Dear Hollywood: Let&#8217;s Stop Making Movies Like &#8220;Black or White&#8221;

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Through in-depth comparative analysis of interviews, we identified three major stressors impacting the identity development of the mixed Mexican participants: monoracism, cultural distance, and pressure to authenticate one’s ethnic or racial membership. These challenges precipitated feelings of confusion, isolation, and exclusion. Participants described negative experiences embedded in monoracism or discrimination and pressure from peers as well as family members to identify with only one race or ethnic group. This ranged from getting inquisitive looks because of one’s ethnic ambiguous appearance (i.e., ‘‘What are you?’’) to being denied choice and forced to identify under a certain monoracial label (i.e., ‘‘You’re not Mexican!’’). In addition, we found that mixed minority participants (i.e., Mexican and Black) were frequent victims of interethnic and intraracial discrimination within their own families. This created numerous tensions within and between families and left participants feeling confused and hurt. Participants described getting harassed or ostracized by family members because of their physical appearance, which evidenced their connection to a different ethnic minority heritage. For example, Cierra, who is of mixed Mexican and White heritage, described how her mother frequently harassed her because of her dark skin complexion, which contributed to her overall negative self-image.

First real impacting negative self-image. I’m very excited to see my new baby brother, and I remember thinking how beautiful my mother (of Mexican ethnicity) looked holding this infant, almost like the Madonna and child, and as I tiptoed up to her, and I have to stand on my toes to look at my baby brother and I want to give him a kiss, and she pushes me away and tells me, ‘‘I hate you! You’re so ugly! You’re so dark and ugly!’’ So first impact, BAMB! (Cierra, Mexican and White).

Kelly F. Jackson, Thera Wolven and Kimberly Aguilera, “Mixed Resilience: A Study of Multiethnic Mexican American Stress and Coping in Arizona,” Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1. (February 2013): 217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00755.x.

Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White”

Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White”

Forbes
2015-01-30

Rebecca Theodore

Halfway through the family drama “Black Or White,” Jeremiah Jeffers (Anthony Mackie) an Ivy-League educated lawyer, chastises his drug addict nephew Reggie (Andre Holland) in the midst of helping him regain custody of his daughter by asking, “Why do you have to be such a stereotype?”

A question I repeatedly asked myself as I had to suffer through yet another one of Hollywood’s latest “White Is Right” films about racial relations. In “Black or White” Kevin Costner stars as Elliot Anderson, a successful lawyer who is left to raise his biracial granddaughter Eloise, when his wife dies unexpectedly. Elliot’s life becomes further complicated with an escalating drinking problem and a fight for Eloise from her absentee father and paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer).

Black or White” is the Iggy Azalea of race films – it operates under the guise of being progressive and furthering the “conversation” about race, but only serves to exalt Whiteness by marginalizing Blackness. The movie is chock full of Black tropes and stereotypes; the overbearing matriarch who coddles and enables her son’s inexcusable behavior, the “Angry Black Man” (Mackie) and the “Magical Negro” with Duvan (Mpho Koaho), who starts off as a math tutor for Eloise, but soon finds himself dispensing wise advice and becoming a personal chauffeur to Elliot when he’s too drunk to drive.

You would think in 2015 Hollywood would have evolved from such reductive narratives about race, but according to Dr. Jason Johnson, a political analyst and a professor of political science at Hiram College, it’s business as usual. “It is part of a genre movie we have always had, that’s making a comeback which I like to call the “Reasonable White Man” movie,” Johnson explains. “They are films that are ostensibly about race but are extended polemics where so-called progressive Whites are saying ‘I’m the only one who has a reasonable perspective on this and Blacks are irrational and unreasonable.”…

Read the entire review here.

Tags: Black or White, Forbes, Jason Johnson, Kevin Costner, Rebecca Theodore

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2015 at 01:48Z and is filed under Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White”

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta