Black Girls Documentary Analysis

Improved Essays
Noteworthy Documentaries about Black History you Need to Watch

If you enjoy learning about history then watching documentaries is perhaps one of the best ways to get to know your past. Thanks to filmmakers, you now have the option to watch history unfold and not just rely on reading text-heavy books.

While some still prefer to learn history through reading, others are more visually stimulated by documentary films. For some people, watching films help them remember details more. Here are some documentaries about the history of black people that are worth watching.

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

This documentary series is highly recognized and was awarded an Emmy which is why it comes first on our list. The series covers the progress of the African American people in the US. It also
…show more content…
narrates the story and the evolution of the African American citizen. He also visits various historical places around the country and interviews African American historians. Gates also talks about the hardship and success of the black people as well as explores what it means to be a black citizen in the US today.

Dark Girls

This documentary is a must-see film, especially for America’s black women. It displays a powerful and emotional truth on what it’s like to be a black woman living in the land of the free. The filmmakers, Bill Duke and Channsin Berry spoke to a number of black women who described their daily struggles and experiences.

Their stories are raw and often have a common conclusion. They all feel that black women are not considered beautiful in America. To gain more insight on this delicate topic, the directors also interviewed people outside the black community which revealed their views about black women.

The discussions are quite emotional and helped shed some light on the biased belief that dark women are not as beautiful as white women. At the end of the film, they were able to establish and honor the black

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The United States, during the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, experienced a period of unprecedented economic, technological, and industrial growth that benefited millions of American citizens. Moreover, for many Americans it was an era of “ever-expanding progress” (Major Problems, 240) that elevated the United States into a world power. However, behind this veneer of prosperity remained the costs of progress in addition to the rancid core of racism and white hegemony that forced many minorities, mainly African Americans, into the role of second class citizens. According to T.J. Jackson Lears, “Dreams of rebirth involved renewal of white power, especially in the former Confederacy. Elite white Southerners recaptured state governments and their successors solidified white rule—purifying electoral politics by disenfranchising blacks, recasting social life by codifying racial segregation, and revitalizing white identity through the occasional blood of sacrifice of lynching.”…

    • 1026 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The plight of African Americans has been a very arduous journey. The plight of black women has been an even greater one. A large majority of African American women have faced some form of labeling, racism and backlash. During the antebellum period, you were either a free black, or former slave.…

    • 1030 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The 13th Documentary

    • 1739 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The issues surrounding different races, especially African American in the United States, is a story about as old as this country. And even though times have changed and slavery is no longer legal, the issues of the past have changed the way African Americans are marginalized. For this history paper, I decided to watch the documentary “The 13th”, directed by Ava DuVernay. Although, slavery may be gone the new major issue to arrive is mass incarceration of African Americans by the thousands, that did not just magically appear but was crafted by hundreds of years of oppressions of African Americans. Right away in the beginning of the film we learn that the United States is home to 1/4th of the Prisoners in the world, that equals 2.3 million…

    • 1739 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Sabrina Coccia Women Images & Realities 9/22/2015 Reading Analysis #2 Although, most people assume feminism is just about being against ‘the man’, it is more than that. Usually, when individuals think of feminists, they immediately think of white feminists but what about the colored feminists. Colored women have to endure racial based problems more than white women. Colored women have to endure white supremacy oppressing them. In “No Disrespect Black Women and the Burden of Respectability” by Tamara Winfrey Harris and “Ideals and Expectations: Race, Health and Femininity” by Margaret A. Lowe, these writers talk about the ways in which ‘politics of respectability’ is forced upon and the effects on women of color especially on their bodies.…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The United States of America, are rich in history but not always the world know the reality of all races of this country. One of the races that many people are trying exclude is the colored race, African American people. For many years they suffered the power of the wealthy people “whites”. Between the time was passing many names have been appearing, names like Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B Dubois and many other people that where figthed for the rights of the colored people. Thanks to them African-American people are considered part of the society nowadays.…

    • 1398 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The horrors of segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle against oppressors all brought to light the darkness and hypocrisy behind the flag which stood for equal rights for all. The part which frightens me the most is the fact that we thought we progressed as a nation past racism, yet the recent rumblings in the political and social sphere show that we still have much work to do. In Eyes on the Prize, Emmett Till, nonviolence with MLK Jr., and white culture are topics which stood out to me the most for early reaction towards the documentary. The image of Emmett Till and his brutally mutilated body under a picture of him smiling will forever be burned into my memory.…

