier (1991). While it’s not literally about my friend (she’s from DC), it was the closest thing to a version of her we’d, or she’d, ever seen. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t 100% identify with the character on the screen. When there is such a foundational lack of representation of your experiences in the most powerful form of narrative in your culture, seeing something tangential or related to your experience for the first time doesn’t just alter your expectations. It changes your cellular alignment. It changes your creative DNA.
Were my friend and — who I loved and still love like a sister (I will text this to her for comment before any of you read it) — quiet when we walked out? Was that the moment that she shared a backlog of anecdotes I hadn’t yet heard about her grandma aggressively hot combing her hair and how painful it was? Is that when I learned that as a teenager, even though my friend hated straightening her hair (she still does), she did it herself before she went down south for visits because it was literally less physically painful when she did it herself?
Was it after we saw that movie that my closest friend on earth told me that The Bluest Eye was her favorite book because it was the first she’d read about a little Black girl who felt “even a little bit like me”? Was it after that movie that we talked about how she felt isolated from her culture because she, like Crooklyn’s actual protagonist, wasn’t raised in a religious family? Was seeing that film the conduit for our discussions about how she resented the Black community’s homophobia?
Crooklyn could hardly be called the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but it remains a singularity. Its young lead should have been its breakout star. There was no home for her in Hollywood (it’s questionable there would be today) in 1994, so she has barely worked since. (Granted, this could have been her choice; what rational parent would want their baby girl in that business, right?) It’s a relatively small cast, and it’s some comfort to me that Alfre Woodard, who is the film and its story’s emotional anchor, has maintained a consistent level of stardom that would have been unheard of until our lifetime.
(Oh, speaking of both Woodard and Sayles? Ms. Woodard is hauntingly good in that director’s 1992 film Passion Fish. It garnered her a 1992 Independent Spirit Award and a host of other nods. She grounds the entire film with her grace and power.)
The movie is a solid turn for Lee as a director. That it’s still so remarkably under celebrated even in his own canon only highlights how happy the world remains to ignore Black women in culture, the experiences of young Black women, the stories of young Black girls (when they’re not being discussed in the context of poverty and crime), and the importance of representation.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Eve’s Bayou is dense. Everything about it is dense. It was shot on a terribly low budget, and it is another singular movie from a time when Black stories were largely performative for a white audience. Eve’s Bayou is an unapologetically Black film. It’s the second feature length film in the history of fucking American cinema to be directed by a Black woman. (The first, Julie Dash’s Daughters in the Dust was released in 1991.)
Eve’s Bayou is remarkable for a lot of reasons. It’s a sprawling southern family gothic noir. It’s also told from the young protagonist’s perspective. Diahann Carrol and Samuel L. Jackson are in this movie. The always stunning (and good fucking good god is she ever staggeringly good in this) Lynn Whitfield is incredible, as is a young Meagan Good. The film’s most stellar performance, hands down, is delivered by the amazing Debbi Morgan. That she didn’t win any performance awards for her turn as young Eve’s aunt is still a glaring failure.
The then very, very young Jurnee Smollet was so good (she steals all her scenes, and the scenes between her and Morgan are the film’s best), she broke out as a young Black actress at a time when that was still a feat. That’s not an accident. It’s a testament to how unforgettable she was.
It was one of the best films of that year. You know what won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance that year? It wasn’t Eve’s Bayou. You’re going to have to google the name of the actual winner because that particular film is so boring, so ineffectual, pretentious and irrelevant: I refuse to name it. (To say it’s unmemorable is an understatement; unless you were really paying attention to indie cinema in the 90s, you’ve never fucking heard of it, let alone seen it. As far as seeing it goes? Don’t bother. It’s terrible. Objectively, I mean. It’s objectively pointless, dull, and yes…patriarchal.) No one at the most preeminent film festivals could be bothered to give the only film directed by a Black woman — and again, one of the best films by any measure of the entire year if not the whole damn decade — any awards at any major festival for what I’d still argue is a blazingly brilliant and original film.
I’m not going to compare it directly to Daughters in the Dust. (I don’t line up films directed by men side by side for the simple fact that they were directed by men, either.) It managed to win an Independent Spirit Award that year. As far as I can dig up: that’s the only cinematic recognition its director has ever gotten.
Its director, Kasi Lemmons, was in a class by herself. I can’t imagine how difficult the Hollywood path was for her— a young Black female director — in 1997. It was terrible enough for women in general then. This was her directing debut. (She had some success as an actor up to this point; she’s dope in Fear of a Black Hat.)
