PLEDGE OF SCHOLARLY HONESTY

By my signature below, I pledge and certify that my ELTE M.A. thesis, entitled
From Mammy to Jezebel: Changes of the Black Woman Stereotype in American
Cinematography
is entirely my own work. That is to say, the framing ideas are substantially my own and I have
faithfully and exactly cited all the sources I have used, whether from conversations, books,
letters, and other media, including the Internet. If this pledge is found to be false, I realize that
I will be subject to penalties up to and including the forfeiture of the degree earned by my
thesis.

Vivien Vereczki
SZAKDOLGOZAT
Vereczki Vivien
Amerikanisztika

ELTE 2010
From Mammy to Jezebel: Changes of the black woman
stereotype in American cinematography
A fekete nő sztereotípiái az amerikai filmiparban
SZAKDOLGOZAT

Vereczki Vivien
témavezető: Federmayer Éva, doc.
Amerikanisztika

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Budapest, 2010
 Thesis Summary

This thesis, titled Black woman stereotypes in American Cinematography, gives a

detailed account of the misbeliefs and distorted images of African-American women which
Hollywood has created over the last century. Throughout the thesis, I intended to prove that
all of the stereotypes which have been created about African American women by U.S.
cinematography are based on the perverted images of the black woman’s sexuality. The
overall structure of the thesis follows a chronological order and is split into chapters to
illustrate the reciprocal impacts of historical and social changes in the United States on the
movie industry over the decades.
After a brief introduction of what stereotypes and codes are, I give a thorough
examination of the stereotypes used for African-American women by U.S. cinematography;
how they have been created, what hidden (mis)conceptions of the African culture have lead to
their formation and finally, what types of stereotypes have emerged as a consequence of such
distortions. I also intended to prove that the major stereotypes (the Mammy, Jezebel, Tragic
Mulatto and their variations) which have been around since the very beginning of the U.S.
cinema are still present in today’s movies. To substantiate this argument, I tended to provide
ample examples through distinguished films and also a good number of books by experts of
the field. In the second half of the thesis, stereotypes are examined in connection with the
historical, technological and social changes in the United States during the twentieth century.
In the final chapter, I investigated the social and cultural impacts of these stereotypes
on U.S. society’s African-American women.
Table of contents

1. Introduction.............................................................................................................................1
2. Thesis Statement.....................................................................................................................2
3. Definition of Stereotypes and Codes......................................................................................2
3.1 The correlation between stereotypes and sexuality in US cinematography.....................3
3.2 The Lewd Black Woman: Jezebel....................................................................................4
3.3 The Asexual Nurturer: Mammy........................................................................................6
3.4 The Tragic Mulatto...........................................................................................................8
3.5 The Domineering Sapphire.............................................................................................10
4.1 The 1920s – Birth of a Nation.........................................................................................12
4.2 The ‘Soundies’................................................................................................................14
5. Minstrel shows......................................................................................................................16
7. The New Negro Woman.......................................................................................................18
7.1 The New Negro Woman: Hilda......................................................................................20
7.2 The New Negro Woman: Mammy in Gone with the Wind............................................21
7.3 The New Negro Woman: Peola in Imitation of Life.......................................................23
8. The Tragic Mulatto...............................................................................................................24
8.1 The Tragic Mulatto: Carmen Jones................................................................................25
9. The Production Code of Ethics.............................................................................................28
10. Musicals..............................................................................................................................28
11. The Civil Rights Movement................................................................................................30
12. First Attempts to Bring Interracial Romance on Screen.....................................................31
13. The Post-Integrated Black Woman.....................................................................................32
14. Blaxploitation Films............................................................................................................33
15. Black Romance...................................................................................................................35
15.1 Black Romance: Mahogany..........................................................................................35
16. Disillusionment During the Recuperation Period...............................................................39
17. The ‘Era of Tan’..................................................................................................................40
18. The Color Purple................................................................................................................42
19. Black Aesthetic Cinema......................................................................................................43
20. Hip-Hop and Pop-Culture During the 1990s......................................................................44
21. The Social and Cultural Impacts of Hollywood’s Black Woman Stereotypes...................46
22. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................53
Works Cited..............................................................................................................................54
 1

1. Introduction

In this thesis I seek to find answers to why African-American women have most of the

time, if not always, been presented in relation to their sexuality in US cinematography. As I

explore the historical and social impacts on the cinematic representation of African-American

women on film, it becomes clear that black women have always been judged by white men in

relation to their sexual behavior and appearance. I say ‘white men’ because Hollywood

directors and casting agencies as well as the supportive media consist mainly of white men

even today. Thus casting, storyline, and acting have been strictly managed by white men since

the beginning of the twentieth century. Hollywood’s attitude toward ‘blackness’ have not

changed much over the decades. The same few stereotypes are being used for black women

on film since the very first motion pictures appeared on screen and these stereotypes are all

based on the various (mis)interpretations of sexuality.

The structure of the thesis follows a chronological order starting at the 1910s, but it is

also wrapped around the historical and technological changes that affected (and still affect)

the movie industry. Thus the main themes I explore in this thesis include an overview of what

stereotypes are and how black woman stereotypes came into existence. Then I provide a

supportive argument to why a connection exists between black woman stereotypes and female

sexuality. The main body of the thesis introduces major and lesser known stereotypes of the

black woman through various examples from US films. At the end, I intend to explain how

these stereotypes affect the everyday life of black women, what sort of social and cultural

impact they have on these women and how they actually shape these women’s lives by

creating and enforcing new trends on their social behavior.

Throughout the thesis, I mention a wide range of films and instead of focusing just on

a few films, I emphasize and elaborate on many in order to support my arguments. However,

there are eleven films which I have analyzed in keen detail to provide an overview of the main
 2

themes of the thesis. The Birth of a Nation is a classic movie industry product in a sense that

it was the first long-reeler in the United States to be watched by the American public in the

1920s. The Birth of a Nation is labeled a racist movie because it degrades African-Americans

to the level of simple-minded brutes. Besides being a milestone in terms of cinematographic

development, I chose this movie because it introduced such typical African-American woman

stereotypes as the tragic mulatto. Mississippi – the next movie to be examined more closely –

was my second choice because it was one of the first films with sound. Although it is a very

entertaining and funny movie, the way it represents African-American women as ‘absent,

uneducated mammies’ is rather sad. The Scar of Shame was directed by Oscar Micheaux. The

black woman character is the Tragic Mulatto whose fate is to live unhappily as a light-skinned

woman of African descent. Imitation of Life also uses the stereotype of the Tragic Mulatto;

however, she is represented in a slightly different manner as in earlier productions. Peola is

more independent, more emancipated than the earlier Tragic Mulattos on screen. She is the

typical ‘New Negro Woman.’ The film’s other black woman character is Aunt Delilah (that

is, ‘Aunt Jemimah’) who is a faithful servant but who is, at the same time, more independent

as the earlier representations of the stereotypical Mammy character. The Mad Miss Manton

and Gone with the Wind both include the ‘New Negro Woman’ in their Mammy characters.

Carmen Jones, played by Dorothy Dandridge, is also analyzed as the Tragic Mulatto in the

musical era. One of the first attempts to bring interracial romance on screen was Pinky and the

truly black romance came with Mahogany. The Color Purple has its own chapter because it is

such a unique film that it has given ground to many debates and criticism. Finally, I chose

Poetic Justice as a typical hip-hop culture production to reflect on how little did black woman

stereotypes change during the decades. The film’s black woman characters are in sharp

contrast in terms of their behavior, skin color and language. The darker one is the ‘bitch,’’

while the lighter colored woman is the prettier, nicer, sexier black woman.
 3

The reason I chose to elaborate on over ten movies whilst mentioning a good number

of others is because for one thing, supporting a thesis with more examples further justifies the

argument. The other reason is that I believed the topic would be a lot more interesting if I

mentioned as many movies as I thought was relevant to each chapter.

2. Thesis Statement

Stereotypes are cognitive categories people create in their minds in order to interpret

personal experiences. We tend to categorize just about everything we see and experience in

order to make sense of the world around us. Stereotypes are thus part of our learning process

as we age and they can be very useful in certain situations. However, stereotypes can be also

damaging when based on misinterpreted observations about the world. Distorted beliefs about

others form when we ignore the cultural, social or environmental diversity that surrounds us.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened when white men stepped on African soil during

the colonization period.

In American movies, African-American women have always been presented in relation

to stereotypical constructions of sexuality. African-American actresses have been cast in side-

roles instead of major ones most of the time either as over-sexed savages or as asexual

nurturers in Hollywood cinema before the twenty-first century. These sexuality-related

stereotypes emerged from the archetypal images and beliefs white men had about African

women during colonial times. Such stereotypes were thus the creation of sexual categories

black women have been put into according to their looks and misinterpreted behavior by

white men.

3. Definition of Stereotypes and Codes

James A. Snead uses “codes” to define stereotypes in American films. By “codes” he

means that set of conventions which define perception in limited and predictable ways within
 4

any given culture (26). Roland Barthes distinguishes three major codes for narrative in his S/Z

essay: codes that involve conventions of plot content, codes that involve the structure of the

plot, and codes that the text borrows from outside sources. These latter ones are what we call

‘stereotypes’ (184). Snead thus explains that “[o]ne of the prime codes surrounding blacks on

screen … is an almost metaphysical stasis. The black, particularly the black woman, is seen as

eternal, unchanging, unchangeable” (26). From Hallelujah (1929) to The Color Purple

(1985), black women are portrayed with a shiftless and static personality to reinforce the code

of the eternal or static black woman. American cinematography has set very strict, clearly

defined, ‘eternal’ codes for representing African-American women on screen in order to

define the place of African-American women where they could remain forever inferior to

white women. Codes carry in themselves their completing visual “markers” as James A.

Snead describes (26). Markers can be anything that a woman wears – for example, when a

large-built, round-face African-American appears on screen with an apron on, she is

immediately categorized as ‘the maid’ thanks to the apron and her roundness. She cannot be

anything else but the good old mammy stereotype. When a black woman is slender, has

Caucasian features and is dressed as a slut, her clothes are telling the audiences that she is the

manifestation of the jezebel stereotype. So, there are tools, such as clothes, accessories, or

body images that represent certain codes which can then be interpreted by the audiences into

stereotypes.

3.1 The correlation between stereotypes and sexuality in US cinematography

During the history of US cinema, the stereotypes used in films for black women were

based on old myths about the black woman – reaching as far back as the slavery times – and

were carefully selected one after the other to always respond to the changes in politics,

economics, technology and society. (For example, with Roosevelt’s New Deal, optimism

grew among people and a new social order was in the make. This brought on screen the
 5

modern black woman; the New Negro Woman, who has finally replaced the big, asexual

mammy.) Sexuality has always been a defining factor for the representation of the black

woman on film. All of the stereotypes that can be tied to African-American women originate

from the misconceptions of the black woman’s sexuality or the lack of it (asexuality). Ever

since the showing of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), many stereotypes had

been personified on-screen by Hollywood actresses, which reflected Hollywood’s idea about

what black women should be or should have been like in American society. The mammy, the

tragic mulatto, the lusting jezebel were among the most distinct ones, but their overlapping

characters should be recognized, as well. Although many of these stereotypes of black women

were rooted as far back as the antebellum period, their introduction to the moving pictures

came only gradually and in a distinct order at such a pace as Hollywood recognized the need

for them.

3.2 The Lewd Black Woman: Jezebel

Up until today, American cinematography does everything in its power to restrain and

keep within boundaries the definition and representation of African-American women on

screen. Regardless of what decade we are talking about, from the first day the movie industry

had started to cater to large audiences, it has always proved to satisfy the taste of the

dominant, white social order. As Ed Guerrero puts it, “…the representation of black people on

the commercial screen has amounted to one grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been

subordinated, marginalized, positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and

relentlessly hold in place the white-dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of

American society” (2). Most of the black woman stereotypes emerge from the misunderstood

and misinterpreted African cultural traditions by white men. As Deborah Gray White states in

Ar’n’t I a Woman?, “…when Englishmen went to Africa to buy slaves…[they] mistook semi-

nudity for lewdness. …polygamy was attributed to the Africans’ uncontrolled lust, tribal
 6

dances were reduced to the level of orgy, and African religions lost the sacredness…” (29).

