Portrayal Of Black Women Essay

Improved Essays
The portrayal of black women has evolved greatly over time. From Oliva Pope in Scandal to Annalise in How to Get Away with Murder, black women are on-screen professionals now more than ever. Although black women are seen dealing with issues in their stories’ plot, the great majority of these plots take a back seat to the subplot of romance. The success of black women in media is relentlessly measured by their love life. Regardless of the success of their financial, employment, or platonic relationships, black women are still conceived in the media to act as if love will complete them. The long lasting effects of minstrel stereotypes placed on black people at the beginnings of American theatre has allowed for this trope to continue on into the …show more content…
However, to equate the way white women and black women face sexism would be trivializing the experiences of black women. It is apparent that white women in film are also often times shown to have love be the focal point of their movies. However, even in these situations, there are other things that create depth to their characters. For example, in the movie Trainwreck which stars Amy Schumer, the main character has many reasons for why she is single. She faced childhood trauma and received negative influences from her father that caused her to want to stay single (Apatow). Also, her character is work driven as seen by her trying throughout the film to write a good story for her editor so she can receive a promotion. Shumer’s character is given depth and drive that is geared not only towards her romantic life but her platonic and professional lives as well. However, in the two examples of movies with black women, neither of them are given any reasons as to why their love lives are the way they are. The audience is supposed to accept this and continue to watch as she mindlessly falls in love with the first man to tell her what she needed to

Related Documents

  • 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
  • Decent Essays

    The author of this article states that there are too many angry black women narratives in the media. This work also explains how lighter skinned black women are portrayed positively in the media while their darker skinned counterparts are represented negatively. The main topics that are discussed in the article is colorblind discourse and racial stereotypes. Additionally, the article states colorblind disclosure causes the viewers to evaluate blacks on television according to the content of their characters on screen. Kretsedemas also discusses the criticism of black shows that try too hard to steer away from the black stereotypes.…

    • 1140 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Great Essays

    African Americans have a long and difficult history in the United States. They were once property that could be bought and sold. They once had separate water fountains, bathrooms, and schools than whites. They had to fight for their rights in America and even though they have as many rights as every other American under the letter of the law, there are areas in which they still have to deal with undo ridicule, harassment, and injustices in our society.…

    • 1501 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I love black women. I love their curves and their flava. I love their attitudes and their intricacies. Black women are the ultimate puzzle. Sometimes you put the pieces together and you may not like the picture.…

    • 837 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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…

    • 422 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The African American women in this movie were portrayed as floozies and sex objects. Women who sleep around and allow themselves to be mistreated by men. Ms.Parker is the neighborhood eye candy. She’s that lady that men sexually fantasize about. Craig and Smokey enjoy watching her water the plants in the morning wearing her shorts and tight crop top with her huge partially wet breasts nearly popping out.…

    • 1153 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Essay On Black Experience

    • 1548 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The black experience is one journey that is unique to every single black person that resides on this earth; although, some black’s experience might be similar, not one will ever be the same, so if you don’t mind I would like you take on my trip of what I deem as the back experience. Being black you’re underestimated at birth just based off the color of your skin and you are look at as nothing but a hopeless statistics; however, the power to knock down those statistical barriers you must realize your greatness and no one could of realized it more than Wilma Rudolph who stated “Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” If you look back at every monumental person in black history such as: Martin Luther…

    • 1548 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hollywood: Truly a Land of Opportunity? From white actors portraying black men in classics, such as Othello, or even from white actress playing dark skinned women, such as Mariane Pearl, white actors portraying people of color in american films has been a tradition in Hollywood. Hollywood has historically made the decision to cast white actors instead of letting minorities play their own roles. While Hollywood is known for being a white industry, over the past years more noise, such as the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (8), has been made about the lack of diversity in their films.…

    • 767 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As an African American female, there is a constant battle with being able to feel as if you are enough. Society makes black women feel as if her skin is not beautiful, as if God did not take his time creating her melanin and the course of her hair. They label us as loud, aggressive and incompetent. On the other hand, you have people that look just like you, who fight the same battle as you against the world, and they make you feel as if you are not worthy either. Therefore, I’m left with the question “What is my purpose?”…

    • 816 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Essay On Black Community

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Of the several discourse communities that I belong to, the most evident and probably the one that I identify with the most is the black community. Contrary to popular belief in this country, the black community does not exclusively include African Americans, but those who come from African descent such as people from Africa, the United States, Caribbean, and in some cases Europe and Central/South America. From our several shades of brown to our unique culture, this large, widespread group of individuals is my community; we represent the global black discourse community. The black community has experienced a significant amount of tension both within and outside the community.…

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    If a woman is powerful or doing her job, she will be a villain but if she is submissive even if she is stupid, she will become an angel. Black people were working in low paid simple jobs, society wanted them not the use their brains but their muscles. Native Americans were seen as someone who follows white men and white men are their teachers and saviours. Even if the movie is about freedom, it shows us that even if you escape from your prison society always categorise you as bad women, black, native and…

    • 793 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The history of African Americans has always been limited in many school systems creating an ignorance to many people on the construction of this race. To truly understand why a race of people do things you need to know their history and where they came from. The African American Experience is often considered one of the most interesting pieces in history. Africa, the world’s oldest populated area and also considered the beginning of humanity was comprised up to 10,000 different states and groups with distinct languages and religions. The country of Egypt was a huge contributor to the development of Africa and other world civilizations and was the land of mathematics and problem solving.…

    • 1293 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior 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

    I personally decided to cease the pursuit of my acting career after narrowly losing the serious dramatic lead to a skinny white girl one too many times. It’s always been because I am too short, too curvy, and too brown to be taken seriously, but not brown enough to suffer real oppression. Cofer and women like her are so important because they give a voice to those who have remained silent for far too long. They make dreams seem a…

    • 950 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Janes Gaines’s, White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory, Gaines wanted to show how a theory of the text and its spectator, based on the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference, is unequipped to deal with a film which is about racial difference and sexuality. “The Diana Ross star vehicle Mahogany (directed by Berry Gordy, 1975) immediately suggests a psychoanalytic approach because the narrative is organized around the connections between voyeurism and photographic acts, because it exemplifies the classical cinema which has been so fully theorized in Lacanian terms” (Gaines, 12). But as Gaines argued, the psychoanalytic model works to block out considerations which assume a different configuration…

    • 929 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics