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5 Common Black Stereotypes in TV and Film
Black people may be scoring more substantial parts in film and television, but many continue to play roles that fuel stereotypes, such as thugs and maids. The prevalence of these parts reveals the importance of #OscarsSoWhite and how Black people continue to struggle for quality roles on both the small and big screens, despite having won Academy Awards in acting, screenwriting, music production and other categories.
‘The Magical Negro’
“Magical Negro” characters have long played key roles in films and television programs. These characters tend to be Black men with special powers who make appearances solely to help White characters out of crises, seemingly unconcerned about their own lives.
The late Michael Clarke Duncan famously played such a character in “The Green Mile.” Moviefone wrote of Duncan’s character, John Coffey: “He’s more an allegorical symbol than a person, his initials are J.C., he has miraculous healing powers, and he voluntarily submits to execution by the state as a way of doing penance for the sins of others. A ‘Magical Negro’ character is often the sign of lazy writing at best, or of patronizing cynicism at worst.”
Magical Negroes are also problematic because they have no inner lives or desires of their own. Instead, they exist solely as a support system to the White characters, reinforcing the idea that Black people aren’t as valuable or as human as their White counterparts. They don’t require unique storylines of their own because their lives simply don’t matter as much.
In addition to Duncan, Morgan Freeman has played in some of these roles, and Will Smith played a Magical Negro in “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”
‘The Black Best Friend’
Black Best Friends typically don’t have special powers like Magical Negroes do, but they mainly function in films and television shows to guide White characters out of challenging circumstances. Usually a woman, the Black best friend functions “to support the heroine, often with sass, attitude and a keen insight into relationships and life,” critic Greg Braxton noted in the Los Angeles Times.
Like Magical Negroes, Black best friends appear not to have much going on in their own lives but turn up at exactly the right moment to coach White characters through life. In the film “The Devil Wears Prada,” for example, actress Tracie Thoms plays friend to star Anne Hathaway, reminding Hathaway’s character that she’s losing touch with her values. Also, actress Aisha Tyler played friend to Jennifer Love Hewitt on “The Ghost Whisperer,” and Lisa Nicole Carson played friend to Calista Flockhart on “Ally McBeal.”
Television executive Rose Catherine Pinkney told the Times that there is a long tradition of Black best friends in Hollywood. “Historically, people of color have had to play nurturing, rational caretakers of the White lead characters. And studios are just not willing to reverse that role.”
‘The Thug’
There’s no shortage of Black men playing drug dealers, pimps, con-artists and other forms of criminals in television shows and films such as “The Wire” and “Training Day.” The disproportionate amount of Black people playing criminals in Hollywood fuels the racial stereotype that Black men are dangerous and drawn to illicit activities. Often these films and television shows provide little social context for why more Black men than others are likely to end up in the criminal justice system.
They overlook how racial and economic injustice makes it more difficult for young Black men to evade a prison term or how policies such as stop-and-frisk and racial profiling make Black men targets of the authorities. In addition, these productions fail to ask whether Black men are inherently more likely to be criminals than anyone else or if society plays a role in creating the cradle-to-prison pipeline for them.
‘The Angry Black Woman’
Black women are routinely portrayed in television and film as sassy, neck-rolling harpies with major attitude problems. The popularity of reality television shows adds fuel to the fire of this stereotype. To ensure that programs such as “Basketball Wives” maintain plenty of drama, often the loudest and most aggressive Black women are featured on these shows.
Black women say these depictions have real-world consequences in their love lives and careers. When Bravo debuted the reality show “Married to Medicine” in 2013, Black female physicians unsuccessfully petitioned the network to pull the plug on the program.
“For the sake of integrity and character of black female physicians, we must ask that Bravo immediately remove and cancel ‘Married to Medicine’ from its channel, website, and any other media,” the physicians demanded. “Black female physicians only compose 1 percent of the American workforce of physicians. Due to our small numbers, the depiction of black female doctors in media, on any scale, highly affects the public’s view of the character of all future and current African American female doctors.”
The show ultimately aired and Black women continue to complain that depictions of Black womanhood in the media fail to live up to reality.
‘The Domestic’
Because Black people were forced into servitude for hundreds of years in the United States, it’s no surprise that one of the earliest stereotypes about Black people to emerge in television and film is that of the domestic worker or mammy. Television shows and movies such as “Beulah” and “Gone With The Wind” capitalized on the mammy stereotype in the early 20th century. But more recently, movies such as “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Help” have featured Black people as domestics.
