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In his 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin argued that no black actor has ever lived up to his or her potential on-screen. However famous black performers become, he explained, they are constrained by the limited choices afforded to them by a racist industry. Looking at the history of film and television, the same can be said of black producers, writers, directors, and those on every strata of the studio system. Black creatives must also navigate a minefield of expectations, having to represent both themselves as artists and their entire community.

Angelica Jade Bastien

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Films such as Hidden Figures and Moonlight have not only succeeded in showing intersectional representation in the film industry, but also showing African-American representation in a different light. Hidden Figures shows African-American women as hardworking and intelligent rather than hyper-sexualized and lazy which are some of the common stereotypes we see in films. Moonlight shows respect for the LGBTQ community while involving people of color. Hollywood is breaking ground in the diversity spectrum, we just aren’t going at a fast enough rate.

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Studio executives once told African-American director Julie Dash that a movie about a black woman in science and technology might “confuse the audience.” She was told by someone she was asked to work with on a “Scandal”-like show called “Enemy of the Sun” that the plot was “not plausible” since her co-worker had “never met black people like this.” Other times, she has faced hurdles that would give anyone with even a surface-level knowledge of black history a headache. Once, for example, a woman asked Dash while she was pitching a film about the Harlem Renaissance, “Is it happening now?”

Maxwell Strahan, What It’s Like To Be a Black Woman in White Hollywood

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The Five Black Women Stereotypes in Film

1. The Black Best Friend

2. The Thug

3. The Magic Negro

4. The Brash Women

5. The Domestic

Tracie Thoms and Idina Menzel in “Rent” (2005).

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"One might think here, obviously, of such signs of Black success as Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, of the many prominent figures in the entertainment industry, or of the Williams sisters, of countless African-American basketball, baseball, and football greats, or of Tiger Woods. However, that black financial and cultural success is still so often tied to areas of achievement admissible even at the height of white supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century-entertainment and sports-raises questions about whether blackness continues to be assigned a specific culture 'box'. Who, in other words, gets to define what blackness is or means? And who is to say what is 'really' black?

Martin Japtok and Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, “What Does It Mean To Really Be “Black?” pp. 9

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#OscarsSoWhite

Popular hashtags such as #OscarsSoWhite or #herdreamsdeferred have held important conversations in the Twitter community regarding the lack of diversity within the media today. People of color are primarily disregarded but women of color are especially dodged in being equally represented.

[theblackwomaninhollywood-blog]

Why is White the default?

“But in today’s globalized movie industry, there is a myth promoted by Hollywood decision makers that foreign audiences will automatically reject films centered around people of color. Indeed, the conventional ‘wisdom’ in the film industry has been that ‘black films don’t travel,’ and this notion has posed a longstanding obstacle to advancing diversity in Hollywood, particularly among directors and filmmakers.” - W Magazine

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“Fewer than 50 of the 250 box office releases by Dec. ‘13 featured a Black woman in a leading or supporting role. Among the top 10 grossing movies, only Star Trek into Darkness featured a Black woman” (AAPF).

[theblackwomaninhollywood-blog]

The women, both Jigaboos and Wannabees, take no apparent interest in either politics or culture except as passive consumers. The Gamma Rays wear expensive clothes, elaborate Farrah Fawcett hairdos and lots of makeup. The films preoccupation is with their falseness, which reflects both their ‘wanna be whiteness’ and their femininity - as though they were black women in white women’s drag. Jigaboo women, on the other hand, are natural women with natural hair; the film primarily focuses on them as objects of ridicule, humor and negation.

Michelle Wallace, Spike Lee and Black Women (104)