Thus, one of the earliest images hence created by white men about African women was the

‘Jezebel.’ She is the exact counter-image of the Victorian woman who is pure, untouched and

pious. Drawn almost entirely by her libido, jezebel is the direct opposite of the white

Victorian ideal. She is a lustful and oversexed woman who takes advantage of men by sex.

Antebellum Southerners “were convinced that slave women were lewd and lascivious, that

they invited sexual overtures from white men” (Gray White 30). A slave woman’s body – as

opposed to that of the white woman – was exposed either because her clothes had to be

pinned up in the fields, or because the clothes she wore were tattered almost to the levels of

nudity. This exposure of the black female body was again misinterpreted by the white class as

‘promiscuous.’ Conversely, white women wore clothing over most of their body parts.

The contrast between the clothing reinforced the beliefs that white women were

civilized, modest, and sexually pure, whereas black women were uncivilized, immodest, and

sexually aberrant. While in the North white prostitutes were coveted and disrespected, in the

South white women were kept pure because black women acted as a buffer against their

degradation. In some cases, white women even envied black women for their ‘sexual

freedom’ and saw this arrangement as a burden to their subordinate situation to white men.

“The image of jezebel excused miscegenation, the sexual exploitation of black women, and

the mulatto population” (Gray White 61). Angela Davis, in Women, Race & Class states that

raping black slave women “…was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose

covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize

their men” (24). During slavery times, many African women were sold into prostitution. Also,

freeborn light-skinned black women sometimes became the concubines of wealthy white

southerners. This system, called ‘placage,’ gave way the white man to financially support the

black woman and her children in exchange for her long-term sexual services. The image of
 7

jezebel survives even today. She is the whore and slut in the exploitation movies, for example.

Her value is measured by her sexuality; she is a sexual commodity.

3.3 The Asexual Nurturer: Mammy

The other image which simultaneously came to be accepted as the typical character for

a black woman was the ‘Mammy.’ Her first appearance on screen was in relation to the comic

‘Coon’ in Coon Town Suffragettes (1914). This asexual, usually large-built woman is just the

opposite of Jezebel. She is the premier house servant who knows everything best among the

servants, she is a tough one to argue with, deeply religious and endlessly devoted to her

master. Always wearing clean clothes, she is a polite servant and a protective nurse to the

master’s children. She always finds a way to warn the white children not to mingle with the

Negro kids. Mammy is a friend and an advisor to her master and mistress. Sort of a surrogate

mother and mistress in the house. Mammy’s strict racial codes, – loyal, desexualized, strong –

had to meet the audience’s expectations of such a household character and had to confine with

the Victorian ideal of a woman and the sentimental depiction of the Southern plantation life.

Hollywood did its best to reflect conservative middle-class values because that’s what the

mass demanded and that’s what brought the money in. And middle-class values would not

tolerate the emergence of the black heroine as a leading role character or as the symbol of

beauty. She is the “…ideal slave and the ideal woman; the ideal symbol of the patriarchal

tradition….Mammy was the centerpiece in the antebellum Southerner’s perception of the

perfectly organized society” (Davis 58). To sum it up, mammy’s character and attitude is the

romanticized image of the maternal or Victorian ideal of womanhood prevalent in nineteenth

century America.

As the Victorian ideal is understood in terms of asexuality, mammy is always seen as

an older woman and her age – as well as her large complexion – is a metaphor for this

asexuality. Her image was deliberately constructed to suggest ugliness. Her dark skin was
 8

considered undesirable in a society that regarded black skin as ugly. She was extremely

overweight. The goal with the creation of such image was to desexualize mammy. The

implicit assumption was that no reasonable white man would choose an obese, old black

woman instead of the idealized white woman. Mammy was portrayed as lacking all sexual

and sensual qualities. The desexualization of mammy meant that the white woman was safe.

The mammy image tells many lies: in this case, the lie is that white men did not find black

women sexually desirable.

From slavery through the Jim Crow era, the mammy image served the political, social,

and economic interests of mainstream white America. Mammy’s figure served as proof that

black women were contented and happy as slaves. Catherine Clinton, a historian, claimed that

real antebellum mammies were scarce (201). Her research found records of female slaves who

served as the ‘right hand’ of plantation owners and their wives ( 202). However, documents

from the first fifty years following the Civil War reveal only a handful of such examples.

Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women

and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during

the ante-bellum period. In the primary records from before the Civil War, hard evidence for

its existence simply does not appear.

The mammy caricature implied that black women were only fit to be domestic

workers; thus, the stereotype became a rationalization for economic discrimination. During

the Jim Crow period, approximately 1877 to 1966, America's race-based, race-segregated job

economy limited most blacks to menial, low paying, and low status jobs. Black women found

themselves forced into one job category: house servant. The mainstreaming of mammy was

mainly the result of the advertising industry. Mammy’s offshoot is ‘Aunt Jemima’ who is a

lovable, jolly, fat black woman – in ways more polite but not as head-strong as mammy. She

differs from Mammy in that her duties were restricted to cooking. It was through Aunt
 9

Jemimah that the association of the African-American woman with domestic work, especially

cooking, became fixed in the minds of society. Perhaps Aunt Jemimah’s most famous image

is in the pancake advertisement campaign. The films Mae West starred in during the 1930s

are great examples for this character.

The mammy image was immortalized and forever engraved in the minds of the

American audiences with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and her image was truly

perfected by Hattie McDaniel during the 1930s. Sometimes maids of movie stars also acted in

films – usually in the same role as at home (for example, Leatrice Joy’s maid Louise Beavers,

or Mae West’s maid Libby Taylor).

3.4 The Tragic Mulatto

The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ comes closest to what beauty is by white standards. She is a

light-skinned, educated and talented character whose only flaw is that she has black blood.

Her fate is tragic because her legal status as slave places her in degrading situations. Her

Caucasian features allow her to become the sex object of white men but her ancestry denies

her the sexual freedom to choose or to be chosen by white men. The tragic mulatto stereotype

claims that mulattoes occupy the margins of two worlds, fitting into neither, accepted by

neither.

In slavery, the mulatto afforded the slave owner the opportunity to rape a woman who

was physically near-white but legally black. The mulatto woman was depicted as a seductress

whose beauty drove white men to rape her. This is an obvious attempt to reconcile the

prohibitions against miscegenation with the reality that white men used black women as

sexual objects. Every mulatto was proof that the color line had been crossed. In this regard,

mulattoes were symbols of rape and concubinage. Gary B. Nash summarized the slavery-era

relationship between the white owner and his black ‘belongings:’

 10

Though skin color came to assume importance through generations of

association with slavery, white colonists developed few qualms about
intimate contact with black women. But raising the social status of
those who labored at the bottom of society and who were defined as
abysmally inferior was a matter of serious concern. It was resolved by
insuring that the mulatto would not occupy a position midway
between white and black. Any black blood classified a person as
black; and to be black was to be a slave.... By prohibiting racial
intermarriage, winking at interracial sex, and defining all mixed
offspring as black, white society found the ideal answer to its labor
needs, its extracurricular and inadmissible sexual desires, its
compulsion to maintain its culture purebred, and the problem of
maintaining, at least in theory, absolute social control. (289-290)

Cinematic portrayals of the tragic mulatto emphasized her negative traits: self-hatred,

depression, and eventually alcoholism and suicide attempts. Her skin tone was light enough to

pass for white, but passing led to even deeper self-loathing. The tragic mulatto pitied blacks

and hated whites, yet desperately sought the approval of the white society. She evoked either

pity or scorn from others, but no sympathy. Sterling Brown summarized the treatment of the

tragic mulatto by White writers: “To [the white writers] he is the anguished victim of divided

inheritance. Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and self-control

come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings, indolence and potential savagery come

from his Negro blood. Their favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the ‘single

drop of midnight in her veins,’ desires a white lover above all else, and must therefore go

down to a tragic end” (145). Most tragic mulattoes were women who were portrayed as so

selfish that they would give up everything in their lives, including their family, just to be able

to live as whites (for example Peola in the film Imitation of Life).

One of the earliest appearances of the Tragic Mulatto was in The Debt (1912). The

white master’s wife and his black mistress bear him children almost at the same time. The two
 11

as they grow fall in love, but eventually they find out that they are blood-related. The biggest

problem, however, is not their kinship, but the fact that the girl has an African descent.

Around 1913, three films, the In Humanity’s Cause, In Slavery Days, and The Octoroon, deal

with the stereotype of the fair-skinned mulatto who attempts to pass for white, but being

exposed, she must live unhappily as a victim of her ancestry. In The Birth of a Nation, Lydia

(the mulatto woman) is the only black character for whom some of the audience may feel pity

and sympathy. She is captured between two worlds while she despises whites and refuses to

be treated as an inferior due to her skin color. The mulatto’s character with her light skin and

Caucasian features comes closest to the white ideal and only this type of a black woman can

be accepted as a sexy, adorable representation of black womanhood. (This is probably why

Eartha Kitt in Anna Lucasta and Lola Falana in The Liberation of L. B. Jones never emerged

as ‘hot’ goddesses as their skin was ‘too dark.’) The Show Boat in 1936 employed a white

woman for the role of the tragic mulatto – Julie. When it comes to light that she has Negro

blood, Julie’s white husband performs a ritual by drinking a drop of blood from her hand in

order to become a ‘Negro’, too. Nonetheless, they are ordered to leave the boat and at the end,

Julie becomes an alcoholic.

3.5 The Domineering Sapphire

A hundred years after slavery, a new stereotypical image of the black woman emerged

– based on the ‘findings’ of such sociologists as E. Franklin Frasier, Daniel Moynihan, or

Calvin Hernton: the ‘Sapphire.’ Unlike jezebel, sapphire is more of a domineering rather than

a sexually overheated black woman who aggressively consumes men. As opposed to mammy,

she has no maternal compassion. She is as tough and tireless as mammy but her character is

set in the men’s world. Sapphire dominates her man, her family and her sexual activities. She

is harsh, loud, and when around whites, she usually serves to make the other (white)

characters more professional, more charming, and more polished by contrast. The Sapphire
 12

image has no specific physical features other than the fact that her complexion is usually

brown or dark brown. Her hands gripping her hips, she is always engaged in an ongoing

verbal dual. Although African-American men are her primary targets, she insults anyone who

disrespects her. The sapphire is a perpetual complainer who wishes her bitterness and

unhappiness on others. The sapphire image is also a social control mechanism that is

employed to punish black women who violate the societal norms that encourage black women

to be passive, servile, non-threatening, and unseen (Abagond: “The Sapphire Stereotype”).

During the boom of the blaxploitation genre films, the Jezebel caricature and the Sapphire

caricature merged into a hybrid: angry ‘whores’ fighting injustice. For example, Pam Grier’s

characters in the blaxploitation movies (e.g. Coffy, 1973) resembled those of the black male

superheroes: they were physically attractive and aggressive rebels, willing and able to use

their bodies, brains, and guns to gain revenge against corrupt officials, drug dealers, and

violent criminals. Their anger was not focused solely at black men; rather, it was focused at

injustice.

It was not the film industry which has created the aforementioned stereotypes. They

had long existed (since slavery times) in the American life and arts and were simply borrowed

by the early filmmakers to entertain public audiences. Naturally, they have been used and

reused by trimming them here and there, but the main features of mammy, the tragic mulatto,

sapphire, jezebel as well as their overlapping images have not changed much over the

decades. As Jones and Shorter-Gooden note in Shifting, these stereotypes “have mutated into

contemporary versions of their old selves” (3).

It is interesting to note that overseas, where Josephine Baker – an African-American

entertainer who moved to France after the First World War – was performing in Parisian

music halls and night clubs, the stereotypical image of the black woman was somewhat

different than in America. The French believed that women of African descent were innocent,
 13

sensitive, and as primitive as the noble savages in America (Sharpley-Whiting 106). During

the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Baker soon realized that in order to keep her audiences

interested, she had to exploit the French’s ‘exoticism’ of black women by dwelling on the

expected images, such as costumes made of banana leaves, accentuated buttock-dances, and

ultimately the ‘savage sex goddess.’ She also appeared in films made by French filmmakers

during the 1930s, while her “Black Venus” character reaffirmed the stereotypical image of

black women “as a savage, sensual, infantilized cinematic Venus” (Sharpley-Whiting 111).

To sum it up, by the time the first long-reeler came out and audiences sat in the theater

to watch a story unfold on screen, the roles for African-American women have already been

created, categorized and sharply defined by the major stereotypes whose roots have reached

back to the colonial times. The Jezebel, the mammy, the sapphire and the tragic mulatto all

emerged from the misbelieves and misinterpretations of the African-American women’s

sexuality and have been used over and over again with little changes and add-ons to reinforce

the sexual images and social replacement of black women in America.

4. The Impact of the Changes in History, Technology and Society on the Stereotypical
Representation of the Black Woman on Film

4.1 The 1920s – Birth of a Nation

The most controversial and influential movie of the silent era (before the 1920’s) was

unquestionably D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915. This first feature-length film

fused the two basic racial themes of the segregated South, drawing a parallel between the two:

the minstrel show and the lynching. The movie helped revive the Ku Klux Klan and inspired a

new wave of white supremacy in the 1920s. D. W. Griffith based the film on Thomas Dixon’s

anti-black novel The Clansman (which was the original title of the movie). Griffith depicted

his black characters as either ‘loyal servants’ (mammies and Toms), or ‘brutes’ who were

lusting for white women and girls. In addition, the tragic mulatto appeared as the seductress to

the white man but carried the fate of a black slave woman.
 14

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of two families: the Stonemans from Pennsylvania

and the Camerons from South Carolina. The Stonemans, headed by politician Austin

Stoneman, and the Camerons, headed by slaveholder ‘Little Colonel’ Ben Cameron, have

been friends for a long time. However, the Civil War came between them and separated them

by conviction. Both families suffer the same loss of a son in the war. The second intertitle

during the movie says that “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of

disunion.” Then, the very last intertitle reads: “Liberty, and union, one and inseparable, now

and forever!” So clearly, Griffith proposes the idea that unity of South and North can only be

achieved by the elimination of the African threat – in other words, by subordinating the black

population. Stoneman, who is a carpetbagger from the North, moves his family to the South.

He falls under the influence of Lydia, his mulatto housekeeper and mistress. The Birth of a

Nation portrays two mulatto characters, Lydia Brown and Silas Lynch, who are both from the

North. These two characters are able to impose their evilness on the Southern gentry through

their relations with Austin Stoneman. The film suggests that the mulatto girl, Lydia, is the

manipulative force behind Stoneman’s anti-slavery and integrationist policies. To reinforce

this notion, the intertitle states that she is the “weakness that is to blight a nation.”

The Birth of a Nation set the standard for cinematic anti-black images. All of the major

black stereotypes are present in the movie: the mammy, the sambo, the Tom, the pickaninny,

the coon, the brute and, of course, the tragic mulatto. The depictions of Lydia as a cold-

hearted, hateful seductress were the early example of the tragic mulatto stereotype. In the

motion picture, she hates whites and refuses to be treated as an inferior. Throughout the film,

she laments her displacement as a black woman in her desired white world. Sexualized and

ambitious, the blackfaced mulatto characters in this film served as a warning against any kind

of integration or miscegenation.
 15

Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film, Within Our Gates, is an African-American response

to The Birth of a Nation. Micheaux’s film provided a rebuttal to Griffith’s depiction of black

violence and corruption with a story of the injustices faced by African-Americans in a racist

society and sets a scene of an attempted rape of a black woman by a white man. Within Our

Gates centers on a schoolteacher from the South, Sylvia Landry, who is characterized by the

intertitle as “typical of the intelligent Negro of our times.” She is the adopted daughter of

Jasper Landry, described as “typical of the thousands of poor Negro laborers in the Great

Delta, lacking education and the vote, but in whose heart burned an eternal hope.” He is a

middle-aged, dark-skinned man who lives with his family in a metal hut and labors hard to

make ends meet for the whole family. After the lynching scene of the Jasper family, the film

shifts to the attempted rape of Sylvia. She is trapped in a house with Armand Gridlestone, a

white man whose land the Jaspers used to plow. An intertitle reads: “Still not satisfied with

the poor victims burned in the bonfire, Gridlestone goes looking for Sylvia.” Gridlestone

starts chasing Sylvia around the room and rips off her coat. Sylvia grabs a knife but gives in

after a long fight. The only thing that saves Sylvia from being raped is Gridlestone's

recognition of a scar on her chest which identifies her as his mulatto daughter. He never

reveals to Sylvia that she is his daughter but he stops attacking her. The movie ends happily:

Sylvia is engaged by Dr. Vivian – another mulatto character who is educated, comes from a

wealthy middle-class family and is socially and politically sensitive. So, even though the

tragic mulatto becomes the victim of painful and tragic events during the movie, she is

nevertheless offered a happy ending to her story, unlike other mulattoes in the preceding

movies.

4.2 The ‘Soundies’

Thanks to two events, which took place simultaneously in the 1920s - the Great

Depression and the development of film sound – the movie industry had shifted into a new
 16

direction with new social values and ideals to escape reality. The old traditions were replaced

by escapism and denial. However, similarly to the previous films, the new ideology had failed

to give a just representation of the black people. With the ‘soundies,’ African-American actors

and actresses were given roles of exaggerated comic stereotypes and were degraded to play

feeble-minded, dancing, singing entertainers, or “pickaninnies.” Of course, the old mammy

type stood strong just as before. Plantation life was a romantic, idealistic way of carrying on

with one’s labors. A show boat film of 1935, told a romantic tale of a white man, Tom, (Bing

Crosby) and a southern girl named Lucy, whose father is a plantation owner. As the story

unfolds, both characters undergo a personality development. Tom who originally plans to

marry Lucy’s older sister, takes a journey on the show boat down the River Queen to return

with a code of honor he earned during his time on the boat. Lucy awaits him faithfully and

forgives him for killing her uncle on the boat. Mississippi is a full-blown romance with many

musical songs performed by Bing Crosby. Libby Taylor (Lavinia) plays the maid of Mistress

Lucy in the film. Her appearance is that of a typical mammy: large-built, ample bosom, hair

tied in a handkerchief. She is wearing black, undecorated clothes. Lavinia does not say too

many lines in the scene; once she comments on Lucy’s luck for finding Tom at the Hotel. She

acts very childishly when she says giggling “Miss Lucy, you don’t have to go to that

celebration alone. Not now!” That is her only appearance on screen. However, she is also

‘present’ in another scene when Tom shows the Commodore a letter written by her in which

she informs Tom of Lucy’s leaving him. The camera focuses on her letter for about twenty

seconds to show how many spelling mistakes there are in it. Instead of writing ‘says,’ Lavinia

writes ‘sez.’ For the words ‘right off’ she instead spells ‘rite off.’ For the word ‘get’ Lavinia

spells ‘git’ and when she tries to write ‘Respectfully yours’ the letter says ‘spectfuly yurs’.

Even her name is signed with small capital letters. The film director’s purpose of this letter is

to further degrade the black woman maid to the level of an uneducated simpleton and to draw
 17

a sharp contrast between the fine, young, white lady and her black, dumb maid and thus to

elevate the white woman to the level high above the black woman.

The soundies served one good purpose to African-American actors and actresses: their

roles could no longer be played by whites in blackface because their voices had to be

distinctly ‘black.’ Women did not become regular features on minstrel shows until all-black

companies were formed. The sexuality of African-American women was accepted and

assimilated into the framework of minstrel performances. These shows allowed the black

woman to become the target of the white male desire.

5. Minstrel shows

Minstrelsy began around 1830 when Tom Rice watched a black man dance and sing.

Rice then imitated the performance and the creation of Jim Crow was born. Minstrel shows

were first performed around the country by white men in blackface. They sang and danced,

duplicating the originally black rhythm of the plantation slaves. Minstrel shows were pro-

slavery burlesque musical performances. By the 1880s, Jim Crow was not just the name of a

minstrel performance but it had become synonymous with racial segregation. Around 1855,

black minstrels started to emerge. While minstrel shows – whether black- or whiteface – had

employed only male characters, Sam T. Jack has added 16 beautiful black girls to his show

and thereby guaranteed an opportunity to black women to set foot on stage. These girls were

dressed in glamorous clothing (unlike the usual ragged plantation clothes) and were given

leading roles. This was not the usual casting, though. Sexual reversal added to the charge of

the minstrel shows. At first, the women’s role in minstrel shows was played by male

comedians in blackface, wearing a gown and black wigs to originate the ‘wench’ character.

During the singing performance, this ‘woman’ would start dancing and flirting with everyone.

Later the blackface she-males would adopt one of two distinct roles: that of the dark

black mammy – grotesquely disfigured and comically dressed in rags with huge feet, and the
 18

lighter-skinned octoroon, or ‘yellow gal.’ The latter character was portrayed as beautiful and

desirable, and was the object of romantic songs. The impact of the minstrel shows on society

could be felt all over the country and have engraved some major negative images of black

women and men into the American population’s mind suggesting that African-Americans

were inferior, feeble-minded, and childlike in nature. Such images have been later

incorporated into the roles of black actors and actresses on film.

6. Race Movies

Between the two World Wars, there was a rise of a new genre called ‘race-movies.’

The African-American Cooper brothers formed Million Dollar Productions to shoot films in

this new genre. (By this time there were theaters in urban areas that catered to black

audiences, as well.) The company signed up such stars as Louise Beavers and Theresa Harris

who were happy to play roles where they could actually throw away their aprons and dress up

in elegant costumes.

Films made during this era for black urban audiences reflected an authentic black

morality, social ethic and point of view. The Scar of Shame (1927) along with other race

movies (black westerns, gangster tales and mysteries) appeared when there was a growth in

the northern black urban ghettos. These films reflected the “…black bourgeois success myth,

a manual for those on the make, and a caution to the weak-willed who might be diverted from

success by urban temptations” (Cripps 50). One ‘feature’ that symbolized salvation from the

demoralized urban ghettos was the farm. In The Law of Nature (1917), the heroine deserts her

family for the hope of a better life in the city, only to be disillusioned of the urban life. She

repents and returns to her husband and son to the country side where she finds wealth and the

richness of life. Race moviemakers often felt the duty to raise race pride in their black

audiences. Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader (1919) is about a black man who falls in love

with a ‘Scottish’ girl, but at the end it turns out that she is really a Negro woman. As a
 19

resolution, the hero becomes proud of his race. The same dual identity plot and resolution

occurs in Micheaux’s 1920s films, such as the Symbol of the Unconquered, Birthright, The

House Behind the Cedars, and Thirty Years Later. In the Scar of Shame, Louise is the mulatto

heroine whose father is a drunk, living in the suburbs and always beating on her. She seeks

salvation from Eddie, her lover, who always tries to lure her into a career as a saloon singer.

The third person in the story is Hillyard, a rich uptown man trying to win Louise’s love over

Eddie. To break out of poverty and escape her father’s beatings, Louise marries Hillyard but

soon takes off with Eddie to make it in the show business. Hillyard confronts them and shoots

Louise who doesn’t die but carries the ‘scar of shame’ for selling herself so cheaply and

turning her back to the promise of a higher class-life. At the end, when she unsuccessfully

begs Hillyard to take her back, she poisons herself. The message of the film, as the title cards

suggest, is that the heroine was the victim of her class and her poor environment. But she also

died because she could not make use of her white paternal heritage. Micheaux’s tragic mulatto

character in this movie is degraded to the level of a prostitute who cold heartedly ‘sells

herself’ to the man who offers her more wealth and opportunity of a carrier. She gets

punished at the end for betraying her husband when he refuses to take her back into their

sacred matrimony. Louise used her sexual power to play the two man but she had to pay for it

at the end with her own life.

