You know it's bad when the simple query, "why does the black guy always die first?" returns 7,990,000 results in 0.14 seconds. This specter has once again raised it's head this summer—no, not the jive-talking gold-toothed jiggabots of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen infamy—but in the movie X-Men: First Class. It would seem that one character won't be making it to the second class. Can you guess which one? I must confess, for the record, that I have not been a fan of any of the X-Men adaptations since Storm uttered one of the most sorry-ass lines ever written for a movie. EVER. "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else." I usually give filmmakers a lot of latitude when it comes to imagery when dealing with black people. I liked the 1986 musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Some critics and many friends have debated me over Levi Stubbs' voice performance as well as the architecture of the juicy red-lipped carnivorous vegetable Audrey 2. I wasn't put off by it and actually saw the satire of a cool R&B-singing plant helping Rick Moranis' pipsqueak Seymour Krelborn get the girl, all the while priming earth for conquest.
Being somewhat of a visual anthropological hobbyist (which is the study of culture(s) through films, photography, et al) I've been fascinated with imagery since early childhood. As a lad in the seventies I consumed a lot of racist material in the forms of cartoons, comic books and movies. From the black maid whose ashy legs and droopy stockings were all we saw as she bounced around screaming "Hep me! Hep! Itsa mouse!" on Tom and Jerry; to the creative leap many comic book writers / artists made by putting the moniker "black" in front of a black character's name as if we couldn't tell he was black by the way he dropped his "g"s when speakin' or his 3-foot wide afro-shaped helmet a la Black Lightning. Jared M. Breaks it down here. Let's not forget how Jeff Burton's Dodge, the quiet cerebral antonym to Charlton Heston's swaggering mid-life machismo, ended up stuffed and on display in the original (and still the best) Planet of the Apes. I guess that goes to prove that a black scientist ain't nothin' but a sandwich even in futuristic dystopias. Thank God for Star Trek--a place in the universe where people of different cultures, races, genders, and even species, could come together and become a grander mosaic. Here, the characters recognized that in their disparateness was their greatest strength. Whoopi Goldberg, who later played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, described Uhura as a role model for her, recalling that she told her family, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"As a child I could not articulate any of these feelings of dissatisfaction. I just observed and absorbed. I just knew something—or an entire race of people—was missing. I think this, in part, fueled my desire to create. All too often we of the African diaspora are marginalized both by mainstream Hollywood and Madison Avenue. If you recall the commercials of the 1970s-80s, and if you saw brown faces in them, all you got was a lot of "sangin'" and dancin', as if black viewers could only digest the content if it were attached to musical numbers. My friend, L. Trey Wilson, the brilliant playwright, once told me of a party he attended where he met the producers of the groundbreaking Showtime series, Queer as Folk. One of the producer's response to Mr. Wilson's question of why a show about gay people was made up of an entirely white cast was that he felt he couldn't write an authentic black gay character sufficiently. Translation: So, instead of doing research or the unthinkable of hiring a person of color (there's no room for affirmative action in gay cable) they decided to omit black queers entirely. Really? Shylock said it best in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:
If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
At least in the original UK version, created by Russell T Davies of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame, one of the main gay boy's closest friends was a biracial girl named Donna. She had the best line of the entire series when Nathan was complaining that his mother was persecuting him and snooping through his things because he was gay. Her quip? "I'm black and I'm a girl. Try that for a week!"
So often we complain about the establishment and yet we perpetrate the worst kinds of stereotyping. I'm sure I will make many a enemy saying this, but I must take E. Lynn Harris and Tyler Perry to task on their overly melodramatic archetypes. Villainous Stephen Harris (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) and Brain White's (I Can Do Bad All by Myself) characters were written so broadly that I thought each was going to break out in maniacal laughter while twirling an imaginary mustache. And let's not forget to mention the hypocritical morality play: The Family that Preys. The overwrought plot's central adulterous affair between a black woman played meanly by Sanaa Lathan and her philandering boss, Cole Hauser, lacks sex-appeal or even sleeze. Of course, when the shit gets stuck to the Gucci loafer, the black woman bears the brunt of the fallout (losing her job, house, Mercedes AND husband) while her white lover continues in his marriage running a multi-million dollar corporation. Yancey Harrington Braxton and Basil Henderson were so patently Dynastysian in Not a Day Goes By and Mama Dearest by E. Lynn Harris that it was like reading flash cards written as Cliff Notes for Melrose Place or The Colbys for people who didn't understand all the pretentious campiness. Ironically, it took a gay southerner to buck the kill-off and remediate the black characters to obscurity. Alan Ball's Trueblood took Lafayette (who was killed early on in Charlaine Harris's fist novel in the Sookie Stackhouse books) and Tara (an acquaintance of Sookie who is underused in the novels) seriously. He created great characters for two great actors; not only have their roles been expanded in the HBO smash-hit, but they've become fan favorites. They are never fodder, filler or throwaway characters yet they enrich the show. Devona Walker explains it here. Which goes to prove: when you see things in living color they become much more vivid.
