|
Being a Maid
By James McBride
Last night, President Obama, our first African American
President, delivered his third State of the Union
address. On that same day, the American Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated two gifted
African American actresses, Viola Davis and Octavia
Spencer, for Oscars for playing maids in
The Help.
This is 73 years after the first African American to win
an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, garnered the award for the
same role—as a maid, and a slave maid at that, winning
the Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category on
Feb. 29, 1940.
And here we are, in the year of our Lord, Jan 25, 2012.
Maybe I’m getting old, but the irony of this is too
much. Or perhaps I’ve heard this song before. In the
1970s, when I was a freshman at Oberlin College, my
white friends and I used to sit up and talk about racism
and solving society’s problems all through the night
until the sun rose. Not much good came from these talks,
the least of which is I hoped to get laid, which rarely
happened. But on those cold nights, I was convinced that
when I walked out of college, racism would be just about
finished. Instead, it smashed me across the face like a
bottle when I walked into the real world. Now, 33 years
later, I find myself talking about the same thing I
talked about when I was a college freshman.
I have no take with Ms. Davis and Ms. Spencer. They’re
outstanding actresses. But the nomination of these two
women by the Hollywood community 73 years after Hattie
McDaniel won for the same role speaks for itself. As
co-writer and co-producer of Spike Lee’s newest film
Red
Hook Summer, and his previous feature film
Miracle At St. Anna, I have a clear eyed view of
what the cultural display of African American life means
to hearts in Hollywood, a land of feints and double
meanings and as tricky to navigate as anything inside
the Beltway. I wish someone had told me this when I was
a freshman at Oberlin.
America is a super power not because we make the biggest
guns. We’re a superpower because our culture has
saturated the planet: Levis, Apple, Nike, Disney, Coke,
Pepsi, McDonald’s, Jazz, Rhythm n Blues, Rock ‘n Roll,
and Hip Hop. Our culture dominates the world far more
than any nuclear bomb can. When you can make a person
think a certain way, you don’t have to bomb them. Just
give them some credit cards, a wide screen 3D TV, some
potato chips, and watch what happens. This kind of
cultural war, a war of propaganda and words, elements
that both Hollywood and Washington know a lot about,
makes America powerful beyond measure. The hard metal of
this cultural weaponry, much of it, emanates from the
soul of Blacks, the African American experience
in music, dance, art, and literature.
But this kind of cultural war puts minority
storytellers—Blacks, Asians, Latinos and people of
color—at a distinct disadvantage. My friend Spike Lee is
a clear example.
Three days ago, at the premiere of Red
Hook Summer at The Sundance Film Festival,
Spike, usually a cool and widely accepting soul whose
professional life is as racially diverse as any American
I know– lost his cool for 30 seconds. When prompted by a
question from Chris Rock who was seated in the audience,
he blurted out a small, clear truth: He said one reason
we did Red
Hook Summer independently was because he could
not get Hollywood to green light the follow-up to
Inside Man which cost only $45 million to make and
grossed a whopping $184,376,240 million domestically and
worldwide—plus another $37 million domestically on DVD
sales. Within minutes, the internet lit up with burning
personal criticism of him stitched into negative reviews
of Red
Hook Summer by so-called film critics and
tweeters.
I don’t mind negative reviews. That’s life in the big
leagues. But it’s the same old double standard. The
recent success of Red Tails which depicts the story of
the all black Tuskegee Airmen, is a clear example. Our
last film,
Miracle at St. Anna, which paid homage to
the all-black 92nd Division, which fought on the ground
in Italy, was blasted before it even got out the gate.
Maybe it’s a terrible film. Maybe it deserved to bomb.
The difference is this: When
George Lucas
complained
publicly about the fact that he had to finance his own
film because Hollywood executives told him they didn’t
know how to market a black film, no one called him a
fanatic. But when Spike Lee says it, he’s a racist
militant and a malcontent. Spike’s been saying the same
thing for 25 years. And he had to go to Italy to raise
money for a film that honors American soldiers, because
unlike
Lucas, he’s not a billionaire. He couldn’t reach
in his pocket to create, produce, market, and promote
his film like Lucas did with
Red
Tails.