7. The New Negro Woman

With Roosevelt’s New Deal and the growing liberalism of the country, a new world

view and social order were starting to emerge in the United States. The old portrait of the

black woman was slowly being replaced by the modern black woman – the New Negro

Woman –with a touch of dignity and racial pride. She was still a maid (most of the time), but

now she was self-conscious and liberated in spirit. In Imitation of Life (1934), it is Aunt

Delilah’s (Louise Beavers) pancake recipe that brings the family fortune. However, when her
 20

mistress, Miss Bea wants to give her 20 percent of the profit, Aunt Delilah feels frightened at

the thought of not being able to care for her beloved family after accepting the money. When

Miss Bea tells her that “You’ll have your own car. Your own house,” Aunt Delilah gets

frightened. “My own house? You gonna send me away, Miss Bea? I can't live with you? Oh,

Honey Chile, please don’t send me away. How I gonna take care of you and Miss Jessie (Miss

Bea’s daughter) if I ain’t here... I’se your cook. And I want to stay your cook.” Regarding the

pancake recipe, she says, “I gives it to you, Honey. I makes you a present of it.” Her

submissiveness justifies Miss Bea’s exploitation of her labor. Here, Aunt Delilah is the

mixture of the old ‘Tom’ and the ‘Aunt Jemima’ stereotypes. Her character has introduced

“the idea of black Christian stoicism” (Bogle, “Toms, Coons” 59). This new level of Christian

goodness has elevated the black woman maid character above the other characters by being

loyal, asexual (meaning she is no social threat to anyone). At the same time, however, it had

made her “even more resolutely resigned to accepting her fate of inferiority” (Bogle, “Toms,

Coons” 59). Louise Beavers was stuck in the role of the naive, always cheerful servant or

cook throughout her career. Her image as the jolly black cook was thus manufactured and

presented for mass consumption. To her credit, she has finally taken the black woman off the

plantation.

Louise Beavers’ greatest rival on film was Hattie McDaniel. With her massive, robust

mammy figure she was the type of mammy and aunt Jemima who would always speak her

mind, feel socially equal to everyone else in the household and play the true mother figure. In

Blonde Venus (1932), the “…prehumanized black domestic is the true and trusted companion

out to aid the white world, not harm it” (Bogle, “Toms, Coons” 83). In another movie, George

Stevens’ Alice Adams (1935), McDaniel puts her white masters in their place by mocking

them for making a fuss over a petty deal. While acting out the role of a nice, obedient house

servant, she actually looks down on her masters. In Show Boat (1936), she openly talks back
 21

to the white man. In Saratoga (1937), McDaniel sings along with the starving proletariat and

with that, she becomes socially equal to them. In the same movie, she plays the mother figure

to the blonde, white woman. She is protective and advisive, but at the same time she refuses

to take nonsense from the other. At one time, she even goes against the white woman’s will.

7.1 The New Negro Woman: Hilda

In The Mad Miss Manton (1938), McDaniel is a mammy type with solid self-confidence and

vitality. She sticks her nose into her mistress’ business and openly criticizes things around

her. The film’s protagonist is a beautiful, white, young lady called Miss Manton who

discovers a dead body but when the police arrive to the scene the body is gone and so nobody

believes Miss Manton’s statement. She does not give up though and – with 7 other young

ladies – sets out to discover who has killed the mysterious man.

Miss Manton has a house servant called Hilda who is an obese, short African-

American woman. She is very blunt; always says everything that she thinks and comments on

other people’s business. When somebody rings the doorbell, Miss Manton tells Hilda to open

the door. Hilda responds, “I heard it. I ain’t deaf. Sometimes I wished I was.” Another time,

when someone is knocking on the door and Miss Manton’s ‘detective crew’ gets frightened at

the thought that it could be the murderer, someone shouts that “Oh, he’s come back!” when

Hilda responds, peaking from behind the door that “Then I’m leaving!” Her comment is

funny and it is aimed to ease tension.

At a later scene, when Miss Manton’s suitor comes to see her at the apartment, Hilda

refuses to let him in, saying that “Oh, it’s you. I’ve told you on the phone she won’t go with

you.” When the man makes a weak attempt to bypass her, she gets angry and tell him “She

don’t wanna talk to you. Besides, someone come to take her to the charity.” He does not give

up and jokes that “I’ll force my way in.” Hilda smiles and says in a sweet voice that “If you

do, she told me to throw a pitcher of water in your face.” When he replies that “I’ll risk it”
 22

and walks in, she really does throw a pitcher of water in his face and makes a very serious

face that sends the message “I’ve told you so, but you didn’t take me seriously.” She is not the

one to mess with; Hilda is her mistress’s protector and she takes care of her miss come what

may. To her mistress, she is very helpful, even obedient, but she still talks back at her giving

Miss Manton her own opinion about things.

When the girls are in the bedroom and Miss Manton is already in a nightgown,

combing her hair to get ready for bed, Hilda looks at the bunch of the girls and says “All the

children now get some sleep! You go get your shower, honey chil’!” The last remark is

addressed to Miss Manton. Hilda here acts as a mother figure and makes it look like that the

young women are just a gang of small children who need someone to tell them when to go to

sleep and when to take a shower.

Although the film is set in a city and Miss Manton is an independent woman with no

family around, Hilda is still the same old stereotypical mammy just like her predecessors on

the plantations, always taking her mistress’s side and acting as a protective mother.

In In This Our Life (1942), she plays a young man’s mother who mourns over the lost

opportunities of her son due to a wrongful accusation that ends his career as a lawyer. In this

role, McDaniel adds a restrained and modulated tone to her mother character which was

unusual at that time.

7.2 The New Negro Woman: Mammy in Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind (1939) was her greatest debut on screen. McDaniel’s mammy

figure was everything but submissive and obedient. She was the typical plantation house maid

with her large bosom, kind smile, but she was outspoken, opinionated, side-taking, and never

missed a chance to express her anger toward her masters (which, of course, did not go beyond

the boundaries of loyalty and commitment). She knew everything, saw everything, acted out

of concern toward the white family and cared for her mistress, Tara. At the beginning of the
 23

film, when Tara runs off from Brent and Stew who keep annoying her, Mammy (as she has no

other name during the entire film) yells after her from the window “Miss Scarlett. Where're

you going without your shawl, and the night air fixing to set in? How come you didn't ask

them gentlemen to stay for supper? You ain't got no more manners than a field hand...after me

and Miss Ellen done labored with you.” Here, and at other times Mammy refers to the

laborers who plaw the field and who are of her own kind. Nevertheless, she speaks of them as

if black slaves were inferior to the whites and even herself – otherwise she would not be

making such comments. When the war is over and Tara returns home, she is faced with an

empty house, no food, no clothes, no servants except for Mammy and another black servant.

“Miss Scarlett, there's only just me and Paul left. The others moved off during the war and ran

away.” Mammy stays loyal even when she is offered the change of a lifetime to leave the

plantation and become a free person. Instead, she acts as a faithful servant whose life is

inferior to that of her mistress. Mammy becomes a martyr this way. Martyrdom in the

Christian world is coined with asexuality as the act of becoming a martyr by self-sacrifice

stems from the old ages where the early Christian martyrs died for their faith and had been

canonized as saints later on by the Holy Church. Like Keith Small pointed out in his lecture

titled Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam that “According to Jesus in the Bible, God delights

in self-sacrificial love. As the Bible states very clearly, “Your attitude should be the same as

that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God

something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being

made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and

became obedient to death…! (New American Standard Bible, Phil. 2.5-11) By giving up her

freedom and choosing to stay a humble servant to her masters, Mammy has been elevated to

the pedestal of saints and have lost the chance of ever acquiring any sorts of sexual traits,

since holiness completely excludes the idea of sexuality.

 24

In her Mammy role, Hattie McDaniel’s character “became free of the greatest burden

of slavery – on screen and off – inflicted on blacks: a sense of innate inferiority” (Bogle,

“Toms, Coons” 89). Gone with the Wind was the highest point of presenting blacks as

servants. After this movie, the servant tradition came to a close. By the 1950s, the servants

had all vanished from the films in such blunt presentations they have been forced to act in

previously.

7.3 The New Negro Woman: Peola in Imitation of Life

Peola (Fredi Washington) in Imitation of Life is a very good example of the New

Negro Woman character of the era. Although she is the old tragic mulatto figure, she is

nevertheless more demanding, wants to be seen as white and wants the same things others

enjoy, but does not want the opportunities of a white girl. At the end, she is left romantically

stranded. Peola is the daughter of the above mentioned Aunt Delilah, but she is the exact

opposite of her mother. While aunt Delilah is the manifestation of the asexual, large, dark-

skinned, submissive and loyal servant, her daughter Peola is the antithesis of all of this: she is

beautiful by white standards, has fair skin that grants her a free pass to the white world. She is

also very unhappy with her fate as a black woman. To ‘become’ white and mingle in the

world of whites, she even goes as far as to deny her own kin. In one scene she says coldly to

her mother: “Don't come for me. If you see me in the street, don't speak to me. From this

moment on I'm White. I am not colored. You have to give me up.” She has no feelings it

seems when her future as a white girl is at stake. Delilah hopes that her daughter will accept

her racial heritage when she tells her “He [God] made you Black, honey. Don't be telling Him

his business. Accept it, honey.” Peola wants to be loved by a white man, to marry a white

man. She is gorgeous, sensual, and could be a potential wife to any white man who does not

know her secret. But her secret must be kept otherwise her fate is doomed as her fate cannot

be anything else but that of a tragic mulatto. When she runs away and finds a job at a
 25

nightclub as a dancer, her mother searches for her and finds her. Peola feels incredibly

embarrassed by her mother who, by showing up, reveals her secret. She sends her mother

home and denies any further relationship with her. In this scene, Peola is dressed in a lavish,

sexy costume which shows her bare legs and her perfect figure. Her moves can be compared

to those of a strip joint dancer of our times where the performance is aimed to attract the male

gaze and to evoke sexual desire toward the dancer.

In other words, Peola as a white girl is degraded to the level of cheap whores who sell

their bodies for living. But she seems to enjoy her situation as she does not wish to return

home with her mother. This scene tells the audience that a mulatto would do anything – she

would even go so far as to sell her own body and to disown her own blood – just so that she

can pass for white in the white world. She only feels remorse and repents when at the end of

story her mother dies of a broken heart.

8. The Tragic Mulatto

Fredi Washington’s life was very similar to the tragic mulatto parts she has played in

this and other movies (such as Drums of the Jungle and Miles from Heaven where she is the

‘Negress nurse’ who raises a white child as her own only to find herself because of it in an

endless court battle). Hollywood couldn’t make her a ‘star’ because she was an African-

American, even though she could easily pass for white. A leading role for such women was

out of the question at that time. She was too white and glamorous to play the designated

colored roles, but not good enough to play ‘white.’ In The Emperor Jones (1933), Washington

plays the stuck-up vamp who goes mad and revengeful when dumped by her man. She was so

light in color that she had to be heavily made up in order to eliminate fear in the audience that

Paul Robeson (a black actor) was having a romance with a white girl.
 26

8.1 The Tragic Mulatto: Carmen Jones

The all-black musical, Carmen Jones (1954), established Dorothy Dandridge as the

definitive tragic mulatto. The movie was a truly popular entertainment that offered the

audiences relief from their everyday hustles. The film was built on such pop-elements as hair-

pulling fights between women, barroom brawls, harsh dialects and of course the animalistic

outrages and lusting of the lead roles. Carmen (Dandridge) was, on the one hand, calculating,

cool-headed and confident, on the other hand, reckless, insecure and instinctive. At the end, -

just to be in line with the expectations of the Hollywood dream factory, - she became self-

destructive. The movie starts with the usual casting list, but Dandridge’s name appears second

to Harry Belafonte’s, which is a distinguished place, considering that she is a black cast. The

first scene is set in a barracks for air force cadets. Carmen – who works in the adjacent factory

– walks into the cafeteria which is full of soldiers. She carries herself very self-confident.

Dressed in a red skirt and a black blouse which shows off her shoulders, as well as large,

golden earrings, Carmen’s appearance resembles a gipsy woman.

The film’s story line as well as the musical numbers resemble Bizet’s opera Carmen.

As Carmen enters the scene, all heads turn toward her. When a black woman remarks

(speaking to the men at the table but apparently loud enough to make Carmen hear it, too)

“Get a load of this hip-swingin’ floozie rollin’ around to work in time for lunch.” Carmen

replies “Prune-puss, you make sounds I don’t like.” When the other says “I’m tellin’ the

foreman you is late again.” She answers with pity in her voice, “Do that, and I’ll scratch out

the one good eye you got left.” Then she is already off to the next person who is a soldier

standing by the wall. He asks her to go out with him to the ball, but she turns him off and

even humiliates him by saying “T-bone, you too little and too late.” She even turns down the

sergeant and the next guy too in line. When a girl at another table asks her to pick one of the

soldiers, Carmen starts singing “I won’t pick out a man and he won’t pick out me. It don’t go
 27

that way, you can’t ever know, where your crazy heart wants to go.” Then she starts ‘hitting’

on the one man (Joe) in the cafeteria who has a girlfriend and she is sitting right beside him.

Carmen gets in a fight with another woman at the factory and is sent to jail. During the

fight scene, she is violent, does not surrender to the other woman but pulls legs and hair in

this ‘cat fight.’ When she tries to escape on route to jail by jumping on then off a train, she

gets caught by Joe. In this very erotic scene, Carmen rolls around and when Joe grabs her

legs, the red skirt rolls up all the way to her hips showing off her thighs and stockings. While

she is being captivated, he mounts her as she is laying on her back and he is bonding her with

both hands by gripping on her legs. For a split of a second, the viewer may get the idea of

rape as Joe jerks the belt out of his trousers. But then he uses it to tie her by the ankle. This

image of a wild, exotic, half-naked black woman is very sensual and sexual in content and the

idea reaches back to colonization times. When they get wrecked in the river, she convinces

Joe to take her to her home town so that they can reach the train from there. At her house, on

the fence a table advertises that she is a palm reader and there is a “spiritual sitting” at the

house regularly. The word ‘fortune’ is misspelled as ‘fortoon’ in order to emphasize that

blacks cannot spell correctly. Inside the house, Carmen successfully seduces Joe but when he

comes out of the room pulling on his jacket (presumably after making love to her), he finds no

one in the house.

A note on the table informs him that she has fled out of fear of being put in jail. She

assures him in the letter though that she loves him “more than any other man before.” When

they meet again in a bar, Carmen gets mad at Joe for being “too chicken” for her. Joe wants to

leave immediately to return to the flying school but Carmen wants him to stay with her. As

they are arguing on the balcony, a man of a higher ranking then Joe starts laughing at Joe for

being such a pansy. Joe does not tolerate this mockery and when the man does not quit it, Joe
 28

hits him and beats him up until the other becomes unconscious. Carmen and Joe quickly

escape the scene and run to Chicago.

In Chicago, they rent a low quality hotel room. In the room, Carmen starts pulling up

her stockings to go out for food. The scene is full of erotic energy. Joe starts kissing her legs

but she swirls away. Then she takes off her robe and shows her underwear. She is wearing

black bras and zebra panties. Her body is exposed to the viewer as she turns around to show

her beautiful, sexy body. Her semi-nudity expresses the character’s lewdness but it also

degrades the ‘black woman’ to the level of a licentious, cheap girl. When Carmen returns

from ‘shopping’ (she met the boxer Husky Miller to get a loan from him), Joe asks her where

she has been for so long. When she refuses to tell him, Joe starts grabbing her by the arm. She

shakes him off and tells him that “You think what you want. I don’t account to no man.” Joe

replies “You’re accounting to me. I love you. That gives me the right…” But he cannot finish

it, for she interrupts him saying “That don’t give you the right to own me. There’s only one

that does. That’s me, myself.” She is tough, independent and does not belong to anyone as far

as property rights are concerned. “I gotta be free, or I don’t stay at all” with that, Carmen

closes the conversation and takes off to find Husky. At Husky’s place, she sits down at the

table with the rest of the women and asks Frankie, her girlfriend, to tell her fortune from the

cards. Her self-confidence and pride immediately breaks down when she is handed the nine of

spades – the card of doom. She starts blaming Joe for her foretold misfortune and

unexpectedly lands in Husky’s arms. At the end, she gets murdered by Joe who cannot handle

losing her to Husky. Carmen thus fulfills the role of the tragic mulatto who cannot find

happiness in life.

In Porgy and Bess (1959), Dandridge plays the exotic, doomed mulatto, the woman at

odds with society. She is a drug addict; the bad black girl who is trying to go right, but she
 29

can seek no salvation as her fate is to be the tragic heroine. The movie is full of the old and

the newly created stereotypes. (It was Dandridge’s last major role in films.)

9. The Production Code of Ethics

In 1930, the movie industry created its own regulatory board, the Production Code of

Ethics (reinforced it in 1934), which specified in keen detail what could and could not be

depicted on screen. The code specified, for example, that “White slavery shall not be treated.”

However, nothing was said about black slavery and the way it should be handled. The code

further declared that “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is

forbidden.” In Imitation of Life, Peola does not engage in any type of relationship with any

type of a man – black or white. However, in the novel the movie was based on, it is suggested

that she would – after going through a self-sterilization – marry an injured South American

man.

10. Musicals

The servant-dominated world of black Hollywood in the 1930s also carried the

stereotype for blacks as the ‘entertainers.’ As Donald Bogle declares in his Toms, Coons,

Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks book, “…in almost every American movie in which a black

had appeared, filmmakers had been trying to maintain the myth that Negroes were naturally

rhythmic and natural-born entertainers” (118). The use of the African-American cast as

‘entertainers’ and ‘jesters’ on screen was in full bloom by the 1940s in the distinctly

American genre, the musicals. African-American performers had a unique energy, rhythm and

sound that could not be reproduced by white actors and actresses. Hearts in Dixie (1929) was

an all-black cast musical. Fox Studios went around Los Angeles, picking girls from the chorus

lines at the night clubs to dance in the film. Signed for a role was Mildred Washington. To fit

the role, however, her fair skin had to be darkened with heavy black make-up. King Vidor
 30

persuaded MGM Studios to make a film on Negro life in the South. “I wanted to make a film

about Negroes, using only Negroes in the cast. The sincerity and fervor of their religious

expression intrigued me, as did the honest simplicity of their sexual drives,” Vidor explained.

For Hallelujah!’s (1929) leading actress he finally picked Nina Mae McKinney (Chick) who

possessed the kind of look the film industry then expected of the black leading actresses for

the tragic mulatto role. She was light-skinned, had large eyes, dark, straight hair and a

radiating personality. Hallelujah! was shot in the old rural South. In the story, a respected,

good-hearted, religious man gets seduced by the sexy young woman, Chick. He leaves his

family for her, only to return to them after being disillusioned of the love affair. Chick, who is

portrayed as a sexually loose, hot, erotic black woman, dies in an accident.

The entertainer, as a unique type of movie character, was used mainly to ease the

tensions of the war-depressed nation. Their jolly nature and happy dancing was intended to

boost the nation’s morale and to promote patriotism. It is important to mention here that these

musicals with black casting were designed in such a way that musical numbers could easily be

cut out entirely should certain audiences (especially in the South) object to seeing Negros in

the films. Due to this built-in cutting technique, two new black personalities emerged on

screen: the first one was ‘the musician’ always seated at the piano and the other was ‘the

singer’ always standing next to a huge, white column. It was usually two great performers

who were handed these roles: Hazel Scott and Lena Horne. Both women implanted their

racial pride into the songs they sang. Hazel Scott, usually playing the piano, always displayed

a feeling of confidence and supremacy on film. However, because she wanted so hard to get

rid of the old prejudices about black women on screen, her performances during the 1940s

were becoming more and more forced and instead of breaking with the old stereotypes of the

wild, exotic black woman, by exposing her armpits and breasts, she became the ‘sex object’ –
 31

rather than a sex symbol. In I Dood It (1943), Scott transforms her dance into an orgiastic

tribal dance which evokes images deeply associated with the ‘savage’ African heritage.

Lena Horne appeared in ‘specialty numbers’ where she performed a couple of songs

then left. These parts could then easily be left out of the movies for the satisfaction of

Southern audiences. Horne was also cast in movies where she had to perform a new type of a

tragic mulatto: ‘the tragic mulatto without the tragedy.’ Or as Donald Bogle puts it, “the sex-

object syndrome” (“Bright Boulevards” 127). Being an exceptional beauty with dark hair,

copper color and Caucasian features, she was cast as the ‘sex object’ and the slut in most of

the films she starred in (Swing Fever, 1943, Two Girls and a Sailor, 1944, Words and Music,

1948). In Tarzan’s Peril (1951), Dorothy Dandridge elevated the stereotype of the black

woman as a sex object. In one scene, she is tied to a stake with her legs wide open, wiggling

herself to break free. This erotic performance recalled images of the savage, lustful black

woman whose body is exposed in a tiny leaf-skirt for the sole purpose of satisfying her sexual

cravings.

11. The Civil Rights Movement

After the Second World War, a new type of audience – younger, more liberal and more

educated – took seat in the movie theaters. African-Americans began protesting openly

against the misrepresentation of blacks in the movie industry. During the Civil Rights

Movement, the NAACP kept continuous pressure on the film industry to revise and portray

African-Americans with an upgraded image of blackness and to employ more blacks within

the industry. As a result, signs of retention to slavery started showing up in films, such as The

Foxes of Harrow (1947), Slaves (1969), or Mandingo (1975).

 32

12. First Attempts to Bring Interracial Romance on Screen

Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949) marked the milestone of a new era: it was the first movie to

deal with an interracial romance. With the performance of Ethel Waters, the archetypal strong

black woman character came on screen. Pinky, a light-skinned tragic mulatto returns to and

re-assimilates into the Southern black society after spending time in the North as a white

woman. Upon returning home to her grandmother, Pinky is forced to endure the hardships of

being a black woman in the South. After being humiliated and abused, she plans to return to

the North where she can live as a free, white woman. But eventually she goes through a

personality change which makes her racially proud. And ironically, it can be owed to an

aristocratic white woman who, aware of Pinky’s dilemma, dies, leaving her estate to Pinky.

Pinky is forced to go to court to hold onto her inheritance. Against all odds, she wins. When

her white fiancé from the North comes to take her back to Boston, she realizes she has no

other place to live but the South. As a good-hearted person, she converts the inherited

property into a school for young black nurses. The film ends with Pinky being left alone;

melancholic and saddened. Although she is facing a future with a new racial pride, as a person

she cannot find happiness with the man she loved. Because there are interracial romantic

sequences between Pinky and her white doctor boyfriend, the studio found it then unthinkable

to use a real black woman in the part. Pinky’s role was thus cast to a white woman, Jeanne

Crain. It is interesting to note that in Quality, the novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner on which the

film was based, after the heroine had won her court case to keep the property left to her, it was

burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan. This unhappy and more realistic ending was

entirely dismissed by the studio. (Another important figure in the movie is Aunt Dicey, the

mammy character, who is hard working, but has a sense of truth and loyalty and is never one-

sided.) Island in the Sun (1957) was the first American film where a black woman was held in

the arms of a white man. Despite the themes where they held hands and danced together, the
 33

audience liked the movie. The same could not be said about Dandridge’s next movie,

Tamango (1957), however. Dandridge played a beautiful savage on an exotic island, who was

desired by a white ship captain. Their miscegenation scenes were too much for the American

public, the movie turned out to be a failure.

