To begin I would like to inform readers that my words and thoughts flow solely from an inner place of reflection. This piece is written by me, a privileged white, approaching forty female with European ancestry. I am a writer and filmmaker who is currently working on a personal journey towards educating myself on African American history and the representation of minorities in film. Some of the topics I have been reading, watching and listening to over the last month have included police brutality against minorities in America, how American history is built on a foundation of oppressed black slaves, and how white feminism has and continues to exclude women of colour.
I felt compelled to write this article during the beginning of recent protests occurring around various states in and around the USA, after countless unjust deaths of black men and women at the hands of white American police officers. I can’t identify to my core with the African American community as I have not lived my life as a person of colour. I will never understand how it feels to have to make calculated daily choices based around my safety due to the colour of my skin, but it doesn't mean that I don't feel angry, sad and frustrated when hearing of the unwarranted deaths of George Floyd and the many who have come before and likely will follow.
For me, though far removed, the protests brought up a lot of memories of my past and made me think about how much American Black culture I consumed as a child and a teenager through watching American movies and music performed and written by African American artists. It also made me realise that despite all that consuming in my youth, as an adult I did not know much at all what a truthful representation of African American culture was, what the culture was built on or what it stemmed from.
With this miseducation and ignorance in mind, I want to talk about how I personally consumed and then perceived African American culture as a white woman growing up in Australia. Also, I want to share with fellow white artists reading this ways in which we can take responsibility for what perceptions are put out there and how we can change the narrative through storytelling.
Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock 1969.
Personally, my introduction to African American culture started through music. Growing up in my pre-teens I listened to my parent’s record collection religiously, and that is when I fell in love with the sounds of Motown. I would listen to Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Tina Turner, The Supremes, and more. Jimi Hendrix was my favourite.
As a teen I was into rap and heavy non-mainstream hip-hop music and later on the more mainstream groups, most of which were African American artists. I even wore my hair in cornrows and took on the same clothing street style as my African American musical idols. I guess when we are young we are easily influenced and truly I confess that I grew up as a music fanatic who had little idea about the culture I was emulating. How naive of me, but I know I was not alone. If I was doing this now I would be accused of cultural appropriation.
The films I was watching at that time depicted African American culture in a ‘one size fits all’ kind of style – depicting African American males as thugs, hard drug addicts and drug dealers, who had no real purpose in life but to hang in the ‘hood and get high while chasing tail. The women were referred to in these films by the male characters as ‘hoochies’, ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’. This is how most African-American characters on the screen were portrayed. So seeing all this as a white middle class impressionable teen, I seriously thought that this was what African-American culture was.
Of course, there were the odd exceptional films, such as Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which revealed a fresh perception of African American culture. The director Lee himself said “I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.”
Any film director that places himself in a quote about shared cultural perceptions through film so eloquently has my attention, and Spike Lee back in the day was ahead of the game, showing such forward thinking ideas with a worldly intelligence that shines through in his films.
2001 Not Another Teen Movie DVD cover
As I got older I became more aware and I started to notice subtle stereotyping of African American characters in white American teen movies. I remember there was a phrase – ‘the token black guy’. The one thing that stood out for me was the poster of the 2001 American teen parody film Not Another Teen Movie, where they had labels for the different characters in a stereotypical way with the only African American male character labelled as, you guessed it, ‘the token black guy’. Sure, there was also “the popular jock”, “the ugly pretty girl” and “the beautiful weirdo”; all the stereotypes you would expect from such a movie, however the “token black guy” is a black man, he was born with dark skin and his skin colour and culture is not a choice for fashion purposes or an attitude the character is portraying to give off a look or to fit into a peer-group.
To this day South Park directly proves this point with their character Token, the only black character amongst a community of white characters. The satirical show uses current social commentary to get its message across and is right on point when it comes to acknowledging the current culture we are in. I applaud the writers for adding Token to the characters, it’s a strong statement.
Films in the early 2000’s were guilty of this kind of labelling so often that it became acceptable and part of the norm. However despite these misleading, restrictive and stereotypical depictions still creeping into some small degree in today’s films, in 2020 our generation are more aware of the damage this causes and now call it out as racist when we see it.
An example of a film that is not deemed acceptable is one which I have fond memories of as a child – Song of the South. My sister and I regularly watched this hybrid animation / live action Disney film, which was released in 1946. The highlights are the musical elements and animated stories of Br’er Rabbit, as told by an African American man named Uncle Remus to Johnny, a white boy who moves onto a plantation in the American South with his family. I was shocked to look this film up as an adult after the memory came back to me, to find that it is labelled a racist movie.
