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On How “The Secret Life of Bee’s” Used 4 Black Women to tell a White Girl’s Story

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I saw The Secret Life of Bee’s (TSLB) yesterday and I couldn’t helped but be struck by two things. First, the tone of TSLB was extremely similar to the tone of The Help. From the color palate of the sets, to the language and how folks moved and the music.

TSLB was directed by a Black woman, and The Help was directed by a White man.

This morning when I got up I KNEW that I had to write about TSLB. I am good for watching a movie and telling the screen “I don’t believe you Gina”. Meaning I don’t believe the characters, the story is underdeveloped, the character is underdeveloped, that the editor was being lazy, the director was being lazy or the actor was being lazy. That someone didn’t push it to a space to take it there.

The moment that I didn’t believe in the film was in Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson showed up at Queen Latifah’s door, and Fanning had done all the talking. Now Hudson had just gotten beat publicly beat a White man for pouring sun flower seed hulls on his feet in public and threw her to the ground and demanded that said apologized. She refused and was taken to jail. This scene is a direct nod to the scene in The Color Purple where Oprah’s character hits the White woman who asks her if SHE will be her maid…let’s just say that it was traumatic to watch.

So when they show up to Latifah’s door, and Hudson just kinda stands there letting Fanning talk, I was like what the fuck is this Gina. This woman has just gotten her ass beat, and head cracked open by White men, and given the time period she was probably raped, consequently she is lucky to be alive, and she can’t speak for herself. I was not interested in what Fanning had to say to Latifah, I wanted to hear what Hudson had to say for herself and to Latifah. It rendered Hudson a child in that moment.

This morning, I knew what fucked me up about The Secret Life of Bee’s. In this movie four Black women serve as a midwife for the spiritual transformation of a young White girl who has been abandoned by her mother and verbally and physically abused by her father.

Why in the hell is an all star cast of four awesome and talented Black women serving as fodder for the spiritual transformation of a little White girl. When was the last time we saw four Black women serve as fodder for their own spiritual transformation? Cough, Waiting to Exhale? Cough.
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Movies matter because they tell us what is important. Movies also matter because they tell us how some people see history.

Honestly, those women were reduced to four mid-wive mammies, to the extent that the White Hollywood imagination see’s Black women’s bodies in film. You all KNOW I Love watching Queen Latifah. I sat in a hotel room in North Carolina on Christmas and had the time of my life watching Latifah. THAT FILM WAS ABOUT A BLACK WOMAN’S PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION. HER JOURNEY, not someone else’s.

This is not to say that Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okendo (check out Skin if you haven’t) did make it twerk, because they did. In fact Latifah is able to work in some #blackgirlfromthefuture juju with the story behind her honey business and Okendo story was probably the most developed and most emotionally textured.

In someways The Secret Life of Bee’s objectified Black women in some of the similar ways that rap music video’s do, because it treats them as objects that are merely there to move the story along and not as subjects with their OWN STORY TO TELL.

You see the movie?

Why do we move other people’s story along but not our own?

Don’t we do the same shit in real life too? Putting our children, our husbands, our girlfriends, our wives, our boyfriends, our work, our mommas ahead of us, and never us first? When will this stop?

Why Black Women Film Directors?

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NY Times article on Black Film in the early 1990’s titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” by Karen Grigsby Bates

Note: There will be a few blog posts on Pariah and Black women’s directors over the next few weeks as I move like a squirrel with a flashlight trying to finish this paper. I cannot have boss bear calling me trifling.

 

The trouble with being erased for so long is that you come to think of your erasure as being natural. ~ Lorraine O’Grady in “The Cave, Lorraine O’Grady on Black Women Film Directors“

Last week my homie James asked me why it was significant that Cooper and Rees fundraised to make Pariah when Black filmmakers were doing that waaay back in ’91.

The early 90’s were interesting years for Black films, but these films were primarily by black men directors featuring the narratives by and large of Black men and boys. To my knowledge and correct me if I am wrong the only films  that had major theatrical distribution that was directed by a Black woman were Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.

The fact that Harris and Dash are the only Black woman from that era that directed a feature length film with major distribution must be noted. Furthermore, the other side of the Harris- Dash coin is the quasi over-representation of Black women’s stories in the recent economic market place.