But there’s a deeper, even more critical element here,
because it’s the same old story: Nothing in this world
happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein
lies the problem of being a professional black
storyteller—writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is
like serving as Hoke, the driver in
Driving Miss
Daisy, except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest
of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to
and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched
together, but only when the boss decides your story
intersects with his or her life is your story valid.
Because you’re a kind of cultural maid. You serve up the
music, the life, the pain, the spirituality. You clean
house. Take the kids to school. You serve the eggs and
pour the coffee. And for your efforts the white folks
thank you. They pay you a little. They ask about your
kids.
Then they jump into the swimming pool and you go home to
your life on the outside, whatever it is. And if lucky
you get to be the wise old black sage that drops pearls
of wisdom, the wise old poet or bluesman who says ‘I
been buked and scorned,’ and you heal the white folks,
when in fact you can’t heal anybody. In fact, you’re
actually as dumb as they are, dumber maybe, because you
played into the whole business. Robbing a character of
their full dimension, be it in fiction or non fiction,
hurts everyone the world over. Need proof? Ask any
Native American, Asian, Latino, Gay American, or so
called white “hillbilly.” As if hillbillies don’t read
books, and Asians don’t rap, and Muslims don’t argue
about the cost of a brake job.
There’s nothing wrong with being white. I’m half white
myself and proud of it. There isn’t a day passes that I
don’t think about my late white Jewish mother and the
lessons she taught me about humanity. But bearing
witness to this kind of cultural war over the course of
a lifetime will grind a man or woman down in horrible
ways, and that’s my fear. I remember as a young
saxophonist, just out of Oberlin, standing at a tiny
jazz club in West Philadelphia watching the great jazz
tenorman
Hank Mobley in his last days, sick, broke. It
was a jam session, and he strode onstage to reach for
the magic one more time, to conjure up the power of his
younger years when his mighty tenor powered
Art Blakey
and the Jazz Messengers and
Miles Davis when those guys
were the toast of Europe. Drink destroyed him. He was
helped onstage by the kind musicians around him, and he
stood there swaying, barely able to hold up his horn in
that rancid little joint. When he put his mouth to his
horn to play, it broke my heart. I felt like I was being
strangled. His ability to play had vanished, and I saw
my future.
It was terrible lesson for a young man fresh out of
college and I did my best to forget it. But I understand
it then and I understand it now: This is what happens
when you walk through a supermarket and hear muzak
playing ninth chords borrowed from your history; when
you see instructions books made from the very harmonic
innovations you created, and in my case, when you spend
a lifetime watching films that spoof your community.
Your entire culture is boiled down to greasy gut bucket
jokester films, pornographic bling-rap, or poverty porn.
I used to think that if only there were a peaceful way,
we could make Hollywood listen to the sound of America’s
true drumbeat: the voices of working class poor, blacks,
Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, and the so-called
rednecks of this country; the people that walk the land,
work in the K-Marts, run the fast food joints, drive the
trucks, stand in line at 4 a.m. for the i-phones, go to
church for redemption, and sell the knockoff s on eBay.
But the new breed of Republicans have taken that high
ground. They’ve gotten rich off it. That leaves me with
nothing but the notion that Washington and Hollywood may
be just alike. They’re engaged in a cultural war. They
take your gun and use it on you, and it makes you sorry
you drew your gun in the first place. It makes you wish
you were a maid.
James McBride
(born September 11, 1957) is an American writer and
musician whose compositions have been recorded by a
variety of other musicians. He is best-known for his
1996 memoir, the bestselling
The Color of Water, which describes his life
growing up in a large, poor African American family led
by a white, religious, and strict Jewish mother, whose
father was an Orthodox rabbi, but converted and became
devoutly Christian during her first marriage to Andrew
McBride. "I thought it would be received well in the
black community but it's sold much better in the white
Jewish community," he said. "Most of my readers are
middle-age, white, Jewish women. . . ." The memoir
spent over two years on
The New York Times bestseller list, and now appears
on high school and university course lists across
America.
