Lights, Camera, Action!

     If you really think about it, how many times do you see a financially stable, literate, and/or successful Black woman in movies? There probably aren’t many instances coming to mind. Dowdy makes a great point about the fact that Black woman are so often depicted as “the bottom of the heap” in every aspect of literacy in movies. In the feature film “Losing Isaiah”, Halle Berry’s character is illiterate, drug-addicted, single parent. Even in current movies, like Tyler Perry pictures, Black woman are portrayed through characters that are struggling and not particularly successful in life. These images of Black woman as seen in the media are the things that create and mold a stereotype. A large portion of popular culture involves visual imagery in the 21^st century with all the new advances and technologies, such as 3D viewing. Young Black girls are seeing these movies and subconsciously being fed the line that “this” (what the film depicts them as) is what, and all, you have to look forward to; nothing. Now, not all movies are “bad” or “stereotypical”. There’s Things We Lost In The Fire with Halle Berry as a widowed (but stable) woman, The Secret Life of Bees with Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys as sisters that have a variety of different literacies, and there’s many more. The point trying to be made in this section of reading is that there simply aren’t enough positive messages about Black women being represented in the film world and it’s important to change that for the sake of the future generations.
-Olivia LaFlamme