I say quasi over-representation because we see stories being produce that feature Black women’s bodies but they are not the directors.
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Chris Rock, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, Bill Duke and Tim Story are 5 black men who have released films in the last 3 years that feature stories about Black women. Which begs the question, where are the Black women directors, directing features with major distribution?

Then there is the Black Woman Can’t Get a Man industrial complex where “The Washington Post”, “CNN”, “MSNBC”, The Economist, scholars (Ralph Banks) and various other magazines explore possible reasons for the “low” marital rates for US heterosexual Black women. #jesusbeaFence. Every time I look up somebody has some something to say about the Who, Where, When, How and Why about Black women’s dating lives. I personally think that the these stories function as a way to make us seem deviant in this current historical moment.

Have Black women directors of feature films been erased for so long that we consider their erasure natural?

Hortense Spillers says that Black women are the beached whale of the sexual universe and that we are awaiting our verb.

Honestly, when I think about the politics of listening to Black women’s stories I am reminded of a scene in Ava Duvernay’s documentary “My Mic Sounds Nice” on women in rap music. In this documentary there is a moment where Stephen Hill states that in some ways the reason why there are very few Black women emcees rapping is because rap music is a male dominated genre where many of the stories are talking about women, so in other words, why would rap audience members want to hear these women speak back?

#Peace to Kasi Lemmons.

On Kim Kardashian’s Empire and Race

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On Clutch Danielle Belton has an excellent and problematic post titled, “Celebrating the Black Beauty on White Women”. She discusses in general the politics of race and women’s bodies as well as the politics of White artists performing what has historically been seen as Black music (see Eminem, Elvis and Adele).

I am really interested in the politics of race and Black women’s bodies AND I have been wanting to write about Kim Kardashian every since that I learned that there were some black communities (notice I used a plural because we are not all the same) who felt that she did not deserve to be in a Tyler Perry film.

The post is awesome because Belton interrogates the different ways in which some Black men may desire say a curvy Black woman with light skin who looks like Kim Kardashian versus how some Black men may desire a curvey White woman because she is just that; affluent, curvey and White. Belton writes,

If society tells you, from birth, that you should dream of marrying Blake Lively, but dream of screwing Nicki Minaj, a woman with Blake’s face and Nicki’s ass is going to trade high on the “male gaze” market.

Which brings us back to Kim Kardashian. (And by proxy, her sisters, Ice-T’s wife Coco, Angelina Jolie’s lips who are gorgeous on her, but “ordinary” on every other black girl in America, etc.) This goes beyond just physical beauty.

Belton then goes on to discuss how “everyone likes Black stuff when it isn’t on Black people”. Which brings me to another thing.

We need to talk about race.

Race is an unstable category and identity marker. So is gender. Race is unstable, dynamic and always changing. Read Omi and Winant for more about this.

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If race were a fixed category and identity marker we could never have a conversation about whether President Obama is  “really” Black. 

Race is a moving target. So is sexuality and gender and this makes people hella uncomfortable.

In fact, it is precisely because ideas of race, and markers of race are unstable and dynamic that we have these conversations in the first place.

So, the title of the post doesn’t reflect the actual content of Belton’s post but I want to address it because it is problematic. To say that Black beauty equals curves suggests that there is only one kind of beauty on Black women.

Ideas of beauty are subjective. Meaning that they are personal value judgements based on individual standards that vary from person to person.

And.

Black women’s bodies and beauty come in a variety of shape and sizes. We are not all the same.

We have to be very mindful of the kinds of beauty standards that we set up.

In fact, I think that with regard to Kim Kardashian the issue isn’t so much that she is an attractive White woman who is curvy, the issue appears to be that she is an attractive White woman who is curvy who enjoys dating Black men and who has leveraged her sexuality into a multi-media empire.

I mean, didn’t the folks complaining about her being in Tyler Perry’s new movie because she is “a bad influence” on Black children because of her sex tape etc. How many of these same folks bump R. Kelly hard (Trapped in the Closet series and all), despite his penchant for teenage Black girls. Remember ya’ll he married Aaliyah.

Why is Kim Kardashian a “bad influence” but R. Kelly gets a pass. No I am not saying that they are trafficking in the same material, nor am I saying that she is as talented in the same way that he is. I am, however, asking why some do Black people’s moral respectability police come out for Kim Kardashian and not for R. Kelly?