In 2002, he
published a novel,
Miracle at St. Anna, drawing on the history of
the overwhelmingly African American
92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from
mid-1944 to April 1945. The book was adapted into the
movie
Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee,
released on September 26, 2008. In 2005, he published
the first volume of
The Process, a CD-based
documentary about life as lived by low-profile jazz
musicians. In 2008, McBride uses the notorious criminal
Patty Cannon as a villain in his novel Song Yet
Sung.—Wikipedia
* * *
* *
Oscar nominations 2012: full list
 |
Juano Hernández (July 19, 1896 – July 17, 1970) was a Puerto Rican stage and film actor of African descent who was a pioneer in the African-American film industry. He made his debut in an Oscar Micheaux film, The Girl from Chicago which was directed at black audiences. Hernández also performed in a serious of dramatic roles in mainstream Hollywood movies. His participation in the film "Intruder in the Dust" earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination for "New Star of the Year." . . . In 1949, he acted in his first mainstream film, based on William Faulkner's novel, Intruder in the Dust, in which he played the role of "Lucas Beauchamp", a poor Southern sharecropper unjustly accused of murder. The film earned him a Golden Globe nomination for "New Star of the Year." The film was listed as one of the ten best of the year by the New York Times. Faulkner said of the film: "I'm not much of a moviegoer, but I did see that one. I thought it was a fine job. That Juano Hernandez is a fine actor—and man, too." Film historian Donald Bogle said that
Intruder in the Dust broke new ground in the cinematic portrayal of blacks, and Hernandez's "performance and extraordinary presence still rank above that of almost any other black actor to appear in an American movie."—Wikipedia |
* * *
* *
|
Mammy to Minnie: Black Women Oscar
Winners—Luchina Fisher—28 February
2012—After
Octavia Spencer won the Academy
Award for best supporting actress,
Jennifer Hudson, who won the same
award in 2006, was first to welcome her
into the very exclusive club of black
women Oscar winners. . . . Like all
families, this one comes with baggage.
For most Oscar winners, an Academy Award
is a boon to their careers, both in
terms of roles and earning power. For
black women, the road after Oscar seems
to be less certain. "The reality is
there aren't enough good roles for black
women, let alone plus sized ones,"
Village Voice columnist Michael
Musto told ABCNews.com.
Just look at
Mo'Nique, who won the same award in
2010 for
Precious. She
only recently signed onto her next
feature after her BET talk show was
cancelled. Then, there's her co-star
Gabourey Sidibe, who was nominated
for a best actress Oscar. After a couple
of small film roles, Sidibe is now a
regular on the Showtime series "The Big
C" with Laura Linney. Spencer, who
became only the sixth black woman to win
an Oscar, has more acting chops than
both and should fare better. "Octavia
has already shown her range in both
drama and wacky comedy, so she should do
fine in a variety of character parts
that show off her talent. In addition to
films, there's also TV (which Octavia's
already done and can shine in again),"
Musto said—abcnews |
 |
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
|
The Black Arts Movement
Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
By
James Edward Smethurst
Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist,
and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African
American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s
coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural
wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive
analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the
Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply
influenced the production and reception of literature
and art in the United States through its negotiations of
the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization,
and the civil rights movement.
|
 |
Taking a
regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions
of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement
distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity,
while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in
view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally
changed American attitudes about the relationship
between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically
transformed the landscape of public funding for the
arts.—Publisher,
University of North Carolina Press
* * *
* *
 |
Visions of a Liberated Future
Black Arts Movement Writings
By
Larry Neal
"What we have been
trying to arrive at is some kind of
synthesis of the writer's function as an
oppressed individual and a creative
artist," states Neal (1937-1981), a
writer, editor, educator and activist
prominent in the Black Arts movement of
the 1960s and '70s. Articulate, highly
charged essays about the black
experience examine the views of his
predecessors--musicians and political
theorists as well as
writers--continually weighing artistic
achievement against political efficacy.
While the essays do not exclude any
readers, Neal's drama, poetry and
fiction are more limited in their form
of address, more explicitly directed to
the oppressed. The poems are
particularly intense in their protest:
"How many of them / . . . have been made
to /prostitute their blood / to the
merchants of war." Rhythmic and adopting
the repetitive structure of music, they
capture the "blues in our mothers'
voices / which warned us / blues people
bursting out." Commentaries by Neal's
peers, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch,
Charles Fuller and Jayne Cortez,
introduce the various sections.—Publishers
Weekly |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 27 January 2012
|
