When
Viola Davis lost the Oscar for best actress, portraying
an African American maid in Katherine Stockett�s �The Help,� to Meryl
Streep portraying former Britain Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher in �The Iron Lady,� at the 84th Academy
Awards ceremony, there was a collective sigh of relief
from many of us African American sisters.
Tulane
University Professor Melissa Harris-Perry, the author
of an upcoming book on racial stereotypes, summed up my
feelings best when she told MSNBC that �what killed
me was that in 2011, Viola Davis was reduced to playing
a maid.�
Earlier
during the Academy Awards ceremony Octavia Spencer won
best supporting actress for her stereotypical role as
the sassy, tart-tongued �mammy-fied� maid, Minny Jackson,
in �The Help,� making Spencer the fifth African
American women to received the coveted Oscar, and the
second sister portraying a maid.
Sixty-two
years earlier, in 1940, in Jim Crow America, Hattie McDaniel
became the first African American to win an Oscar, and
for her supporting role as a maid called �Mammy� in �Gone
With the Wind.� When civil rights groups, like the
NAACP, criticized McDaniel for her portrayal as �Mammy,�
McDaniel famously retorted, �I would rather get paid $700
a week for playing a maid than $7 for being one.�
Knowing
of the controversial legacy stemming from McDaniel�s role,
Davis told Fresh Air�s Terry Gross her
�role of Aibileen, in the hands of the wrong actress,
could turn into a clich�... You�re only reduced to a clich�
if you don�t humanize a character. A character can�t be
a stereotype based on the character�s occupation.� Davis
contests she gave depth and dimensionality to her character
by pulling from the actually lived experiences of both
her mother and grandmother who worked as maids.
Spencer,
too, had trepidations portraying a maid, telling reporters
that her mother was a maid in Alabama, and �Her
heart sank when Stockett gave her the manuscript to read,
worried that she might appear as a character like Mammy
from Gone With the Wind. �And then I read it and I couldn�t
stop reading it. It was brilliant.��
In
this �post-racial� Obama era, the subject of race and
the politics of black representation in films are not
constrained by political correctness, personal enlightenment,
nor moral consciousness.
For
example, in 2010 the historical legacy of the devaluation and demonization of
black motherhood was both applauded and rewarded at that
year�s Oscars. And the point was clearly illustrated with
Mo�Nique, capturing the gold statue for best supporting
actress in the movie �Precious,� based on the novel
Push by Sapphire, as a ghetto welfare mom who demeans and demoralizes
her child every chance she can.
Mo�Nique�s role juxtaposed to Sandra Bullock�s, who captured her
Oscar as best actress in the movie �The Blind Side,� offerring
the hand of human kindness to a poor black child in need
of parenting.
But
the images of African-American parenting have historically
been viewed through a prism of gendered and racial stereotypes.
And the image of Mo�Nique as the �bad black mother� and
Sandra Bullock as the �good white mother� is nothing new.
The images of the �bad black mother� have not only been
used for entertainment purposes but also used for legislating
welfare policy reforms.
With
international stars like Iman, Oprah, Whoopi Goldberg,
and Beyonce, to name a few, signaling that women of the
African Diaspora have come a long way, what�s up with
Hollywood�s, and much of white America�s, fixation on
us as their maids and welfare moms?
�Portraying
African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs,
welfare recipients, and hot mommas has been essential
to the political economy of domination fostering Black
women�s oppression,� sociologist Patricia Hill Collins
writes in Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics
of Empowerment.
In
a skit imagining what actors are thinking, Oscar host
Billy Crystal said the following, referring to Davis: �I want to thank
my writer and director for creating the role of a strong
black woman that wasn�t played by Tyler Perry.... �When
I came out of �The Help� I wanted to hug the first black
woman that I saw, which from Beverly
Hills is a 45-minute drive.�
The
iconography of black women is predicated on four racist
cultural images: the Jezebel, the Sapphire, Aunt Jemima,
and Mammy. With the image of the strong black women who
can endure anything and �make a way out of no way,� her
strength is either demonized as being emasculating of
black men or impervious to the human condition. The Aunt
Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are now conflated into what�s
called �Big Mamma� in today�s present iconography of racist
and sexist images of African-American women.
While
the Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are prevalent images
that derive from slavery, for centuries both of them have
not only been threatening, comforting and nurturing to
white culture but also to African-American men like Tyler
Perry�s �Medea.� The dominant culture doesn�t see and
hear African American women voices on this issue because
our humanity is distorted and made invisible through a
prism of racist and sexist stereotypes. So, too, is our
suffering.
And
our suffering is exacerbated when black women�s stories
are told and/ or scripted through a universally popular feel good but nonetheless
racist trope of the white hero / rescuer.
This
trope principally conveys the following: black liberation
comes about through white agency.
While
white guilt and paternalism are clearly pawned off in
this trope as compassion so, too, is its accompanying
fictive narrative about black people. And given our unresolved
and embarrassing history of race relations in this country,
only such a trope as the white hero / rescuer could be
believed and made in America.
BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion
columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of
the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific
School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a
graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological
Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor
at an African-American church before coming to Harvard
Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She
was recently named to MSNBC�s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author
of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible
Prayers for Not�So�Everyday Moments. As an African-American
feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society
that is frequently invisible. Her website
is
irenemonroe.com.
Click here
to contact the Rev. Monroe.
