What do films teach you?

'What do films teach you?' is such a profound question, and as a child films taught me so much. From how college is to how relationships should be.

I now realize that the majority of the movies I watched as a child gave me a lot of false perceptions on how life actually is. Once I began to notice that a lot of what was being portrayed in these films I began to use them as a way to get away. I guess that's why I love watching movies today, simply because they often times make me forget about my reality for a brief moment.

This course however, has caused me to look at films in a completely different way, from bell hooks' interpretation to Ava DuVernay's. I now don't look at films as I did before, or television for that mater. Any time I see a black person in a movie I immediately want to know who the director is and all about him or her. Any time I see a black person in a movie I often times wonder what the real reason is for casting that black person for that particular role, because there's always a reason right? Whether it be to sexualize our black men and women or to use us as jesters for white entertainment. It is now a little hard for me to be as happy as I once was to see a black face on the big screen because I always wonder 'WHY?'. Only when I see my people playing powerful roles do my thoughts go to rest...some what.

This movie for example, Jamie Foxx plays a black president, which is great, but then I begin to wonder. Well why is it that the white has to be the one to always come to the rescue and bail the black man out of trouble? One movie comes to mind where this did not happen and that is Coach Carter with Samuel Jackson, for once little black kids weren't being saved by some white man, and that's one of few.

I wish we had more directors like Ava DuVernay that make movements like AFFRM because images are so important and we don't have enough of them in our shades of brown to bring up the children on.

This course has taught me to look beyond what the screen portrays because films have taught me that women's only existence is for a man, and that black men are only thugs, or jesters.

From a very young age I was so unaware of how serious things were in terms of how far from the truth we know about ourselves. I had no idea how much I was being brainwashed everyday, from the shows on TV , the movies I watched and loved, the music I listened to and even the toys I used to see in the toy stores. So many images that led me to believe that my black wasn't beautiful.  So many images that made me so badly want to be light skin and as far away from "authentic black" as possible.

Black Looks: Race and Representation even states that control over images equals racial domination
and that's exactly what the white supremacist have done.

Growing up my mother never allowed me to watch anything but Disney movies, nothing but pop music, she didn't want me to watch music videos and she kept me in and out of a little over 11 catholic schools so I wasn't never truly in touch with my blackness as you would think one should be. My mother kept me out of the hood streets of Brooklyn, NY and did her best to raise me nothing like the "ghetto" kids on the block. Just like Chimamanda Adichi in the video Danger of a Single Story, I was just like her roommate, and I had been her roommate at the time I probably would have asked her the same questions because like the white girl, I only had one single story to go by. Not until I got to college did I begin to realize my reality was so far from the truth. It wasn't until I got to college did I realized I really didn't know much about my African American culture, the schools and my mother did a pretty good job at keeping the truth away from me. It is safe to say I was a victim of the brainwashing that seems to resonate within our society.

It wasn't until I got to college was I able to appreciate images such as:





Men that look like this:



Words like this:


It wasn't until I got to college did I begin to learn about people like Adichie Chimamanda, bell hooks, and (thanks to this course) Manthia Diawara. Before enrolling in this course, I first took Hip Hop Discourse with Mr. Turman and it opened my eyes to so much that it made me want to open the eyes of other that are also victims to the brainwashing the white man as done to us. It made me want to be all for my culture, it made me open my eyes to the disgusting hatred that our fellow white community has toward us. Finally, it made me want to enroll in this course. After reading Black America Cinema, the Introduction of Black Looks: Race and Representation and the three video images that were recommended, it made me want to learn to much more, and be all that I can to be a good role model to our future black children and the people around me.

In Black Looks, Ousmane Sembene explains:

"You must understand that for people like us, there are no such things as models. we are called upon to create our models. for African people, Africans in the diaspora, it's pretty much the same.."

WE MUST CREATE OUR OWN IMAGES!
The white man isn't going to do it for us, when we google search the word "beautiful" and click on images all we see are white faces!

Sooooooo, you're trying to tell me that Black isn't beautiful??? I will no longer accept this and allow my black friends and future black children to believe this.

bell hooks suggests that in order to gain control of ourselves we must:

1. transform the images,create alternatives
2. ask ourselves questions about what images subvert, undermine the power and authority of established system
3. transform world views
4. move away from dualistic thinking about whats "good" and what's "bad"

As a community we need to come together for our purpose and not ideologies and Dr. Umar Johnson said it the best (skip to 53:00):

Dr. Umar Johnson is a wonderful example of the role models we need to be looking up to, he is the perfect example of what more of us need to be doing and that's taking action.

As I am becoming more aware of these things and looking more into my black culture it is making me want to do so much to help our future youth, my future children for that matter. I want to make sure that my children do not grow up believing their black isn't beautiful. I want them to grow up in a household that would not stand for them making eurocentric choices without first understanding the back story. I don't want my children being as unaware as I was growing up. These readings and videos helped me open my eyes to so much more than just the tip of the iceberg in our culture and it's only making me want to learn more.

hhhhh