While Latinxs are arguably the group most likely to be typecast as domestic workers today, the controversy over the portrayal of Black domestics in Hollywood hasn’t gone away. The 2011 film “The Help” faced intense criticism because the Black maids helped to catapult the White protagonist to a new stage in life while their lives remained static.
Like the Magical Negro and the Black Best Friend, Black domestics in film function mostly to nurture and guide White characters.
https://www.thoughtco.com/common-black-stereotypes-in-tv-film-2834653
The Introduction of comic strips in the American press in the 1890’s corresponds with the beginning of a renewed of racial segregation in the United States.
“While Southern laws were used to oppress American citizens of African descent, the mainstream White press served up accounts of Blacks in newspaper articles which supported such sanctions’. In the comics section, Blacks were the principal comic figures, having surpassed the Irish at the turn of the century as the butt of America’s jokes. Taking images from black-face minstrelsy, which was America’s first national popular entertainment form and a mainstay of the American stage until the 1940’s, many of the images of “Blacks” in the first half-century of the comics were not of Blacks at all. Instead they were caricatures derived from the popular stage routines of white males’ gross parodies of “Black life” (originally the slave life of Blacks). Just as minstrels worked “under cork,” the colloquial terminology for their use of burnt cork to blacken their faces for a performance, figuratively these were comics “under cork.”
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/links/essays/comics.htm
“We Are Literally Slaves”: Black Nanny Dispels The Contented Mammy Myth.
“In folklore, the Black nursemaid was seen as a dutiful, self-sacrificing black woman who loved her white family and its children every bit as much as her own. Yet the popular images of the loyal, contented Black nursemaid, or “mammy,” were unfortunately far from the reality for the African-American women who worked in these homes. In 1912 the Independent printed this quasi-autobiographical account of servant life, as related by an African-American domestic worker, which dispelled the comforting “mammy” myth.”
I am a negro woman, and I was born and reared in the South. I am now past forty years of age and am the mother of three children. My husband died nearly fifteen years ago, after we had been married about five years. For more than thirty years—or since I was ten years old—I have been a servant in one capacity or another in white families in a thriving Southern city, which has at present a population of more than 50,000. In my early years I was at first what might be called a “house-girl,”or, better, a “house-boy.” I used to answer the doorbell, sweep the yard, go on errands and do odd jobs. Later on I became a chambermaid and performed the usual duties of such a servant in a home. Still later I was graduated into a cook, in which position I served at different times for nearly eight years in all. During the last ten years I have been a nurse.
“I have worked for only four different families during all these thirty years. But, belonging to the servant class, which is the majority class among my race at the South, and associating only with servants, I have been able to become intimately acquainted not only with the lives of hundreds of household servants but also with the lives of their employers. I can, therefore, speak with authority on the so-called servant question; and what I say is said out of an experience that covers many years
To begin with, then, I should say that more than two-thirds of the negroes of the town where I live are menial servants of one kind or another, and besides that more than two-thirds of the negro women here, whether married or single, are compelled to work for a living, — as nurses, cooks, washerwomen, chambermaids, seamstresses, hucksters, janitresses, and the like. I will say, also, that the condition of this vast host of poor colored people is just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during the days of slavery. Tho today we are enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves. And, not to generalize, I will give you a sketch of the work I have to do—and I’m only one of many.
I frequently work from fourteen to sixteen hours a day. I am compelled by my contract, which is oral only, to sleep in the house. I am allowed to go home to my own children, the oldest of whom is a girl of 18 years, only once in two weeks, every other Sunday afternoon—even then I’m not permitted to stay all night. I not only have to nurse a little white child, now eleven months old, but I have to act as playmate or “handy-andy,” not to say governess, to three other children in the home, the oldest of whom is only nine years of age. I wash and dress the baby two or three times each day, I give it its meals, mainly from a bottle; I have to put it to bed each night; and, in addition, I have to get up and attend to its every call between midnight and morning. If the baby falls to sleep during the day, as it has been trained to do every day at about eleven o’clock, I am not permitted to rest. It’s “Mammy, do this, ”or“Mammy, do that,” or “Mammy, do the other,” from my mistress, all the time. So it is not strange to see “Mammy” watering the lawn in front with the garden hose, sweeping the sidewalk, mopping the porch and halls, dusting around the house, helping the cook, or darning stockings. Not only so, but I have to put the other three children to bed each night as well as the baby, and I have to wash them and dress them each morning.”