13. The Post-Integrated Black Woman

An early attempt to bring about a new type of black woman on screen was MGM’s

Bright Road (1953). In it, Dorothy Dandridge plays the modern post-war African-American

woman who is “smart, articulate, sensitive, and strikingly beautiful without the old dialect and

gingham or the giggling maid antics” (Bogle, “Bright Boulevards” 344). During the 1960s,

this new black woman stereotype was perfected – which still carried traces of the old-style

tragic mulatto: the ‘post-integrated black woman.’ This new image of an independent, all-

white looking, educated, self-confident black woman was brought to screen by Diahann

Carroll. In Paris Blues (1961), she plays the character of a middle-class Negro lady whose

best friend is a white girl, and their cultural background as well as their mentality is pretty

close to each other. In this act, she “came closer in speech, dress, mannerism, looks, and life

style to the great white ideal than any black actress before her…She is obviously a woman

accustomed to getting what she wants, one who really doesn’t have any great feelings of

discrimination. She knows depression only on a superficial level” (Bogle, “Toms, Coons”

211). Her tragedy lies in the fact that for entering the free society by adopting white values,

she has lost her own identity in the act. At the end, she is left alone as her lover decided to

choose a career as a musician instead of marrying her. The reason Beah Richards made a fake

impression in her role as a middle-class mammy in this film was mainly due to her darker

skin color. It was commonly expected that middle-class black characters be light-skinned and

bear the closest complexion to whites as possible.

 34

14. Blaxploitation Films

In the 1970s, Americans started to focus on personal goals and cared less about social

concerns. During this decade, more black actors and actresses worked at the movie industry as

ever before. The blaxploitation boom emerged from a period of militant political activism

fuelled by the rising identity consciousness and social expectations of African-Americans at

the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Blaxploitation movies supposedly depicted realistic

black experiences; however, many were produced and directed by white filmmakers. Daniel J.

Leab, movie historian, noted that “Whites packaged, financed, and sold these films, and they

received the bulk of the big money” (259). The height of blaxploitation movies reached when

an independent filmmaker, Melvin Van Peebles directed Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song

in 1971. (Soon after, another megahit, Shaft followed in the same genre.) It was the

glamorized ghetto life where the pimp was elevated to be the folk’s hero. The actors were all

attitude, talking in fake ‘ethnic’ rhythms. The black woman was, however, devaluated to the

level of a prostitute. It was a resurrection of the old Jezebel stereotype. Sweet Sweetback’s

Baadasssss Song was originally rated X. After decades of asexual and desexualized black

Tom characters, Black audiences were ready for a sexually assertive black male movie star

and it was personified by Melvin Van Peebles’ character: Sweet. Sweet grew up in a brothel.

In one scene, a ten-year-old Sweet (played by Van Peebles’ real life son, Mario) is graphically

taught how to make love by an older black prostitute. Much of the movie centers on Sweet’s

lovemaking abilities, and this movie helped promote the "Black sex machine" characterization

of Black men common in later movies. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song also gave

impetus to cinematic portrayals of black women as Jezebel sluts. According to Donald Bogle,

“With the glamorization of the ghetto, however, came also the elevation of the

Pimp/outlaw/rebel as folk hero. Van Peebles played up this new sensibility, and his film was

the first to glorify the pimp. It failed, however, to explain the social conditions that made the
 35

pimp such an important figure. At the same time, the movie debased the black woman,

depicting her as little more than a whore.” (“Toms, Coons” 236.) The movie offered no

complex female portrayal whatsoever. Super Fly (1972), directed by Gordon Parks, Jr.,

similarly to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, was full of vivid sex scenes as it played on

the legend of the African-Americans’ high-powered sexuality. The women in the movie,

again, are not much more than the hero’s love interest. Wives are always pictured as slutty.

The collapse of Hollywood’s Production Code in the mid-1960s, along with the

Supreme Court’s liberalization of obscenity laws, resulted an uncontrolled flow of sex,

violence, and graphic language on screen. A new shift in stereotypes came along which gave

way to the rise of the black female ‘superheroine’ – a revamped Sapphire – as a gender-match

to the black, macho action hero – part buck, part mammy, part tragic mulatto. The portrayal of

African-American women as hyper-sexual temptresses was personified in the Jezebel and

Sapphire stereotypes which got merged to bring on the new black woman: the angry bitch

fighting injustice. These characters resembled those of the Black male superheroes: they were

physically attractive and aggressively rebellious, willing and able to use their bodies, brains,

and guns to gain revenge against corrupt officials, drug dealers, and violent criminals. Their

anger was not focused solely, or primarily, at Black men; rather, it was focused at injustice

and the perpetuators of injustice. A good example would be the ghetto action adventure,

Cleopatra Jones (1973), which clearly showed that the components of the blaxploitation

genre could be easily transformed into feminine expressions. Here, Cleopatra Jones fights her

street battle with Mommy, - her counterpart in crime. The scenes are full of sex and violence.

In an even more violent, supermacho hit, Coffy (1973), the heroine takes revenge on the

underworld for turning her little sister into a junkie. The film is loaded with violence, sexual

images and murder. In 1974, Foxy Brown was yet another hit with a similar plot summary as

Coffy’s. Foxy Brown takes revenge on a white drug organization which claimed the lives of
 36

her lover and brother. Slavery images are blended into the scenes when she gets raped and

beaten by two white sadists. Her revenge climaxes when she castrates the white boss and

sends his private parts to his girlfriend in a pickle jar. Women’s talents in acting were thus

limited to sex, violence and action scenarios. All these superwomen are beautiful, anxious for

sex; they run the household and are out to clean the ghetto (Just like the good old mammies

did in the plantation movies). Their looks, manners and sex-appeal are of the mulatto’s.

Although they are often seen as sex objects, they also play with men as they like.

15. Black Romance

Filmmakers soon recognized that some black audiences desired to see more films

focused on relationships as they grew tired of watching action-packed violence. Thus the first

full-fledged black romantic melodrama was created with Diana Ross and Louis McKay in the

Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Billie Holiday’s autobiography was carefully edited and glossed

over to win the audience’s approval. It was a great hit because it finally elevated the black

woman to the center of the man’s attention as a valuable person, rather than a sex object. She

was actually being courted by the man, and their relationship was full of romance. The movie

gave the audience the idea that black characters could be romantic, too. Another great movie,

Sounder (1972), introduced a new type of woman, who was dark in color, yet she did not fit

the traditional image of the big, strong, black mammy. Cicely Tyson was a slender woman

and she transformed her character into an intelligent, caring mother and wife figure which

could not be associated with the stereotypical overpowering mammy type. Tyson became the

first dark-skinned African-American woman to play leading roles in American movies.

15.1 Black Romance: Mahogany

Toward the end of the 1970s, there was a shift in social and political attitude which

was instantly reflected in the upcoming movies such as Mahogany (1975). Starring Diana
 37

Ross, Tracy, a young black woman is in search of a better, successful life. The importance of

this movie lied in the fact that for the first time, it was clearly expressed that the black woman

had a choice on her own and things happened as she chose her destiny. Tracy is a gorgeous

black woman raised in the ghetto but soon becomes a model called Mahogany. She falls in

love with a black man but soon must make a choice between him and her career. She

somewhat personifies the tragic mulatto and the post-integrated black woman. Mahogany has

no interest in fighting a war against racial discrimination and injustice as does her boyfriend,

Brian. She does not feel the urge to get involved in social issues. For example, when she

returns home from a long day at the cloth designer school, she finds a couple of protesters in

front of her door yelling at everyone who passes by about the risks of the city’s home

improvement plans.

When the demolition begins and the neighborhood houses are being torn down, the

leader of the protesters announces that “There’s a program in this city that’s being neglected

by the very same people it has been created for.” As he turns away, Tracy pours milk into his

loud speaker and he spills it on himself. Clearly, Tracy is not socially sensitive at this point.

Later on, as they are walking down the street on their first date, Brian (the protester) tries to

bring up social problems in the neighborhood “Something’s gone. Some kind of feeling for

each other,” she answers him “It’s hard to feel for each other when you can hardly keep

yourself up.” But he insists, “Up, or out? It’s what you really wanna do, isn’t it: Get out?” She

carries on, “Out of here? You’re damn right, I do! And I’m gonna do it,too!” She is a self-

confident, ambitious young woman who wants a life out of the ghetto and wants to fill it with

success and high achievement. The race issue comes up at Tracy’s workplace – she just gets

selected to be a model, but her employer, a classy, old white lady, tells them it is out of the

question. She quickly adds that it is because the clothing store’s models have always been
 38

selected by “conservative” standards and she does not think that Tracy would fit the

description.

When she starts her career as a model and they are shooting photos in the ghetto, she

gets into an argument with Brian about politics. He asks her how much are the models

making. When she answers, he asks her how much would they pay the old woman they’ve

just picked from the crowd. She shakes her head and says, “I know, but that’s not the point.

This is fashion stuff, not politics.” But Brian cuts in, “Everything’s politics, hon.” “Maybe to

you Brian, but not to me” she tries to end the quarrel. When they go on, she finally bursts out,

“Brian, I’m from down here, too. Are you forgetting that? … The one thing I can’t forget.

That’s how many times I’ve been told what I can’t do, where I can’t go, why I can’t be

different from anybody else. Cuz that’s all I had to keep track of all my life from everybody.”

Her anger is real; it expresses her true feelings about being black and being a black woman in

a white world. She soon loses her job and starts helping out Brian with his election campaign.

There is a very symbolic scene in the movie: when she tries to pin up Brian’s election

poster on the board, she actually covers up her design sketch with it. In other words, she gives

up her hopes and dreams for Brian’s career and assumes the role of a supporting partner to her

man. She soon has to realize though that Brian does not return her efforts the same way.

When she finally sets up an appointment with the city’s famous designers, Brian tells her she

should rather go with him to a campaign dinner. When she says no, he intimidates her by

saying “What’s the big deal? They’ve all said no to you, anyway…. Tracy, you don’t

understand. This dinner is really important.” Then she looks at him in the eye and says sadly,

“And what I’m doing isn’t, right?” Brian responds, “Now, you got yourself involved into

something that’s really meaningful here.” But Tracy gets back at him, “Yeah, your career.

Somebody seems to be forgetting about mine.” She angrily kicks the door then walks out on

him. When she gets home, Sean McAvoy (the photographer who earlier left to Rome to set up
 39

a business there) calls her on the telephone and asks her to go to Rome for her career’s sake.

This is the point where she makes a decision: she will leave Brian and go after her dreams.

In Rome, she becomes a celebrated model thanks to Sean and of course, herself. There

is a quite long scene in the movie when Sean is shooting pictures of her in different places and

different costumes. She is beautifully made up, shining and glowing in the camera. There is a

double view, or ‘gaze’ as the black woman is seen once through the lenses of the movie’s

camera and once through Sean’s camera as she takes pictures of her. So, the viewer actually

sees Tracy as a model and also as the sex object of Sean whose facial expressions clearly

reflect his desire for her. Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

expands on the conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides

visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey

asserts that “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and

displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be

said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness …” Mulvey identifies three “looks” that are embedded in

film which serve to sexually objectify women. Out of these, the first look is the perspective of

the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. (When Sean is

watching Tracy through his camera.) The second one is the perspective of the viewer as they

see the female character on screen. But the first one can influence the second one in a way

that the male character’s opinion of the woman has an affect on the viewer’s opinion of her.

For example, when Sean watches Tracy with blunt delight, the viewer in the cinema will

likely get the same idea about Tracy.

In many instances, Tracy is dressed in costumes that show in quite good detail her

shape. She is beautiful, sexy and she represents the black woman as a desirable sex object to

the white male’s gaze. Again, it is the black woman’s sexuality that the film’s director bases

the protagonist’s success upon. Black female sexuality peaks when Sean throws a party at his
 40

place and Tracy starts undressing while dripping hot wax from the candle onto her body. As

she holds the white candle in her hand the object could be taken as the symbol of a white

penis which ejaculates on her black body while she is dancing ecstatically. So, the black

woman gets sexually satisfied from the pleasure a white penis can give her. Redemption, too,

comes from a white man; she first breaks up with Brian then she nearly gets killed in a car

accident in which her ‘patron’, Sean dies. When she recovers, the rich white Italian man

(Christian) – who has already ‘saved’ her once by buying her clothes at an auction – prepares

her a big surprise: he sets up a sewing house where she can create her own designer clothes.