Young girls are taught from a young age that their most important value is how pretty they are. In some ways, in a society that devalues women over men, a society that teaches women that their primary value is their beauty, a society that emphasizes the visual, the rise of a woman who embodies Kim Kardashian’s beauty makes sense.

Black Relationship Politics: “Do You Believe Beyonce?”

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Perhaps it is because I finally listened to Watch the Throne. Or perhaps it is because I have been writing about Beyonce on this blog for what, three years now. Perhaps it is because I am smack dab in the middle of researching Black women’s sexuality. Perhaps it is because I hear Janelle Harris in the back of my head saying that being married with a baby is the way to go because doing it alone alone is too much work.

I have come to the conclusion that I don’t believe Beyonce.

I think it is the gap between how patriarchal “If you like it you should have put a ring on it” is, and the lack of public intimacy that I have been thinking about this week.

Now here is the thing with writing about pop culture. I know that in taking on people’s beloved artists there is a possibility that they will shut down, cover their ears, and sing lalalalalalalalalalalalaal like a four year old. If you go that route, keep your comments to your self. This is grown shit we are speaking on.

Yes, Beyonce is attractive, talented, hard working, focused and driven. She can perform her ass off. I get that.

But what I also know is that the ways in which she normalizes patriarchy for Black girls need to be interrogated. When I say patriarchy I mean idea that men/masculine people have the right and the power do dominate women and children. For example, patriarchy normalizes lots of janky things like the right for men make more than women for the same work; the right for men take up more space on the train; the right for men to  stand on the sidewalk and not move when they see us coming; the right to not clean up shit in the house because it’s women’s work; the right to seek and desire pleasure without being called a failed man; the right for men to be active and women to be passive.

A Black woman who seeks and desires pleasure is called spoiled. Spoiled food is ruined, inedible. It will make you sick.

Being a Black woman with a healthy dating life, I realized that the reason why I don’t believe Beyonce, is that I have never seen her hug her #husbear in public. No hug, no kiss, no face grab.

No passion.

Now on That’s My Bitch, which is song on Jay-Z’s and Kanye’s  new album Watch the Throne Jay-Z raps about her, with out “really” rapping about her saying,

Go harder than a nigga for a nigga, gofigure
Told me keep my own money if we ever did split up
How could someone so gangsta be so pretty in pictures
Ripped jeans and a blazer and some Louboutin slippers
Picasso was alive he woulda made her
That’s right nigga, Mona Lisa can’t fade her
I mean Marilyn Monroe, she’s quite nice
But why all the pretty icons always all-white?
Put some colored girls in the MOMA
Half these broads ain’t got nothing on Wylona
Don’t make me bring Thelma in it
Bring Halle, Bring Penelope and Selma in it
Back to my Beyoncés, you deserve three stacks word to Andre
Call Larry Gagosian
You belong in museums, you belong in vintage clothes crushing the whole building
You belong with niggas who used to be known for dope dealin’
You too dope for any of those civilians
Now shoo children, stop lookin’ at her t*ts
Get your own dog, ya heard
That’s my b**ch

So, if I have this correct, she is his Bitch, well kinda. She belongs to niggas known for dope dealing?

According to her, if he liked it, then he would have put a ring on it.
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But I ain’t never seen you kiss this man. Evar. Grab his face. Smack his ass. Something Gina.

I don’t believe you.

Now, @cervantes left a comment questioning my evidence and he has a point. Both Beyonce and Jay have referred to each other publicly. He is correct in that Jay Z has mention her, and she him, publicly. And I will acknowledge this corrective in my post because this is in fact important and significant. However, isn’t there something to be said about the distinction between a public mention, and public affection when you make your bread saying that “You are a success if he gives you a ring”.  Why is success measured by having a marriage contract?

I think the post on Clutch by Janelle Harris has influenced me as well. Harris states that while folks living together may be great for some people, for her, she understands the importance of getting married before you have children having had a child 12 years ago and another nine months ago. Harris believes that,

So now, after besting 12 years of single motherhood and nine more months on top of that of being a baby mama, I see now that there is a reason why you should wait to be married before you have little ones. This ish ain’t easy solo. Not that having a husband makes life a cakewalk, but if you’ve picked the right dude, you’ve got a partner to help shoulder and share the responsibilities that come with being a parent, a homeowner—heck, an adult in general.

