Mixed Race Studies

Colin Kaepernick’s Life to Become Netflix Series From Ava DuVernay

The Hollywood Reporter
2020-06-29

Lesley Goldberg, West Coast TV Editor

‘Colin in Black & White’ will tell the story of the athlete and activist’s adolescent life.

Colin Kaepernick’s formative years are becoming a Netflix series.

The athlete and activist is teaming with Ava DuVernay for Colin in Black & White, a scripted limited drama that has been picked up straight to series at the streaming giant.

The six-episode series will examine Kaepernick’s adolescent life, focusing on his high school years and the acts and experiences that led him to become the activist he is today. Kaepernick will appear as himself as the narrator of the series, which will cast an actor to play the younger version of the star quarterback.

Kaepernick in 2016 protested racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression when he kneeled during the national anthem ahead of a San Francisco 49ers game. His act of protest was, at the time, considered polarizing with both NFL officials and fans, eventually drawing the ire of President Trump, who urged team owners to fire players who protest during the national anthem. Kaepernick became a free agent in 2017 and filed a lawsuit against the NFL and its owners, alleging that they colluded to keep him out of the league. He remains a free agent. More recently, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minnesota police, Kaepernick has become another face of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Read the entire article here.

‘Big Mouth,’ ‘Central Park’ to Recast With Black Actors for Biracial Characters | THR News

The Hollywood Reporter
2020-06-24

Netflix’s animated series Big Mouth will recast the role of Missy — at the request of the actor who has voiced her thus far, Jenny Slate. Apple will also recast a biracial character, currently voiced by Kristen Bell, in its animated show Central Park.

Slate and Big Mouth’s creators said in social media posts Wednesday that they will cast a Black actor to voice the middle schooler in the future. The show has aired three seasons and is renewed through season six. The move comes as the industry continues to reckon with its record of inclusivity and representation amid nationwide anti-racist protests.

“At the start of the show, I reasoned with myself that it was permissible for me to play Missy because her mom is Jewish and White — as am I,” Slate wrote on Instagram. “But Missy is also Black, and Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” (See her full statement below.)…

Read the entire article here.

[Mati] Diop’s father (jazz musician Wasis Diop) is from Senegal and her mother is French. Diop was born and raised in Paris, although she visited Senegal often as a child. “In France, we have a very different relationship in terms of defining blackness. I’m not called black — I’m called a Frenchwoman,” she says. “But I have noticed that in America, as soon as you have a little — even 10 or 20 percent of blackness — you become black. Being black is not something I think about every day when I wake up. I don’t think of myself as white or as black. I just think about me as me.”

“Meet the First Black Female Director in the Cannes Competition,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 9, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mati-diop-being-first-black-female-director-cannes-lineup-1208189.

Hawaiian Family Drama From Viola Davis, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen Set at ABC (Exclusive)

The Hollywood Reporter
2018-08-22

Rebecca Sun

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen (Matt Dine; Courtesy of Plume)

ABC is headed back to Hawaii.

The network is teaming with Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee Productions to develop the hourlong drama ‘Ohana. The potential series is based on Kiana Davenport’s 1994 novel Shark Dialogues and follows four hapa women who reunite when their grandmother, a mystic known as a kahuna, dies mysteriously and leaves them the family plantation.

Former Time staff writer and foreign correspondent Lisa Takeuchi Cullen will pen the adaptation.

“So many Hawaii-set stories have been told from the white point of view,” Cullen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This is a story we’re passionate about telling from the point of view of native Hawaiians — Pacific Islanders, people of Asian descent and people of hapa heritage.”

Each of the four protagonists is of a different mixed ethnicity — half-white, half-Japanese, half-Filipino and half-black — and their unexpected shared inheritance will force them to overcome years of jealousies, misunderstandings, resentments and secrets…

Read the entire article here.

Cannes: Interracial Marriage Drama ‘Loving’ Throws Hat in Oscar Ring

The Hollywood Reporter
2016-05-16

Gregg Kilday

Director Jeff Nichols and stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga make a strong first-impression as their new film about the landmark Supreme Court case is unveiled.

Loving, writer/director Jeff Nichols’ new film about Richard and Mildred Loving — the interracial couple whose 1958 marriage violated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, which were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court’s landmark Loving vs. Virginia ruling in 1967 — held its first press screening Monday morning in Cannes. And it immediately made the case why the film has to be considered one of this year’s first major awards contenders.