He also sets up for her fashion shows where she finally becomes successful. So, a black

woman’s success cannot be achieved without the white man’s help. However, when they are

at home and Christian orders her to take off her clothes, she quietly obeys. But when he asks,

“You would do it, wouldn’t you?” she responds, “A deal is a deal, right?” So, she would not

want to sleep with the white man but since he was the one who brought her success, she

understands that she must pay him back for it with her body. At the end, though, they don’t

make love. Christian understands her and lets her go home the next morning. She finally finds

Brian again and they end up staying together. Being the tragic mulatto, she is punished for her

independence and is made to return to the ghetto. The moral of the story is that a black

independent, intelligent woman cannot have everything she desires. Her fate refuses to let her

be both successful and black.

16. Disillusionment During the Recuperation Period

The 1980s brought nothing but disillusionment to black audiences as the

“recuperation” period – as Ed Guerrero calls it – in filmmaking took up (113). African-

Americans soon had to realize that all their efforts during the past decades to eliminate

negative stereotypes and degrading images of themselves on screen went down the drain as

Hollywood took a new turn to re-strengthen and resurface the old-fashioned, openly racist
 41

stereotypes, although in a somewhat updated and altered form. This has meant that all

minorities, including black women, were represented in a devalued, subordinate way. The

black woman during the recuperation period was either a whore, or a sexually indeterminate

person (best represented by the characters of Whoopi Goldberg). In Ghost (1990), Whoopi

Goldberg plays the medium between two lovers. Her role, again, is to play an asexual woman

who is most of the time funny and even grotesque. The new stereotype of black women

emerged with this ‘buddy role’. (She won an Oscar for this performance.) In Jumpin’ Jack

Flash (1987), Goldberg plays Terry Doolittle, a computer programmer who gets involved by

accident with a British (very WASP-looking) agent. Their relationship, however, cannot

exceed the level of ‘platonic.’ Even though in the movie it is the black woman who rescues

the white man, the final scene does not allow them to even just embrace each other. Goldberg,

again, plays the black woman who is totally void of any kind of sexual qualities. It is also

interesting to notice that in these and other movies, Goldberg is purposely removed from all

other black actors and actresses to emphasize that she is not part of the black community.

Nevertheless, Goldberg was the only African-American woman of the decade to work

consistently in starring roles.

17. The ‘Era of Tan’

Donald Bogle calls the 1980s the “Era of Tan.” As he explains, this decade was

disastrous for the black woman as she got only minor, insignificant roles in the films.

Throughout the Era of Tan, “…films did all they could to make audiences forget the

blackness of a black star. [Black performers] had no cultural identity. All ethnic edges had

been sanded down, so that while they looked black, everything about them seemed expressed

in a white cultural context; and in the long run, characters were neither black nor white but a

tan blend. Even so, tan, like black, was often kept in the background” (“Toms, Coons” 268).

The idea behind this was to clean up the menacing, rebellious, racially proud black
 42

man/woman that haunted the new decade from the 1960s-70s movies. The mainly white-cast,

big-budget films of the 1980s sent messages to the audiences that blacks have been tamed and

absorbed into the system. Black women basically disappeared from the screen, or if they did

turn up once in a while, they were cast in roles where the old Sapphire and the exotic savage

stereotypes emerged again. In Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome (1985) Tina Turner plays

the lustful ‘vamp’ who tries to empower the white male hero. (Slavery images of the black

woman trying to ‘seduce’ her white master.) However, Mad Max is strong and does not

succumb to her seductions. Instead, he’s the one who conquers and finally rejects her. The

message in Imitation of Life (1934) is quite similar: “…attempting to define oneself as sexual

subject would lead to rejection and abandonment” (hooks 120).

In the film Choose Me (1984), the female protagonist tries to seduce the white man,

but instead of conquering him, the man abuses her sexually and physically. He then discards

her. “The message her sexualized image conveys does not change even as she continues to

chase the white man as if only he had the power to affirm that she is truly desirable” (hooks

120). Similar roles were handed to Grace Jones in Conan the Destroyer (1984), A View to a

Kill (1985), Vamp (1986) and Siesta (1987), or to Lisa Bonet in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart

(1987) where she plays a super exotic tragic mulatto. It is obvious that Jennifer Beals was

used to play the ‘tan’ girl. This harmless, beautiful, raceless sexy young woman falls in love

with a married white man in Flashdance (1983). There is no punishment at the end unlike it

would be had she played the tragic mulatto. But the movie carefully cut all roots from her as it

does not present her with either a black or a white family and so her racial identity is absent.

Bird (1988) has only one significant woman character: Parker’s wife. She is bright,

dependable, and fully aware of her husband’s genius. All other women, though (Parker’s first

wife or his mother, for example), are virtually non-existent in the film.
 43

18. The Color Purple

A new type of plantation movie was The Color Purple (1985), with such woman

characters as Shug or Celie. The film and the book it was based on, however, showed crude

dissimilarities in the development of the characters. While Alice Walker’s novel assured the

eventual triumph and independence of the black woman values by breaking with the

patriarchal Church, the film’s resolution is that Shug makes up with her father and succumbs

to the patriarchal, Christian values. In The Color Purple, latent expressions of the slavery

motif are still present. For example, the acts when Celie’s assumed father rapes her and then

sells their child is an allegory for the exploitation of the black woman’s labor, sexuality, and

reproductive capability by her master during the plantation era. Another example is when

Celie comes out to show herself at the demand of her father to be looked at by a man looking

for a wife. This gesture resembles the old times when black women stood as chattels on the

auction block.

When Mr.__ (Celie only refers to him this way, although his first name is Albert)

marries Celie and takes her to his ranch, he treats her like an old master would treat a slave –

with no respect. He does not love her, nor does he take care of her, he only uses and abuses

her physically, sexually and mentally. When Mr.__’s son comes home with his pregnant

girlfriend to announce their marriage, Mr.__ tells them in a very hypocritical way that “Young

women no good these days. Got their legs open for every Tom, Dick and Harpo.” He

wouldn’t admit though that it is the same he’s been doing to Celie and it is what he tried to do

to Nettie, Celie’s sister.

After marrying Sophia, Harpo soon realizes that he is being overpowered by the woman

he’d married. Sophia is very self-confident, very bossy and does not accept “no” for an

answer. When Harpo asks Celie what to do about it, Celie looks up at him and says silently

“Beat her.” So, Celie has already accepted her husband’s beatings to be a rational way of
 44

treating a wife and a woman. She has no other advise to Harpo but to apply the same

treatment on Sophia. This way, Celie betrays her kind (the black woman) by reinforcing the

institution of punishment as the only reasonable means of treatment for black women. Celie

loses her sexuality when Shug Avery appears. With Shug’s presense, the black woman’s

sexuality shifts from Celie to Shug and Celie becomes the asexual nurturer – the Mammy.

Celie starts acting as a mother to Shug and satisfies Shug’s every demand. Shug, in terms of

sexuality, is the complete opposite of Celie. She is considered beautiful, sexy and

entertaining.

When she performs at the local bar, all the man stare at her, they are lusting for her. But

she is overtly coarse; her moves imitate sexual intercourses and her appearance and mimicry

is vulgar. The viewer sees a savage black woman dancing a modern ‘tribal’ dance and the

scene is filled with primitive sexual elements (Shug is wearing feathers in her hair, she

spreads her legs while shaking her protruding buttocks). Towards the end, when the family

and friends gather at the Christmas table, Celie finally openly confronts Mr.__ and pours all

the blame for her life on him. Mr.__ yells back at her “Look at you, you’re black, you’re poor,

you’re ugly, you’re a woman…you’re nothing at all!” He completely devalues Celie as a

black woman.

19. Black Aesthetic Cinema

With Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986), there was finally new hope for the birth

of a real black aesthetic cinema. It was a black-directed, black-acted film with a black

sensibility with which both black and white audiences of the younger generation could

identify with. Nola Darling is the film’s protagonist who is a strong-willed, charismatic young

woman living in Brooklyn. She refuses to be dominated by any man. The plot deals with

woman-man relationships, their questions, perceptions and conventions of sexuality. Nola has

three lovers but refuses to make a choice between them. She keeps them hanging on and
 45

enjoys her situation. This movie is a satire of the men whose weakness and insecurities

surface as they struggle to make Nola choose between them. In this movie, the black woman

is once again presented in relations to her sexuality because she is using her sexual power and

sexual freedom to dominate men.

20. Hip-Hop and Pop-Culture During the 1990s

With the 1990s, the African-American commercial cinema had also arrived, which

dealt mainly with racism, cultural tensions and social as well as political concerns. After the

Rodney King case and the Los Angeles riots in 1991, African-American pop culture shifted

toward social and racial issues. Rap music sent out messages of racial injustice and a new type

of Black Nationalism and pride. Although many films still used the good old stereotypes,

some films used characters that were incorporated into the concepts of American life.

House Party (1990) portrayed African-American teenagers with slang, hip-hop and

attitudes. The film expressed traditional attitudes on women and class. The middle-class girl,

Sidney, for example, is a fair-skinned girl, while the darker Sharanne plays the flirting girl.

There was a new wave of ‘ghetto’ movies in the 90s with such themes as wasted lives in the

streets, cocaine addiction of the youth, and violent machos with slutty bitches. Boyz N the

Hood (1991), for example, was sharply criticized by Jacquie Jones for its sexist representation

of black women who occupied only two categories in the film: the “bitches and ho’s” (50).

Mrs. Baker, for example, is a tough, full-mouthed, insensitive and irresponsible mother. Tre’s

mother, too, is depicted to look inadequate at rearing a son. In this movie, the boys call each

other “bitch,” which is a derogatory term for them to describe the other as a weak, powerless

figure. It is an open statement of the boys to show their distrust, suspicion and dislike of

women. In New Jack City (1991), the black female characters are not much defined, either.

They are little more than the conventional black ho’.

 46

Poetic Justice (1993) starts with the drive-in theater scene where Justice (Janet

Jackson) and her lover are watching a movie. She is sitting in the back seat when she starts

unbuttoning her clothes to offer her body to the boy. Here, the black woman’s body is once

again used to represent hyper-sexuality and lewdness of the black woman. In another instance,

she is licking a stamp and the camera zooms onto this erotic scene in slow motion. Again,

there is a double gaze where once the viewer is the observer and secondly, the viewer sees the

same act from the male character’s (Lucky) point of view. When Justice and Lucky strike up a

conversation later on in the van, he starts referring to Justice as a “bitch.” She immediately

turns back on him saying “Don’t be calling me a bitch, you don’t know nothing about

me!...I’m a black woman, okay? I deserve respect. I ain’t no ‘bitch.’ If I’m a bitch, yo

mamma’s a bitch!” In contrast to Justice, her girlfriend, Lesha, is a slutty, vulgar and bitchy

girl. Her nails are long and painted red, she carries herself in a way that suggests she is a

common, everyday girl. Her role in the movie is to emphasize the difference between the

usual bitchy black woman and the more sophisticated, clever, promising, fine young black

woman. Justice on the outside seems to be the same as any other black woman, but when one

gets to know her better, she is an enigma. She is sensitive, intelligent and she writes poems,

but she is locked up in her memories of bad times. Even her character cannot be presented in

this movie without having sexual elements to lure the viewer’s attention to the screen. There

is a scene where Justice is lying on her bed and her bosom reveals part of her chest and

breasts. She is wearing black bras and her voluptuous curves draw the viewer’s attention to

the ‘black woman’s body.

The Bodyguard (1992) is an interracial romance, where race was actually never

mentioned and cultural as well as racial differences have not surfaced throughout the movie.

The light-skinned, gorgeous pop diva (Whitney Houston) falls in love with her white, strong,
 47

charming bodyguard (Kevin Costner). However, their romance cannot be stretched farther

than the edges of their work-relationship. At the end, they choose career over love.

The 1990s carried the promise of the rise of African-American women directors.

Daughters of the Dust (1991) – written, produced and directed by Julie Dash – posed an

alternative representation of African-American women. The significance of this movie is that

as a very rare occasion, African descent, heritage and history occupy the visual, spiritual and

moral center of the screen.

