The Incarceration of Black Artists

The other night The Shakespeare Theatre Company (@shakespeareinDC) held a "Twitter Night", where they encouraged audience members to tweet before the show and during intermission, using the #STCnight hashtag. In a mix of curiosity, vanity, masochism and, above all and most likely, stupidity, I decided to search what people had written. And I found this tweet (the user's handle and page have been edited out):

This user, who, from what I could gather is a young Latino or Black American woman and an aspiring theatre artist, makes a cryptic tweet about the casting of a Black person as Ferdinand--neither expressing discomfort nor seeming to condone the choice. When she's urged to elaborate on her feelings, she replies with "It made me wonder more about what we're saying about race and power given two black men with speaking roles became slaves."

The Twitter exchange reminded me of an interview between Tavis Smiley, Octavia Spencer, and Viola Davis from a couple of years ago. Here's some excerpts from the transcript; the full interview can be found here. The emphasis below is mine:

TAVIS:  You both have done wonderful work and will do more wonderful work, but there’s something that sticks in my craw about celebrating Hattie McDaniel so many years ago for playing a maid. Here we are all these years later, and I want you to win, but I’m ambivalent about what you’re winning for.
...
DAVIS: ...I will say this – that very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African Americans have is absolutely destroying the Black artist. The Black artist cannot live in the place – in a revisionist place. The Black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy. People are messy.
Caucasian actors know that. They understand that. They understand that when you bring a human being to life, what you want as an artist, to show all the flaws as well as the beauty.
We, as African American artists, are more concerned with image and message and not execution.
....
TAVIS: The point I’m making is that while I celebrate your accomplishment, there is, in fact, a lack of balance in this industry, and it makes me – that’s why I said ambivalent. I’m not upset with you. There’s an ambivalence here that when I see the audience just stand up and cheer and go wild when the characters that we’re celebrating here – they are real. My grandmother, Big Mama, God rest her soul, you’re playing Big Mama.
....
DAVIS: If you would come to me, if you were to come to me and say that you were ambivalence because that you felt the writing was not balanced, that you felt like with Aibileen and Minny and Mae and Constantine, that you didn’t feel that there were a lot of colors to the character, that their humanity was not explored, that you just saw just a blank, flat, unrealistic stereotype, then I would go with you...But if your criticism is that you just don’t want to see the maid or you just don’t want to see Denzel Washington in “Training Day” play the kind of rogue cop, then I have an issue with that. 
...
DAVIS: When I say “multifaceted roles,” they’re roles where I open up a script and the character goes on a journey. Where I see a balance. Where I’m not just always dignified, I know everything, I see everything. I’m just this straight-backed Black woman, friend, all-knowing, seeing, whatever.
I’m talking about a human being, multifaceted human being that actually lives, breathes, all of that, okay? ...Because my whole thing is, do I always have to be noble? 

Frankly I rarely feel fidelity, as a Black American artist, to any sort of "cause". I think that the "Burden of Representation" (where a non-white actor, or a gay actor, or a woman, or whatever, is anointed as a stand-in for that entire group) is completely unfair and ridiculous. I approach my life and my craft as a human being first, as an individual first, NOT as a Black person. I am not naive enough to believe that my blackness has no bearing whatsoever on, at the very least, the way that I'm perceived, but there comes a point when one becomes too busy being "black" and not busy enough living life.

The best I can do is create a fully-realized and compelling character, and let the work speak for itself.  THAT is how you honor the "Black Experience", THAT is how you honor Black people--you show them as multi-dimensional human beings, no matter what, and you KEEP doing it. I try to choose roles based on their complexity and story arc--and that's pretty much it. If anything traffics in negative stereotypes, I attribute that more to limitations of the writers than anything else.

If I sit here and worry about what it looks like if I'm playing a slave, or what it looks like for a black person to be kissing a white man's foot, or what it looks like for me to wear chains, then I'm dead in the water. It's unfair to me as an artist to be beholden to "What Black People Might Think". Can you imagine the cast of HBO's The Wire worrying about what black people would think of their roles and their work? It would have robbed viewers of one of the most complex and compelling television dramas ever produced.

This woman's tweets piss me of because in her zeal to preserve and uphold her highly subjective and racialized worldview, she ignores that Ferdinand is royalty and has a wonderful journey through the play; she ignores Caliban's complexity and poetry and soulfulness; she ignores the hard work that everyone is doing on stage and off (which she should be aware of, being a theatre artist herself), in fact ignores the whole sweep of Shakespeare's play. Rather than celebrate the triumph of having black artists employed at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, furthering their careers, building their resumes, and sharpening their skills, she complains.

Two of the top-rated shows on television feature Black women in the lead, and the producer of both of those hit shows is a black woman; men like Key and Peele, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejifor, Michael B. Jordan, and David Oyelowo, and women like Shonda Rhimes, Lupita N'yongo, Uzo Aduba, Octavia Spencer and of course Ms. Davis are breaking through and getting their work out there and are CRUSHING it. We are living in a time of abundance and of unprecedented exposure for Black artists in entertainment, and yet it's STILL not enough--people still complain because to them the representations aren't "perfect". The Cosby Show "wasn't an accurate portrayal of Black life" yet Good Times trafficked in stereotypes; some people feel that Black-ish is a "coon show".

People are protesting around the country about overzealous law enforcement and what they view as an oppressive and racist regime that targets Blacks unfairly. In the realm of the arts, or at least entertainment, it seems that at least some oppression comes from other black people.

And I'm tired of it.