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Regarding ‘The Color Purple’ And Hollywood’s Obsession With Black Trauma
The Black community is fed up
The Black community is taking a hard PASS on the continued exploitation of our painful past and continuing struggles — especially when it’s for white profit.
The new film adaptation of The Color Purple failing to set the box office ablaze is a glaring indicator of this fact: the Black community is fed up. We are so over stories about our trauma being the primary narratives in which we see ourselves centered onscreen.
I’m a Gen X-er who came of age in the 70s and 80s. During that era of television, there was only three broadcast networks and going to the movie theater still held the allure of a special event.
The main narratives Hollywood was serving to Black people about the Black experience in the United States were films and TV mini-series centering slavery or life in impoverished communities like inner-city ghettos or the rural South.
That’s overwhelmingly all we had to watch if we wanted to see ourselves centered in onscreen media.
Growing up, I remember watching Black narratives like Roots, Queen, The Autobiography of Miss Jame Pittman…
