BLACK LEADER

A slap heard...

 

This was the moment in 1967 that pushed Hollywood forward. It was constructed, rehearsed, directed, enacted, and filmed and edited with added foley effects. I reedited the scene for my installation Osmundine(Orchid Slap). 

This is the moment and behavior that sets Hollywood back 50 plus years, upending the joy of Questlove’s documentary feature win for revealing to a new generation, elided archival documentation of historic, live Black performances, filmed 3 years after the release of In The Heat of The Night.

One slap is acting, no matter how “realistic” we may want it to be, because it challenges decades of (mis)representation. The other slap is acting-out with actual violence, documented on a live telecast. Ironically--a minstrel show comedy-giant-razor-sized irony- is that this happened as we mourn the loss of awardee, Sidney Poitier (who delivered that blow to racism), significantly, during the first Oscar broadcast to be directed by a Black man, Will Packer.

(Plus, there’s Danny Glover winning a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and--you can’t script this, Samuel L. Jackson receiving an honorary Oscar.)

Conflating a joke made by a comedian about a performer of equal stature into an attack on people with alopecia is misdirection.  Chris Rock, in my experience of his comedy, doesn’t punch down, but up and across. Jada Pinkett-Smith is a public figure and an actor who can defend herself. She’s at a show where comics make jokes about people who are in the same, rare, realm of fame that she occupies. Rock’s (ridiculously outdated-1997!) jibe doesn’t cast Pinkett-Smith as less beautiful, less rich, influential or chic, nor does he defame her as a Black woman. Despite the accolades, the Pinkett-Smith family are Hollywood royalty, not actual royalty and we cats may look at and make fun of the King (Richard) and Queen.

The Smith family are not sovereigns and the fact that Smith had the temerity to walk up on stage during a live, international broadcast and assault his Black colleague in front of Yes The Children!, the theater audience, TV and internet watchers, fans, fellow Academy members, actors and industry professionals and hopefuls is shocking and shameful.

I’m disappointed that the show went on.

Are the Oscars important? No. Are the Oscars important? Yes. Do they have meaning? Yes. Do they have meaning? No.

Maybe now, the show will go the way of the Golden Globes to be ensconced in memories and at the Academy Museum. We don’t need the show anymore, which originated as a roomful of self-congratulating studio moguls slapping each other on the back and giving each other awards in order to protect/promote their industry. The challenges of achieving equity in this arena of the representational, performing arts that acknowledges people of color as skilled artists and professionals, in front of and behind the scenes, was upstaged by Smith’s ugly, self-righteous and all too real need to bitch slap.

 

 

This Is America, Kanye. No matter if you're black or white.

(my interpretation attempt)

"And he had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown, and we would forget his pharaoh’s nose, forget his vast eyes, his dazzling smile, and Michael Jackson was but the extreme of what felt in those post-disco years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of black men on album covers smiling back at me in Jheri curls and blue contacts and I think of black women who seemed, by some mystic edict, to all be the color of manila folders. Michael Jackson might have been dying to be white, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a black god dying to be white?”

I’m Not Black I’m Kanye

TA-NEHISI COATES

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Podcast: Overlooked Black Performers

Overlooked Black Performers

By Film Comment on February 26, 2016

Throughout the ongoing discussion of diversity at the Oscars and in Hollywood at large—the types of films that get made, and who gets to make them—a longer historical view is often absent, or limited in its scope. In the hopes of fostering a deeper and broader appreciation of performances, and honoring those who have come before, FILM COMMENT arranged a discussion about overlooked and underappreciated black actors. In early February, Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Ashley Clark, film critic and author of the book Facing Blackness (and this fine FC article on James Baldwin); and Ina Archer, co-chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund for New York Film and Television, longtime FILM COMMENT contributor, and video artist, to tackle this topic. Over the course of an hour, questions of what could’ve been—and how old and layered this problem is—repeatedly crop up. The transcript of their conversation is linked above.