What does Shange think?

by Sydnie L. Mosley

On Wednesday, November 7th I had the pleasure of attending “Ntozake Shange on Stage & Screen” sponsored by Africana Studies at Barnard. The event began with a screening of Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, followed by a panel discussion and audience Q & A with Ms. Shange, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, and Monica Miller, Associate Professor of English at Barnard. With so much negative criticism surrounding Perry’s 13 million dollar film adaptation, the question burning on every one’s mind was, what does Shange think?

I was relieved to learn that her thoughts aligned with the criticisms I’d been outlining in my head since I first saw the film over a year ago. Shange was frank: "Tyler Perry's greatest challenge with for colored girls was what he was about to tackle." In other words, Perry could not grasp the radical nature of the work, and it was clear, at least from an artistic standpoint, he had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Read more at BCRW BLOG.

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Sydnie L. Mosley is a dancer, choreographer and teaching artist who loves to write. Read more of her musings on race, gender, dance and life on Love Stutter.

Africa's Place in the World: Ruminations on a historic dialogue

My husband just returned home from an evening out with a group of West African friends and to my surprise, he was livid after a heated debate about Africa, its history, its people and its place in the world. Apparently the conversation, which had been cool, calm and collected, had taken a turn for the worse after his friend had, with complete confidence, stated that at a conference when asked what Africa had contributed to the world (a question I already find offensive, because it is never asked of other continents), this friend of my husband's had, with the same confidence, stood up as an African and proclaimed to his fellow conference attendees that the continent had not contributed a thing. 

The conversation that followed was full of dismissive remarks about the continent and its peoples' histories, including slavery and systemic oppression under colonial rule. That was all in the past and it is over now. It's time to move on and stop complaining and making excuses. Why can't black people ever stop complaining, this group asked. My husband said he had yelled to the point of losing his voice; for those who do not know him, he is a relatively quiet and calm guy. My husband's friend, to be fair, is a really nice, well-educated person who is a natural-born entrepreneur and has lived in the US for over a decade, without ever once returning home. 

My husband made two major points in this heated argument, yelling over the many voices of the group who debated just as passionately against him:

1. Making the statement that Africa has not contributed and, even worse, has nothing to contribute is the surest evidence you have of Africa's systemic oppression. You who believe this are the system's worst victims and your rejection of history is a rejection of your own heritage. You have to understand, acknowledge this oppression in its varied forms to be able to move forward in any sustainable, healthy way. 

2. The world as we know it has only been made possible due to Africa's many contributions, the majority of which were taken unwillingly and some of which have been freely shared. Europe's industrialization and America's economic force were built on exploited African ingenuity, labor and natural resources. But that is not all Africa has to offer - it offers a diverse set of cultures, with different values and definitions and priorities. It offers us alternative modes of living, relating to each other and relating to our built and natural environments. To deny this is to blindly accept one occidental way of life that has been spoon fed to you and deny yourself and everyone else the possibilities of countless alternatives. 

While upon his return home, my husband was still unsure of whether his points had been enough or  even heard, we continued to discuss the conversation, one I have personally heard before and know is but a continuation of a historic dialogue. There has always been some level of conflict and resentment between African Americans and other black immigrants to the US, who, upon arrival have often openly questioned why blacks in America haven't seized the opportunities of the American Dream and done more with themselves. Tinges of this historic resentment surfaced in the conversation described to me. Why can't they be more entrepreneurial? 

In our post-debate conversation, my husband and I took his argument a step further. Last week I wrote about the universal and fundamental importance of empathy. Well, it is my contention that to truly aspire to be filthy rich in this society, to make this your singular ambition and your source of happiness as so many people have,  you have to be willing to give up a certain level of empathy for others. Climbing to the top, after all, means possible slowing down, putting down, if not crushing, those beneath you. So once this trade-off has been accepted, people anticipating the imagined rewards of the capitalist system, start shedding their empathy right away. With that empathy goes indignation at mass injustice, along with acknowledged historical oppression and recognized continued systemic inequities. To become a winner, one must accept that capitalism creates winners and losers and, against all odds, maintain the winner's mentality, free from all of the baggage and inconvenience of reality. 

Sadly, I fear this is what many entrepreneurial African immigrants, like my husband's friend, do. What is most disturbing though, is that they are right to do so in order to accomplish their stated goal, because our society rewards this behavior. This reminds me of a favorite quote from the interesting historical figure of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said that "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." I couldn't have stated it better myself.

One thing that my very wise husband says often in these types of conversations is that we, as humans, like latching onto one part of something that we deem to be true and then accept the whole thing, though perhaps not wholly examined, as truth. This is true with science, technology, capitalism and so forth. Something about it works, so, regardless of its faults and its known inequities and known unknowns, we launch ourselves into it and forget that this seemingly inevitable and hegemonic system hinged, at one point, on a single choice. 

