Halfway through the family drama “Black Or White,” Jeremiah Jeffers (Anthony Mackie) an Ivy-League educated lawyer, chastises his drug addict nephew Reggie (Andre Holland) in the midst of helping him regain custody of his daughter by asking, “Why do you have to be such a stereotype?”
“Black or White” is the Iggy Azalea of race films – it operates under the guise of being progressive and furthering the “conversation” about race, but only serves to exalt Whiteness by marginalizing Blackness. The movie is chock full of Black tropes and stereotypes; the overbearing matriarch who coddles and enables her son's inexcusable behavior, the “Angry Black Man” (Mackie) and the “Magical Negro” with Duvan (Mpho Koaho), who starts off as a math tutor for Eloise, but soon finds himself dispensing wise advice and becoming a personal chauffeur to Elliot when he’s too drunk to drive.
You would think in 2015 Hollywood would have evolved from such reductive narratives about race, but according to Dr. Jason Johnson, a political analyst and a professor of political science at Hiram College, it’s business as usual. “It is part of a genre movie we have always had, that’s making a comeback which I like to call the “Reasonable White Man” movie,” Johnson explains. “They are films that are ostensibly about race but are extended polemics where so-called progressive Whites are saying ‘I’m the only one who has a reasonable perspective on this and Blacks are irrational and unreasonable.”
Johnson, who attended a screening of “Black or White at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last year recalls, “There was not one person I spoke to who thought the movie was good. When they screened The Butler last year, there was lots of discussion. I do think it’s very telling that the social media silence afterwards spoke volumes." Johnson goes on to mention movies like "Monster's Ball" and "Losing Isaiah" which promote a one-sided examination of race, "What they don’t want to hear is “No, we hated Losing Isaiah because it was a paternalistic and racist film or that Monster’s Ball wasn’t the least bit progressive - it was a White Supremacist fantasy of 'I get to screw a Black girl and get away with it."
"Black or White" practices the same type of lopsided storytelling where Elliot's alcoholism is contextualized with the death of his wife, yet the Black characters are devoid of any kind of complexity or humanity. While Elliot harbors very bigoted views, his thoughts and actions are still framed with a sympathetic gaze while the Jeffers family is essentially penalized for their own family dysfunction and deemed unworthy of raising Eloise. "There wasn't a huge quality of life difference between the White and Black family," Johnson observes, "They were a middle-class, entrepreneurial family but the ending said to the viewer that it was better for this little girl to be with this White man who is an alcoholic and suffering from depression, than to be with a loving, multi-generational Black family."
Jerry L. Barrow, Managing Editor at Watchloud.com, was also disturbed by the messages he picked up from “Black or White.” "Imagine if this film was about a gay couple wanting to adopt a child and the only way to justify them being good parents was to say the heterosexual parents were dysfunctional. What does that really say about how you feel about a gay couple's ability to parent?” Barrow continues, “They are only worthy when the alternative is dysfunction? If you want to tell a story that really gets to the heart of race and family, put the opposing parties on equal footing without convenient vices and stereotypes and then explore what comes out of that dialogue. If you can't deal with it on those terms you're not really ready to talk about race."
Which brings us the marketing behind “Black or White”; Relativity Media, which is distributing the movie, has hitched their wagon to the MLK film "Selma" by showing trailers right before the critically acclaimed film in theaters across the country. They've also created a social media campaign with the asinine #LoveHasNoColor hashtag. Zeba Blay, a film writer and critic who took the movie to task in her review for Shadow and Act, finds this color-blind approach to racism highly problematic. “The sentiment ‘Love Has No Color’ is a beautiful one, but it's the kind of sentiment that is at the core of racial tensions to begin with. Let's stop ignoring race and ignoring color in an effort to move forward from racism. Sometimes, frankly, love has very little to do with the realities of growing up a mixed Black girl in an all-White environment.”
Perhaps what is most disappointing about “Black or White” is that filmmaker Mike Binder and Costner sincerely believe these types of movies can help to heal the racial divide in our country. The problem is this type of condescending, faux-progressiveness can serve to be just as toxic as outright bigotry. If you aren’t going to tackle the ways racism and White privilege are ingrained into the very fabric of our country, then you’re really just maintaining the status quo. Let's discourage Hollywood from making these basic and unintelligent race-themed movies. Go give your money to "Selma" this weekend.