Lemmons has done well as a director (Talk to Me is a complete delight). That Black women have any kind of footing today in the film business is due in no small part to her. There are a few reasons that you may not like the film. The story editing can be clunky. Terence Blanchard’s score is beautiful, but at times, overwrought. But if it feels dated, it may simply because, like anything that’s over a quarter of a century old, it is dated. It is still hands down one of my favorite films from the era.
Imagine being me in 1997. Your best friend is Black. You list artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder amongst your favorite recording artists of all time. You love hip hop. You have a group of friends that today would be described as intersectional. And you’re 27. And you JUST saw your first film in a movie theater directed by a Black woman. You think it deserves praise, accolades, awards, mentions on top 10 lists.
…and it gets none of those things.
I don’t care if you love this film as much as I do. There will never be anything remotely called a Black classical cinema if Eve’s Bayou isn’t claimed amongst those titles. It absolutely should be, warts and all. What is remarkable about it today is its perspective. This is a Black women’s story. Because they are isolated both from men and white people, we only see their tragedy from their own eyes. Racism is always a specter, but Lemmons spares us the cliches of southern bigotry. Instead, we are left to feast on the tender isolation this family has to grapple with. It’s a simple and outstanding cinematic achievement and one that has always been vastly underrated.
Available on HBO and for rent on iTunes etc.
Black is…Black Ain’t (1995)
By the time I saw this life-changing documentary, its director, the visionary Marlon Riggs, had died of AIDS at the tender age of 37. He was the definition of an underground filmmaker. He’s also an ideal figure to read about and research if you’re new to this discussion. Do some googling about the massive amount of bullshit, racist nonsense he faced with his film Tongues United. Read about him. Spend time in his world, and I promise you’ll be a better person once you do.
On a personal level, by 1994 I had Black gay friends who had already tirelessly explained to me the strange and unwelcoming position they had to hold in the world. (I lived in San Francisco at the time, which, alongside New York were maybe the only two places remotely friendly to both queerness and blackness in America; that needle hasn’t moved nearly enough.) Riggs was a Black gay man whose religious relatives weren’t accepting of his homosexuality, nor was the civil rights movement. (Many of the most important civil rights activists of the 1960s were avowed homophobes.)
The painful and annihilating combination of racism and homophobia left men and women like Riggs — queer Black people who were alienated by both white and Black culture — without a comfortable home in society.
The film is about a lot of things. It’s a meditation on the unenviable position that Riggs and his contemporaries (the film features, among others, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Bill T. Jones, and Cornell West) held in the Black community as queer or queer-friendly. It’s also a meditation on gumbo as a symbol of Black culture. It’s Riggs’ farewell message. I feel incredibly lucky to have seen it in a theater amongst people who were ready to contextualize it for me in real time.
He speaks often on camera (as his body was being ravaged by AIDS during the film’s post production). Of both AIDS and being Black in America he says: “Each of them is a struggle against the gods in the face of adversity, in the face of possible extinction.” This gorgeous write up of the film (from the San Francisco Chronicle, written at the time when it was screening at The Roxie in the Mission, where I originally saw it) puts the film in a sad and revelatory context:
“It was part of Riggs’ talent that he could argue for black gay dignity without obscuring the other issues and hurts of the African American community.
To Riggs, it was all connected: By shunning and silencing its gay brothers and lesbian sisters, he believed, the black community only cheats itself.”
In terms of where to rent? I suggest that your local library may have this available as DVD to check out. There could be a film archive where it’s available near you, too. It looks like you can also buy a cheap version from Amazon. (Also, I know you have ways to watch this online. Folks are welcome to post in the comments if it’s available through a digital library.)
Other Stuff:
This list from Parade magazine is exhaustive and very current.
I wrote this as a resource for both my Black and white friends.
Bonus visual tools. Internet hero Noelle Cress created these tiles for posting on social media. They are amazing. Use them as needed.
Postscript
If this discussion about race, and especially if the phrase “Black Lives Matter” makes you uncomfortable: sit with your discomfort. (If you’ve never had a conversation with a Black person about race — this if very important — now is not the time to do it.) Ask your discomfort questions. Have conversations with that discomfort. DO NOT bring that discomfort to the feet of a Black person right now. You are sitting on a page full of resources. Use them. Process in silence with those resources. Ask questions ONLY when you’re ready to listen. Thanks.
