The American movie consumer has been screaming at studios for years. No, we DON’T like overpowered, poorly written female characters with no flaws beating up likeable male characters. And no, we don’t like our treasured movie franchises being vandalized for the sake of woke ideology.
Luckily, the studios have finally listened. We’ve been consistently voting with our wallets and the lawyers and money men have clearly snapped the whip, bringing the idealogue directors, producers, and actors to heel.
Nice.
But since we’re making changes in entertainment, there’s another pressing issue that I’d like to fix, if you don’t mind.
The Vicious Slander of Black American Culture
Since 2016, mainstream media has taken a nasty turn in its portrayal of Black Americans,Music, film, popular culture. Somehow, every media outlet gave us booty shaking female rappers, criminalized, sexualized black children spewing filth on YouTube, and sub-80 IQ adults proudly proclaiming their past (and current) crimes. And then they called it Black American culture.
No. It isn’t. And it never has been.
Before I get too deep into this, I know there are some melanated brethren (and neurotic white people) who will take issue with my pasty ass even daring to talk about this. I don’t care.
I do not see you as separate from white Americans. We don’t do “blood and soil” here. You are my people and a part of my culture. So I’m not going to apologize for my glow-in-the-dark, red-headed self having an opinion. Those days are over.
Somehow, despite significant Black economic mobility and educational achievement (particularly in women), entertainment platforms have insisted on promoting and glorifying the nasty stereotypes previous generations worked so hard to dispel.
Remember all those Black guys who held signs saying “I am a man”? Remember how Black women fought the idea that they were just bodies to be sexually degraded?
Millennials decided that was “respectability politics,” which was bad. So once they took over the arts, they gave us Ice Spice and a movie literally titled “The Society of Magical Negros.”
We also got a spate of slavery- and racism-focused suffering porn. Since 2015, the mainstream shift in Black cinema toward "12 Years a Slave," "Harriet," and "The Hate U Give" was obvious and ubiquitous.
Gone was the vibe of 90s and 00s movies like Ice Cube's "Friday" series, which offered pure comedy. Yes, it featured stereotypes like financial struggles, pot smoking, and gun violence. But it was played for laughs (effectively). It was not painted as aspiration or as the written-in-stone fate of every Black person.
Spike Lee's "Crooklyn" showed us a dramatic and comical portrait of family life in 1970s Brooklyn, while films like "Love Jones" and "Brown Sugar" explored romance among young Black professionals. (Employed AND Black?? Impossible! The white man would never allow it!)
"Soul Food" celebrated family traditions and intergenerational bonds, while "Love & Basketball" told a story of athletic ambition and a friendship turned romance. These movies all shared Black joy, love, ambition, and everyday experiences. Some of them acknowledged, but didn’t center, discrimination or simple differences in being Black.
Black American culture is, in many ways, distinct from WASP American culture, but ghetto culture is NOT Black culture.
And I’m not the only one who noticed:
A Promising Black Future
There have been glimmers of hope. I was blown away by Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone, a scifi comedy centered on Black people that blended the aesthetic of 70s Blaxpolitation, contemporary hip hop, and early 2000s crunk. It was so funny, the scifi elements were solid, and the performances fantastic.
I will never forgive Disney Star Wars for sidelining John Boyega. He’s amazing.
Likewise, there have been several forays into horror movies centered on Black people (Get Out, Deliverance, Candy Man) and a return to the Black comedy is looking promising with the upcoming One of Them Days starring Keke Palmer.
This is what we need, and now that the Covid and Hollywood strike nonsense is over, it's time to return to what we had in the 1990s.
We need films that show Black professionals navigating career challenges, Black families dealing with universal parent-child dynamics, Black romance in all its complexity, and Black heroes saving the world—stories where racial identity informs the character's perspective but doesn't define their entire narrative.
The Black experience in America is not a monolith, especially considering the ever-increasing number of biracial/mixed people.
Moviegoers deserve to see Black people in every genre—comedy, action, romance, science fiction, and drama—not just in historical pieces or social commentary where we’re encouraged to hate and distrust each other.
I don’t accept that model of entertainment. I won’t praise it, and I won’t hold back on my disdain for anyone who has the audacity to declare it as representative of Black American culture.
I ain’t having it. And you, my fellow American movie lover of whatever complexion you may be, shouldn’t either.
If you want some suggestions for Black movies that get it right, keep scrolling.
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Awesome Black Movies
I’m intentionally excluding Tyler Perry movies. No shade, just not for this list. These are Black stories vs movies starring Black People (something like Bad Boys). Django was good too, but we not doing slavery stories today.
Historical
Life
Harlem Nights
Kingdom Come
The Six Triple Eight
The Harder They Fall
Roll Bounce
Black Dynamite
Devil in a Blue Dress
Contemporary
Barber Shop (all of them)
The Wood
The Best Man
Love and Basketball
Waiting to Exhale
Soul Food
Death at a Funeral (2010)
Friday
American Fiction
The Nutty Professor
Boomerang
Other (scifi/fantasy)
They Cloned Tyrone
Blade
Vampire in Brooklyn (not great, but I’ll allow it)
Bones (Also not great, but it could have been)
Spawn
Candyman (2021)
i’m glad there’s finally a conversation about this. it’s as if we’re not allowed to say being black doesn’t automatically equate to suffering. especially in a time when statistically speaking, the majority of the black population is middle class economically speaking & have the lowest rates of lethal encounters with police. why we are not allowed from a mainstream media perspective to not be perpetual victims is beyond me.