Another telling quote from Krishnamurti, "You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life." Amen.

“Girls” isn’t really plural: A narrow view of color on the HBO Hit

I just watched all 4 episodes of “Girls” on HBO. I really, really, really enjoyed the dialogue and the plot. Obviously, as a 24 year old "girl", I and all of my friends can so relate to these young women and the tough things they face in the name of "finding themselves": pregnancy scares, job uncertainty, relationships growing stale, STIs, learning to care for yourself and not succumb to abusive people and situations. Girls is funny and honest, and tries very hard to not glamorize the complete circus that this time can feel like...

BUT...

I will agree with many of the critiques. I wasn't as up in arms about the lack of substantive characters/narratives including people of color, because honestly...most "middle-class/I've been coddled my entire life and now the real world is so 'hard'/I have the luxury of being in a quarter-life crisis" white women would NOT have meaningful relationships in real life with other women of color. Instead, women of color, that is Chicanas, black women, and Asian women may be relatively peripheral to a world that allows you the privilege of introspection, wanderlust, and unabashed disdain for working menial jobs. By no stretch of the imagination am I implying that meaningful interracial friendships and relationships are nonexistent or that the tropes present in “Girls” aren’t more indicative of class status rather than race; however, I believe that the narrative is fairly representative of a large slice of the population.

The show is spun through the lens of Hannah, a 24 year old, liberal arts graduate, a writer whose parents have just cut her off. Hannah’s parents are over-protective professors, she struggles with weight and self-esteem issues, and her acerbic wit is often misunderstood. She and her friends are complex characters simultaneously struggling to escape their insecurities while reveling in the fact that, at this age, life doesn’t have to make much sense. The plot unfolds somewhat haphazardly, yet brilliantly in each episode so that the viewer experiences layers of depth in each girl. There are no “good” or “bad” girls, even the douche-y love interest cannot be relegated to 2-dimensions so easily. This makes for great HBO programming. Unfortunately, the few glances of women of color are (surprise, surprise) narrow, stereotypical, and lacking nuance.

In episode 3, Hannah visits her friend Shoshannah, who is watching her favorite dating show on TV. In the show, each contestant has to unveil their “baggage” (their small, medium, and large secrets) at which point they are either chosen or sent home. One contestant was a black woman. Guess what her baggage was?

Small: She spends $1000 a month on weave, which host Jerry Springer deems “un-be-weave-able.”

Medium: She plans her wedding after the first date.

Large: She pokes holes in condoms.

Um, my biggest question after that scene was “Why?” not “Why would that imagery be so clearly assigned to the black woman?” but “Why are those images so prevalent in American popular culture that they, unsurprisingly, insinuated themselves in a show that doesn’t even address black women peripherally?” The weave meme has unfortunately caught fire in white America. They know what it is, they can even recognize it, they are morally outraged by its prices, and by golly, they are going to mention it every chance they get, even when it is not attached to an actual character. The condom-poking phenomenon, to me, falls into the delicious treasure chest of hood fairy-tales along with “welfare queens”, gang-banging, and the origins of rap music.

In episode 4, Hannah has just gotten a new job. She works with a sexually-harassing boss and two spicy staff members that seem to leisurely regard work. One of them appears to be Afro-Latina (perhaps Dominican or Puerto Rican) and, as we can only expect, is caricaturized and stereotypical from the start. She has an exaggerated accent, dramatic penciled-in eyebrows, tight clothes, and a neck/eye roll combination unparalleled on recent primetime TV.

Again, I asked myself the same questions from above. As you can tell, I am not surprised by the lack of well-constructed black and Latina characters. I actually think it is an honest representation of the stilted and one-dimensional schema that privilege builds towards people of color generally. “Girls” is true to life, because that is how so many interactions with women of color are perceived, analyzed, and then digested by white, middle-class women. As a black woman, I know these characters to often be misrepresented or too narrowly defined; but in a popular culture where there are less black people on primetime TV now than 20 years ago, what can we realistically expect?

“Girls” is one more reminder that media not birthed from a multi-cultural, colorful, inclusive perspective will never authentically reflect what we know to be true and what we hope will one day be celebrated.

In the meantime, we will be left with witty, yet unbalanced vantage points from majority privilege. I will still be watching Girls, but these things are always in my mind.

Will you be watching? How do you feel, am I making too much or too little of this? Read more about Lena Durham, Girls creator, writer, and co-star, confronting the topic (or lack thereof) of race in the show here.

Share your thoughts!

Love,

Brittany