Given the material, Nichols could have delivered a standard-issue courtroom drama, culminating with soaring oratory before the nation’s highest court. But he chose to take a different route — the American Civil Liberties Union, agreeing to take on the case, doesn’t enter the picture until more than half-way through the two-hour-three-minute movie. Instead, the film is centered around the Lovings themselves: Richard, played by Australian actor Joel Edgerton, and Mildred, played by the Ethiopia-born Ruth Negga…

Read the entire article here.

Soledad O’Brien on #OscarsSoWhite: Why Did It Take So Long to Have This Discussion?

The Hollywood Reporter
2016-01-28

Soledad O’Brien, Founder and CEO
Starfish Media Group

Soledad O’Brien
Getty Images

In my experience, diversity doesn’t just “happen.” It has to be very intentional. People have to have a genuine desire to make a change.

It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen this time around. There are some bright signs, including the fledgling efforts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And, most importantly, there is an active, honest conversation going on…

…I was raised by a white dad and black mom for whom dating and marriage were legally impossible in Baltimore in 1958 — so they drove to D.C. to get married, then lived in a fairly hostile environment toward mixed-race couples. That sense of isolation never stopped them, and it’s certainly helped me to deal with some very typical racism in my career: being dismissed as the “affirmative action” hire, being left out of opportunities. I’m not complaining. It’s the way it is and it was up to me to try to excel anyway. And, later, as a reporter I found it interesting to interview people who felt that way and try to understand their perspective. But that doesn’t mean the frustration didn’t build, and in my case, as that of many others, it eventually forces you to speak out. It also encourages you to do what you can to make it better.

In my case, I now run a production company called Starfish Media Group that strives to tell the untold stories of people of diverse backgrounds….

Read the entire article here.

‘Monstress’: Inside The Fantasy Comic About Race, Feminism And The Monster Within

The Hollywood Reporter
2015-11-03

Graeme McMillan

“I didn’t realize how massive it was until I started writing it,” creator Marjorie Liu tells THR.

Monstress, a new comic book series from Image Comics which launches this week, is all about hidden depths. Not only for the title character — a teenager who literally has a monster living inside her — but for the series itself, which uses the fantasy genre to explore real world issues in a new and fascinating way. Writer and series creator Marjorie Liu (Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men, the Hunter Kiss series of novels) talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the origins of the series, and why Monstress is even more than she anticipated.

“I didn’t realize how massive it was until I started writing it, and realized I had totally underestimated both the size of the project, and my own ability to wrap my head around it,” Liu says of the series. “I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural. I wanted to tell a story about war, and surviving war — and I wanted to set it all in an alternate Asia.”…

…Monstress was influenced by a number of people, ideas and experiences from Liu’s life, she explained. “For example, growing up with my Chinese grandparents who were always talking about WWII — how they survived, how they fought. It wasn’t just the war they discussed, but what came after: how they had to piece their lives back together. But what’s striking to me are the photos from this time, especially the ones of my grandmother. She’s always beaming. Her smile is amazing. You would never have dreamed she went through hell.”

That pushed Liu into considering inner strength — “What does it take to hold on to one’s humanity when you’re forced to suffer the long, continuous, dehumanizing experience of war? Is it just strength? Is it something in your character? Is it the kinds of friends you surround yourself with?” — which is one of the key themes to the series. “Other questions I’ve wrestled with, both in this book and others [are] what it means to be of mixed race, what it means to straddle the borderlands of two cultures,” she added.

“The world of Monstress is one that has been torn apart by racism, slavery, by the commodification of mixed race bodies that produce a valuable substance that humans require like a drug. Even if you look human, you might not be safe. It’s a familiar story to people of color in this country, and in the last four or five years I’ve found myself deeply immersed in the study of identity and race, especially in the Asian American context.”…

Read the entire article here.

Belle: Toronto Review

The Hollywood Reporter
2013-09-12

John DeFore

The true story of a mixed-race child raised by British aristocrats is lightly fictionalized by Amma Asante.

TORONTO — Hoping to use some Jane Austen-style courtship anxiety to lend drama to an episode in 18th-century English history that is novel enough on its own, Amma Asante’s Belle centers on Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race child who was sent to be raised by the second-highest judge in England’s courts. Though the inventions of Misan Sagay’s script emphasize concerns over dowries and social rank that will be grating for many contemporary viewers, extracting little of the humor that Austen regularly found in such hangups, the picture’s sour notes are balanced by fine performances and clear historical appeal. Moviegoers should respond well, if not overwhelmingly, when Fox Searchlight brings it to theaters next spring…

Read the entire review here.