James Baskett (centre) as Uncle Remus in Disney’s Song of the South 1946, for which he won an Oscar in 1948, making Baskett the second African American to win an Oscar.
In doing further research this month I found numerous conflicting articles about the film and came to the conclusion that Song of the South may have been set during the Reconstruction era in America after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. * However, according to some critics there seems to be no clear indication of a set time period for the story, nor is the topic of slavery discussed even though the character of Uncle Remus is a slave. Today the film is banned and not recognised on any Disney channels, so of course, I couldn’t find it anywhere for a re-watch with a fresh perspective, just snippets of it on Youtube and a trailer. The debate on whether or not the film is racist seems to be ongoing, with even the Disney World ride Splash Mountain, based on tales of Br’er Rabbit, still facing a backlash. **
Since my teenage years I have grown up a lot and my wisdom, common sense and exposure to people of various cultures has expanded, so I know that African American people and their culture are not all living as I witnessed in the movies.
The world needs more true to life coloured characters written and shown in a mainstream audience, so that when white privileged middle class communities who don’t have direct contact with people outside their own culture see and get exposed to this media, they have a positive and true representation.
As a filmmaker and a storyteller myself, I know all too well what it feels like to want to tell a story from your perspective, with full respect to the subject matter and the culture or subculture which your characters identify with. Finding the balance when it comes to writing and understanding the history behind diverse characters, be it characters of colour, nationality or sexual orientation that differ from your own, at times feels like you are walking on a blazing tightrope. You are trying to get to the other end without too many burns.
On this matter of writing diverse characters, I feel somewhat guilty at present too as I have recently been writing gay and bisexual characters, without being bisexual or gay myself, and it can make me feel like a fraud. So instead I look at my stories from a wider perspective – I write couple dramas, so I try most of the time to not go too deep into the ins and outs of the lesbian and bisexual culture that make up my characters lives as I don’t want to miss the mark and offend. I widen the lens to give myself an overall universal story of love, self acceptance and a couples journey without writing a straight up gay film. In my defence, I do read a lot of reviews on similar gay and bisexual films to see what annoys the audience and I am aware of the stereotypes around these types of characters in film and television.
Asleen Mauthoor and Whitney Duff play Summer and Lucinda in my 2017 film Friends, Foes & Fireworks. Summer is gay, however her best friend Lucinda is not so sure. They share a kiss in this make-up scene, leaving the audience wondering.
I think it is possible to write outside what we know and still not offend. There's really no excuse when we have the internet, we have so much more knowledge than a single person can consume in a lifetime right at our fingertips. Social media means that we can search for and then reach out to people and groups who we may not normally meet when we walk out of our homes or attend local events.
This issue of being unfamiliar with a certain culture, race or subculture as a writer and a director can start to diminish when we firstly do a ton of research. Get to know people in those communities you want to represent, hear their stories and take in their concerns – ask questions. Hire an adviser to check the authenticity of certain elements such as your script, the language used and the costumes. Hire people of that race, sub-culture or culture as part of your crew, cast and as story advisors. This is the way you can obtain a first hand, no-bias education as well as expanding your friendship circle and get help walking that tightrope.
The recent protests in American have many people like me – the white and privileged – take notice of the injustice even though personally we can’t understand what it must be like to feel such oppression and injustice every day of your life due to your skin colour. It's been a period of reflection, a time to get educated and move closer to becoming informed enough to speak up and pass on that change to someone who may be where you were a month, or three months ago.
I would like to say thank you to my family and friends, black and white for correcting my ignorance in previous drafts and for their feedback and their knowledge on the matter that was beyond my comprehension at the time of originally writing. Thank you for the lecture, the links and the push. I will say that this piece, as well as reflective, is a piece written from a personal viewpoint and I would like to hope that it really hits a nerve with creative white people, who like me create and tell stories from a straight white perspective in film and in written word, be it on a conscious or an unconscious level.
I hope that you too reflect on your position of power to change the narrative and what the audiences are seeing on the big screen. Sometimes the stories we tell are not as simple as black or white, there is a wide range of colour, and deep down there is also so much more than what the eye can see.
WRITTEN BY EUROPEAN FILMMAKER & STORYTELLER SARAH JAYNE PORTELLI