Many commentators are hailing the “The 20th Annual Hollywood Issue” of Vanity Fair (on newsstands today) for featuring as many Black on its coveted cover as Whites. But I’m not impressed.
Granted, this stands in stark contrast to previous issues, which gave the impression that Blacks in Hollywood are just bit players unworthy of being featured in such prominent, trendsetting fashion. Not to mention, to use an historical analogy, the impression that Hollywood is a plantation where Blacks are like house niggers, Hispanics and Asians like field hands.
Frankly:
Aside from appealing to Hollywood’s fondness for Black-Mammy characters, I honestly don’t get this.
(“Playing ‘Black’ to Win Oscars…? The iPINIONS Journal, February 7, 2013)
In this case, if you were to take away the Black actors who either played slaves in 12 Years a Slave or freedom fighters in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, the cover for this year’s VF Hollywood issue would be just as lily White as every other one.
The consolidation of a Black presence in the movies and television did not signal the arrival of a postracial Hollywood any more than the election of Barack Obama in 2008 spelled the end of America’s 400-year-old racial drama.
(“Hollywood’s Whiteout,” New York Times, February 11, 2011)
In other words, far from heralding a new era of diversity in Hollywood, this VF cover merely reflects Hollywood’s longstanding practice of celebrating Blacks who play roles that reinforce Black stereotypes.
I would’ve been impressed, for example, if the Academy had awarded Denzel Washington his Best Actor Oscar for playing a pilot (albeit a cocky and drunk one) in Flight, instead of awarding it to him for playing a thug masquerading as a detective in Training Day.
Or even if the Academy had awarded Quvenzhané Wallis the Best Actress Oscar for playing an enchanting and precocious six-year old in Beast of the Southern Wild, instead of awarding the only one any Black actress has ever won to Halle Berry for playing a Black single mother struggling to make ends meet in Monster’s Ball.
Talk about stereotypes; hell, the woman Berry plays in this movie actually gets involved in a relationship with the White man who executed her husband, making it little more than a modern-day version of relationships White masters had with their female slaves. Alas, these are the kinds of playing-Black roles Hollywood loves to celebrate.
But enough of the slavery, Black-struggle, and gangsta movies already! Time for Hollywood to begin dramatizing and celebrating the illegal-immigrant, crop-picking struggles of our Hispanic brothers and sisters, no?
Related commentaries:
The Oscar goes to…
No Blacks please…