21. The Social and Cultural Impacts of Hollywood’s Black Woman Stereotypes

Cinema ‘creates’ culture through the images it channels from the director to the

audiences. Movies represent cultural ideas, myths and fantasies. As described by Marshall

McLuhan in 1964, information about people is transmitted chiefly through visual images

(139-141). This is especially true for black women. The codes (as described earlier by James

A. Snead) which refer to the various stereotypes of African-American women on screen have

long existed and they do not only carry visual signs such as an apron for example for

‘Mammy’, but they also represent cultural and social patterns by which characters on film

shall act. These codes influence the audience’s construction of social reality. The result is a

distorted image of the self and of an entire community. Film has always been a powerful

socializing agent in U.S. culture because of the mass audiences that watched the movies ever

since the 1920s. As the viewer assimilates with a certain character the images and behavioral

codes of that character start to influence the viewer’s cultural and social ideas, attitudes and

beliefs. Schudson states that film merely reflects reality as expressed in a given peoples’

culture (Manatu 40). However, it is not true. Film creates culture, not only reflects it. And for

African-American women, this ‘created culture’ is narrowed down to cultural and social roles

which are based on sexuality. For example, the stereotype of the Sapphire woman has been
 48

around for many years. It is based on the myth that black women are strong, enduring and at

the same time harsh, coarse and loud. Therefore, it is not surprising that black women are

considered strong, masculine, enduring and invulnerable – in other words, unfeminine. While

many movies and TV shows reflect this image of the black woman, the impact of this coding

has long consequences on black women’s everyday lives. They usually try to keep the myth

alive by acting like a Sapphire or try to maintain the image of being strong, powerful and

tough. There is also a strong peer pressure that does not let these embedded stereotypes die

easily. black women tend to act and react the same old stereotypes in their lives that the movie

industry has forced on them throughout the decades. They believe that what they see on

screen is what they have to be like. What’s more sad is that both black and white society

expects the same of them. Jones and Shorter-Gooden have conducted a very thorough survey

of the social and cultural effects of movie stereotypes on African-American women. What

they found was puzzling. They discovered that there are five major myths about black women

in American society. First, black women are constantly being reminded by society that they

are inferior to other people (white women, white men, black men, etc.). Second, there is a

myth that they are strong, unshakable and “emotionally impervious to life’s most challenging

events and circumstances” (11). Third, as a consequence of the second myth, black women

are considered unfeminine (and such qualities act as a buffer to white women in contrast).

black women are thus seen as domineering, non-sensual and unlady-like. Fourth, black

women are believed to have criminal behavior. They are therefore always watched more at

shopping centers, grocery stores and even the police tends to believe it was the black women

who stole something when there is no actual evidence of the act. The last myth is based on

black women’s sexuality. They are usually perceived as sexually promiscuous and

irresponsible. They are being mistreated even by their own folks as they must endure sexual

harassment and exploitation day by day. In most films directed by white men, the roles given
 49

to African-American women are constructed by negative sexual images. Such coding exempts

black women from participating in serious, major roles. So, as we can see the myth of black

women’s sexuality and the movie images are quite similar and instead of trying to break with

the old misconceptions, together they reinforce them instead.

Mae C. King goes ever further with the definition of myths. She states in her The

Politics of Sexual Stereotypes essay that there is a strong interrelatedness among stereotypes,

images and myths. According to her, “myths associated with racial identity are predominant

in the United States and they have given birth to a caste system” (13). So, King describes a

social caste system based on racial myths. Myths that linger among the members of American

society justify and maintain the caste system in which black women belong. Institutions, such

as churches, schools, or even families reinforce the myth that the social role of black women

is inferior to that of white women. When reflected to the movie industry, this statement can be

explained in a way that films convey messages (through images) to black and white audiences

about racial stereotypes of black women. These stereotypes are based on myths about black

women. They tell society how a black woman should and should not look like, behave like,

act like and so on. In other words, stereotypes create social roles for black women. Movie

images thus become central to determining social values, perceptions and attitudes for black

women and they also classify them into castes. Very vaguely, Hollywood films suggest two

types of black women: one is the non-feminist, loser type of woman who is coarse, harsh,

unattractive and sexually overheated. The other is the one who does not fit this category and is

therefore considered ‘invisible’ by society. Both types deprive black women of their

womanhood, self-respect and social status. The non-feminist image, according to King,

“permits the most outrageous exploitation of black females as a cheap labor force” and it also

justifies brutality on them without any retribution (16). Within the family, the tough, enduring

black woman is expected to be the head of the family which creates a domestic inequilibrium
 50

between the black man and woman. black women are also seen as ‘losers’ on film to further

reinforce the stereotypes of inferiority to white people. In society, it creates disillusionment

among black women as they lose their self-esteem at work and when socializing with others.

The purpose of maintaining such stereotypes is to hold the black woman in her place – to let

her know how far she can go in career, in social situations, in marriage (the inferior sexual

status of black women place a burden on interracial marriages) and so on. The movie industry

goes ever farther when it suggests that those black women who try to venture over these

clearly defined borders in society receive due punishment. In real life, this has the

consequence that black women are scared to step over their defined roles and they need to

endure the psychological constraints of the movie industry’s predefined social limitations.

The other type was the ‘invisible’ black woman. Society either punishes black women when

they try to break from the conventions of the myths and stereotypes, or it simply ignores

them. So, when a black woman is actually talented, pretty and even competent then she is not

really ‘black’ because these images do not fit the stereotypes and myths about them.

As mentioned before, black female sexuality acted as a buffer to white women’s

idealization as pure and perfect. White women have always been given roles in which they

could play the romantic, lovable heroine who is beautiful by white standards, intelligent and

who is not judged solely by her looks but other human values as well. In contrast, African-

American women have been given side roles where they could hardly introduce the ‘real’

black woman who is actually an emotional, human being. They have been cast into roles

which were either completely non-sexual (Mammy, Aunt Jemima) or over-sexed (Jezebel,

Sapphire). The social consequence is that many black women feel that men of other races see

them as “oversexed vixens” (King 29). This myth is rooted in slavery times when rape on

black women was socially accepted and approved. This phenomenon turned into the

misconception that black women are sexually loose and lusting. The black woman’s
 51

overheated sexuality on film drew a sharp contrast between the ‘appropriate’ sexual behavior

white women showed on film. In the 1970s, black women on film were harsh, big-mouthed

prostitutes with criminal behavior. In the 1980s they were teenage mothers who could not

hold up a functional family and lived off welfare checks. In the 1990s they sold their bodies

for a ride in a luxury car or for a flashy dress. These images were further reinforced by the

pop culture which showed video images of young black women lusting for sex, drugs and

jewelry. The social consequence of such images was devastating. As Jones and Shorter-

Gooden’s survey shows, black women became even more vulnerable to sexual violence and

abuse from white and black men alike (122). The pressure of the lusting, over-sexed black

woman images that target young black girls every day as they try to maintain the popular

image of the movies but also try to save their sensuality as women. This pressure often

confronts them when they have to perform in every day life.

In 2002, when Halle Berry received an Academy Award for Best Actress for her

performance in Monsters’ Ball, there was a social fear among black women that she may have

been awarded for her sexual performance in the movie rather than her acting qualities. In

many, it triggered disappointment when she was congratulated on performing a wilde sex

scene with white actor Billy Bob Thornton. It sent a message to black society that a black

woman is once again rewarded for fulfilling an old stereotype. When asked why she had

turned down the role finally given to Halle Berry, Angela Bassett boldly replied “I wasn’t

going to be a prostitute on film. I couldn’t do that because it’s such a stereotype about black

women and sexuality” (Samuels 57).

Women’s attitude toward passionate love over sexual pleasure has been a feminine

value in movies throughout the decades. Therefore, as Person 1988 stated in his essay, women

seek out romance as a major part of their identity. They find their own identity through

romantic relationships – this is especially true for the post-war era white women characters
 52

who were used on film as love objects. As Janice A. Radway puts it, the romantic heroine is

often portrayed as independent until she finds love. As soon as she falls in love, however, she

loses her identity by surrendering her sexual autonomy to the man. “Love tamed the

independent woman, who then became the ‘love object’” (162). Molly Haskell categorized

women in film into four groups according to the themes they played in: sacrifice, affliction,

choice and competition. Haskell referred to the ‘sacrifice’ theme as the “Great Lie” for it

suppresses women’s ambitions, intelligence and sexuality in favor of romance (35). Such

movies as “Mahagony” portray this type of a heroine for black women. But the fact is that in

most U.S. films, black women do not experience love – they only experience sex. Therefore,

in real life, they usually find it difficult to find the right way to behave in their relationships

with men. On one hand, movie codes pressure them into the domineering roles of an

independent, tough woman who takes charge at home. On the other hand, however, they are

also pressured to act delicate and shy to adhere to society’s general codes about the roles of

women versus men.

Films in which black women appear tend to reinforce the idea that the lighter the tone

of skin the more virtuous the woman. A woman with a light brown skin tone will get the role

of a more modest, romantic and intelligent woman whereas the darker skinned woman will

most likely be sexually overheated, coarse, explicit and bitchy. (For example, Janet Jackson

and Regina King in Poetic Justice.) This is because white skin color is equivalent to

femininity and virtue, while dark skin color is the opposite. Such codes help set a cultural

“tone” regarding how women with different skin colors are to be viewed, “which filters down

to the viewing audience, where a certain legitimacy is … achieved” (Manatu 191). Broad

noses, full lips, ample curves, dreadlocks, dark skin are the exact opposite of the thin, white,

blonde actresses in movies. The U.S. society still defines feminine beauty by Western

European standards. These standards also define a woman’s worth. Because of this, African-
 53

American women struggle every day to try to look more European. They either straighten

their hair, go on a diet, or perform other alterations on their bodies just to meet society’s

expectations of being beautiful.

Another code for judging black women is language. Movies and television suggest

that Standard English is the proper English. Anyone who speaks different is considered out of

place and is judged negatively. Black vernacular, or black dialect gives ground to social bias

and discrimination even today in the United States. Black vernacular is often looked down on

by white society and sometimes by African-Americans as well. African-American women are

often prejudiced for their tone of voice, dialect and even body language. However, these

prejudices are most of the time based on misunderstanding black women either by mistake or

on purpose. The American movie industry takes advantage of this stereotyping as well. For

example, mammies speak with a harsh black dialect (e.g. Mammy in Gone with the Wind) or

Sapphires who use ‘street talk’ to further emphasize their masculinity. As Jones and Shorter-

Gooden sums it up, “If [the black woman] is opinionated, she is difficult. If she speaks with

passion, she is volatile. If she explodes with laughter, she is unrefined. If she pitches her neck

as she makes a point, she is streetwise and coarse. So much of what black women say, and

how they say it, pushes other people to buy into the myth that black women are inferior,

harsh, and less feminine than other women” (102). To cope with this prejudice, black women

tend to keep a double standard in their language. When at home or around black people, they

speak black vernacular. However, when at work or around white people, they keep

monitoring the way they speak, fearful that they will ‘make a mistake.’ Jones’ and Shorter-

Gooden’s survey implicates that many black women take care to put ‘ly’ on every adverb and

to articulate every syllable. Some of them change not only their speech but also their

mannerisms around white people (102). The sad thing is that when whites speak black
 54

vernacular, they are usually perceived as ‘cool,’ but when the same speech comes from a

black person’s mouth, it is considered ‘low-class.’

22. Conclusion

Cinematic representation of the black woman has come a long way since the first long

reeler has made it to the movie theaters. The stereotypes used back in the 1910’s have not

changed much over the years and even today they seem to be standing strong and

undefeatable. The only change about them is that they have been polished here and there and

have been restyled to fit the current social and political trend. The fact remains though that the

stereotypes in circulation – such as the mammy, the jezebel, the tragic mulatto and their

blends are still defined in relation to the black woman’s sexuality. There have been attempts

over the decades of the past century to break from the old dogmas and misinterpretations of

the African-American woman; however, these attempts have not been successful for long

enough to change the embedded misconceptions and prejudices in peoples’ minds about black

womanhood.
 55

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