    • 684 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Honor Diaries Analysis

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Honor Diaries is a documentary film produced by Paula Kweskin in 2013. The film focuses on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Dr. Qanta Ahmed, Nazie Eftekhari, Manda Zand Ervin, Fahima Hashim, Zainab Khan, Raheel Raza, Jasvinder Sanghera, Raquel Saraswati, and Juliana Taimoorazy. The nine women are all women’s rights activists who have witness cruelty within the Muslim world. The women in the documentary each tell a story about what happened to them and what made them be an activist. The documentary is about the way Muslim use violence towards women for honor, it gives a detailed focuses on a woman’s purity otherwise using female genital mutilation (FGM), it explains traditions like forced marriages and women not being educated.…

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the 2011 documentary film Dark Girls, Dr. Cheryl Grills states that “beauty to black people is just a small piece of a much bigger animal.” Women of African descent throughout American history have been in a constant battle between themselves and the world that surrounds them. When media evolved in the nineteen seventies the women of the world seemed to have taken “control” and the “strong black woman” movement began. Throughout the mass media there are various over-generalizations of a black woman. Mainstream media in American society plays a key role in producing negative stereotypes about this race.…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Gender And Gender Analysis

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Throughout history race and gender have been closely intertwined in the construction of both black and white women’s bodies alike. The female body being viewed as natural, the medicalizing of the female body, and advertising the ideal beauty are concepts that have been embedded in Western thinking for many years. These three theories show the interaction between gender and race in the construction of thoughts concerning, and the interpretation of, the woman’s body. The first concept that affects how we view the woman’s body deals with relating the woman to the body.…

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    LIMITED OPPORTUNITIES FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS African Americans have come a very long way. We shouldn’t fail to acknowledge the progression of the race that has also made a gargantuan impact on the world; ranging from the right to vote to military status and involvement to even the presidency of the United States. Everyone knows the long history African Americans have endured and are still enduring. Despite the fact that slavery is a painful sadness in our history that is long behind us, its fruits of racism, inequality, partiality and discrimination still remain plaguing black Americans culture and lifestyle altogether. Big problems faced by us include the lack of availability of industrial jobs, security misinterpretation and prejudice, disrespect…

    • 805 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    significant (p = .06); no such variations existed between the other clusters. Potential differences in sexual orientation, socioeconomic status (i.e., level of education obtained), and religion/spirituality based on cluster membership were explored using cross tabulation of frequencies and the Pearson chi-square statistic (i.e., dependent variable - gendered racial identity clusters; independent variable -demographic characteristics). Though there were relative differences in educational attainment between clusters, these differences were not significant. No other significant differences were identified. Qualitative Analysis of Blackness, Womanhood, and Black Womanhood…

    • 1539 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This documentary helps awaken anyone of African decent, with the ultimate goal of seeking the truth of your heritage, and not settling with the fabricated education that is…

    • 529 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Through the experiences of the black characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the damages of white femininity are exposed. Throughout the book, white girls and white movie stars often embody standards of cleanliness and beauty by containing funkiness (blackness) and creating order. Morrison often substitutes whiteness for cleanliness and demonstrates the dangers of this mixture in how the black female characters witness the supposed beauty and vulnerability of white girls and movie stars. Whether or not white girls in the book believe in their beauty, they do believe in the power their whiteness grants them over both black girls and black women and act out in fear that this power may be taken from them.…

    • 1697 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Namely in the way the characters are written. One of the key the concepts talked about in the article is the stereotypes that have been applied to black women in media for decades. There is the diva, the nurturing mammy, the loud mouthed sapphire, and the oversexed jezebel. Just listing these name automatically after viewing the film, each characters roles are painfully obvious. Helen, the diva, Helens mother as the nurturing mammy, Madea as the loud mouthed sapphire, and Brenda as the oversexed…

    • 1408 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Showing the world how proud they are of their ancestors and this in turn influenced the audience of African descent to be proud of their skin also, embracing their dark skin and history. The movie not only brought in people to a closer standard, but also revealed the history of how colonization ruined countries and socialization. Not only taking away its culture but stealing their resources and using it as their own. If watched closely, a lot of information and history can come from watching this…

    • 777 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays