Black Artists Win For Themselves

Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash

Teyana Taylor won a Golden Globe for best supporting actress in One Battle After Another earlier this week. I don’t watch award shows anymore and I never heard of this movie until Teyana won. Immediately in the melanated social media spaces much buzz was made about Teyana winning for portraying a character who apparently engages in socially deviant behavior with a white man played by Sean Penn. As of writing, I have not seen this movie. As luck would have it, I do have access to it but it is almost three hours so yeah, I’ll get to it eventually. With that said, I don’t know the plot or even character names but I can acknowledge one thing. Black artists represent themselves. And win they win, they win for themselves. They are not representatives of the entire Black community. Hear me out.

Teyana Taylor’s role was described by some to mirror Halle Berry’s role in Monster’s Ball for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress in 2002. In Monster’s Ball, Halle Berry has a relationship and a steamy sexual tryst with a white supremacist correctional officer. Obviously, this was a controversial role and plot. There was and is no shortage of Black people who felt like Halle sold out for daring to bump uglies with a white man. More than a few feel the only reason Halle got the role because she had such an explicit sex scene. I always hate that conclusion because the plot of the movie was really rich and Halle’s acting was superb. Even Billy Bob , as wretched of a person that he was in the film, made you feel conflicted. Here is this Aryan confederate correctional officer daring to find his humanity and confront his racism. Albeit through the body of a Black woman.

Halle won for that role and infamously shouted out the generations of Black women whose shoulders she stood on. She acknowledged the historical ramifications of her win. And all these years later Black women are still hoping to win Best Actress award.

White Folks Ice is Colder

I hope that one day masses of the Black American collective turn away from the mainstream. I hope one day we build up our own Hollywood equivalent without all the misery, mayhem, addiction, exploitation and abuse. I hope that we treat our awards and ceremonies with the same reverence that we respond to white awards and ceremonies. We have to do this. We have to do this to break the spell of our creations not mattering unless white people say so. This is what it comes down to at the end of the day with situations like Beyonce wanting Best Artist of the Year, waiting to be Best Actress, needing to include token white and other characters when they can continue to make the whitest of plots. All of the ways our actresses in particular butcher their faces and abuse their bodies to fit in their scripts. Black art deserves to be acknowledged and applauded. Black artists deserve all the accolades and profit from their craft. Black artists can and should serve as inspiration and models for the community, if they should want to. But at the end of the day, it is they who won those awards, played this part, sung that song, wore that outfit, made that statement. We don’t own them or their story.

But what About Representation?

It’s the burning point to be made. Blackthelma, do you know how it reflects on us to be portrayed as whores, drug dealers, theives addicts and so and on? Can’t forget about the growing number of Black gays we see on screen? Look how it makes us look to the world. To that I say, look how that actor portrayed that role. Said Black character played a whore in a film. Well, what type of whore was she? Did she drop jewels of wisdom? Did she fight back against a system? Did she save someone’s life? Does she stay a whore the whole movie? Is she even a whore? What is a whore? There is something to be said about the multifacetedness of humanity. No one is simply one thing. We deserve to see both the positive and the negative.

Hollywood does a shit job with Black stories. It does a horrendous job not making its racism so omnipresent across the board; from scripts, to pay, to opportunities, to abuse and so on. It is so obvious watching tv and film to encounter the immense whiteness in the actualization of Black characters and stories. For this reason and this reason alone, Blackness in mainstream white film and tv will never fully encapsulate our experience and our potential not only as actors but creators, directors, writers even down to costumes and design.

We have our own. There are platforms and directors who focus strictly on Black people and Black stories. It is still a growing arena but we can not discount its significance. We have to turn inward for our reprieve in the media spaces where we can a variety of Blackness. We’re wealthy. We have degrees. We speak the sharpest standard English. We summer by the coast. We’re wives with loving husbands, two kids and a dog in the suburbs. We live simple lives. But we also are poor. We also struggle.We have fears. We have scars. We have former honor students in situationships with two kids from two different fathers. We have street guys who cry themselves to sleep at night. We’re gay. We’re trans. We’re shy. We’re bold. We’re really quiet. We’re young . We’re old. All Black. All of the time. I want to see it all. I want the full range of our Black assed experiences on the screen. I want us showing out at Black Awards show. I want the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and so on to miss our beautiful Black selves. We don’t need their endorsement to know that we matter.

To that point, Teyana Taylor won an award earlier this week. She won that. Her. That’s hers. It is not the Black community’s. It is not our award. She is Black but she is an individual. Her depiction in whatever capacity reflects on her.Maybe there is a possibility from this point that Teyana pivots into a role that would be more appealing to some. She’ll be this upstanding lady who goes to church with her three well behaved children, looking for love in a lighthearted comedy. Maybe she’ll be next up to portray any one of our founding mothers , a Madame CJ Walker or an Ida B. Wells. Who knows? All I know is that that moment was hers.

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