On August 15, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American activist who suffered abuse when she took a stand in the 1970s against anti-Native racism in the United States film industry. Joined.
Littlefeather was racially abused after he turned down Marlon Brando’s Best Actor award for The Godfather on his behalf and delivered an impassioned 60-second speech about Native American stereotypes in the entertainment industry.
After that defiant speech, Littlefeather was the target of a professional boycott, as well as personal attacks and discrimination for half a century. While I admit I hadn’t read about Littlefeather’s ordeal or Brando’s splendid defiance, magnanimity, and civil rights activism before, I welcomed the announcement.
That the Academy chooses to apologize for a heinous racist act committed in the 1970s is commendable. It’s just the beginning, though: The Academy and the Hollywood establishment need to make more apologies for promoting a white supremacist agenda around the world for a century.
The victims of Hollywood assault extend far beyond those in the industry who have been targeted, like Littlefeather, by ordinary, unrecognized people like myself. The commercial tentacles of white supremacy respected no borders. Hollywood did not limit its racist productions to white audiences in the United States.
Its problematic content reached as far as Africa and the African diaspora.
ask me.
I love Casablanca, the classic 1942 drama set in western Morocco, to bits. I was intrigued by the romance between main leads Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, played by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, as well as their search for an unlikely second chance at eternal love in an exquisite setting. Everything about Casablanca—the incredibly intense soundtrack, distinguished cinematography, and extraordinary witty humor and suspense—is captivating.
Everything is almost perfect: everything except the extreme lack of depth embodied in the only black character, Sam.
Played by Dooley Wilson, Sam is an understated and complementary addition to the smart, eloquent and beautiful characters on screen. He is simply a “sweet black” entertainer, an infinitely hollow and minor accessory to the white man’s passionate and sophisticated relationship. Sam lacks the story, the perceptible agency, and the sheer presence that make Rick and Ilsa such strong, compelling, and extraordinary characters.
Simply put, he lacks the proper humanity.
Sam’s sketchy character and insignificant role meant that every time he watched the film as a young man, he somehow ignored its profound dehumanization and gave in to the cinematic expressions and demands of white supremacy. The subconscious message I picked up was that love and beauty were essentially intrinsic only to white people and certain narratives were overwhelmingly foreign to “my people.”
For a long time, I considered white actresses like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner to be the quintessential representations of feminine beauty, character, and elegance. I believed that black actresses like Phylicia Rashad (from The Cosby Show), who played strong and intelligent female leads, were just outliers in Hollywood and apparently in life.
Sure, Rashad had as much class, talent, and confidence as, say, Ingrid Bergman or Barbra Streisand, but she was an aberration in a fascinating space dominated by white men and women.
Only white characters and white experiences, Hollywood led us to believe, could fully understand and capture the essence of love and humanity.
By contrast, Sam in Casablanca is barely distinguishable from Mammy, the perky, desexualized, and submissive black slave and servant featured in the award-winning 1939 epic Gone with the Wind. Decades after the abolition of slavery, white filmmakers were clearly still determined to portray Africans as docile to white supremacy.
Meanwhile, the Academy chose to glorify that racism with great success. Gone with the Wind received eight Academy Awards, earning Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, the first Oscar for any black artist. Casablanca also won three Academy Awards.
Hollywood certainly struck gold at the box office by imagining that blacks couldn’t have elaborate, evolving characters that multiracial (read white) audiences could appreciate.
McDaniel, for example, would go on to act as a maid in no less than 74 movies. Her “hits” from her would set a template that Hollywood studios employ to date in massively sentimental black stereotype-laden films strictly aimed at serving white leads. That’s the case with movies ranging from Shawshank Redemption and The Help to Green Mile, Jerry McGuire and Million Dollar Baby.
The deliberate erasure, minimization, and misrepresentation of black characters in favor of the white gaze have had significant and lasting real-life consequences for blacks everywhere.
Growing up in Kambuzuma in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, my friends and I would play this wildly “thrilling” game where we covered our faces and bodies with sand.
Through this innocuous but damaging effort, we pretend to be the white cowboys who saved the day in our favorite Western movies.
He was barely six years old at the time, but like others in Kambuzuma and elsewhere, he harbored a macabre fascination with whiteness and appearing white. Light-skinned African people, especially women, were considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, compared to dark-skinned people, and skin lightening creams were incredibly popular in our community.
Colorism and social and economic discrimination based on skin tone are so deeply entrenched in Afro-descendant communities that the United Nations has described them as a “hidden human rights challenge.”
Years later, my friends and I often laughed at dark-skinned Africans in countries like Sudan and Uganda, describing them as backward, poor, and ugly. Cosmetic ad campaigns, regularly endorsed by fair-skinned models, would confirm our dire deductions.
The world I grew up in inspired me to hate blackness. I felt ashamed of myself and of the economic need and social struggles that colonialism imposed and bequeathed to black people. So I fell in love with Casablanca and the contrived characterization of it, despite its myriad condescending flaws.
Of course, a lot has changed since the 1970s, when Littlefeather was mocked by the Hollywood establishment.
Films like Get Out, Black Panther, Moonlight, and Blackkklansman have demonstrated Hollywood’s new willingness to produce films with genuinely black characters and diverse, forward-thinking themes.
However, the fight is far from over, as the keepers of whiteness remain powerful players in the world of film and television. Black and minority talent continue to be underrepresented in Hollywood. When it comes to onscreen romance, the industry’s love stories continue to feature heavily white characters.
However, blacks, my people, are also people.
We love and we want our love stories to be appreciated and celebrated by everyone, including white people.
If it is truly sorry for the social injustices of the past and committed to doing better for the future, the Hollywood establishment must apologize for repeatedly dehumanizing black and brown people and promoting white supremacy around the world.
You shouldn’t wait another 50 years to do the right thing.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