To them and others who just don’t think it’s that deep, first comes love, second comes marriage, then comes the lady with the baby carriage is a rhyme that didn’t mean much more beyond the playground in elementary school. But to me, it’s the natural order of things, the way the good Lord intended them to be, the modus operandi that makes the most logical sense.

The way God intended? Girrrl, God intended me to be free and to be of service.

Waaaay back in November 2010, my fellow Crunkfeminist @Moyazb stated in response to the No Wedding No Womb meme and the Eddie Long church and sexual violence allegations that,

Perhaps black folks’ ambivalence about marriage signals problems with the institution itself and not with black people.

We are not taught think about how there may be an issue with the institution of marriage rather than with Black people.We are not thinking about other ways to think about family BECAUSE raising children is hella work because doing it alone can lead to a nervous breakdown.

So, if Beyonce is going to be Black women’s ambassador for heterosexual marriage, then ya’ll need to go back to the drawing board.

Can we believe a Love that can’t and won’t be claimed publicly? Especially when the “Love” is constantly referred to, implicitly, in songs.

For GLBTQ folks, claiming your Love publicly can get your assed fired, get you beat on the street, get you kicked out of your biological family. Talk about relationship politics.

Or perhaps their marriage is crude and public example of what marriage in the United States, an economic, legal and property arrangement.

This is why I also believe that folks had such a hard time with the Kim Kardashian’s divorce. Her marriage and divorce exemplified just how much market forces, how much money plays a role in marriage in 2011.

Many of us romantics have a hard time accepting this. But it’s real. As real as that $3.15 latte I just bought. As real as the 35 million people in this country who are on food stamps.

Money matters in our sexual relationships. If you don’t believe me, ask a sex worker or a stripper. Ask the wife of a man who is a millionaire.

I do agree with Janelle on one thing. She states that,

Celebrities wield such heavy influence over what so many folks do, say and believe—including adults, so let’s not front—that Mrs. Carter’s decision to do it the right way (yep, I intentionally left the quotation marks off) just might spark a positive trend.

It is for this reason that I write this piece.

Do you believe Beyonce?

If you refer to your relationship in songs, and if your songs are patriarchal, do you then need to visibly affectionate in order to be believable?

Perhaps patriarchy closes off the space to be affectionate?

Is it meaningful that he put a ring on it but I/we ain’t never seen him kiss her?

#I just wrote my ass off. #Drops mic.

On Black Women’s Sexuality

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The way through the project is sharing it. So here I go.

I have been reading Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower because @Kismetnunez recommended it and also learning about how Black women who I admire, dealt with racism and sexism helps me to deal with racism and sexism.

Lord knows I do not have time to be reading anything that isn’t directly related to reading and teaching, but I started reading the book a few weeks ago and I picked it up again this morning and than an epiphany happened.

In reading about how Darlene Clark Hine and many other Black women scholars who do Black women’s history had to actually fight to study and write about Black women as graduate students, I began to think about how to connect my work to their work.

What is most significant to me, is that while reading about Clark Hine, I realized why my project is important and why how it is related to historical studies of Black women’s history.

I contend that Black women’s history is central to American history. Clark Hine was discouraged from writing about and studying Black women. In fact a white male colleague asked her, “why would you study the most marginalized people in society.” He later apologized. Having read this, I now see that exploring the ways in which Black women, name, see and claim their sexual selves is important because historically Black women have not been seen as legitimate subjects. Yet Black women have been  historically present in this country as reproductive and productive labor during chattel slavery, and after slavery as share croppers. Our work and the work of Black women’s children  played a significant role in creating the capital to build the infrastructure of the United States.

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I am concerned with Black women and girls being perceived as whole human beings. I want to be seen as a whole human being. My day to day life pivots on asserting my humanity.

Because slavery required an ideology that that defined Black women as unrapeable, ready for sex, naturally made for working the field, as masculine, my project is also about reclaiming our sexuality in order for us to be seen as whole human beings.

Boss bear said the paper lacked the passion that I clearly exhibit when I talk to her about it. I think the passion is there now, no?

I think that sounds good.

It makes sense to you?

#Thoughts I had on the train.