January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Is love colour-blind?
Film about inter-racial love ‘sets new paradigm’
A few cup hands to mouths, their boos ricocheting through the room. Others stand up, pumping fists in solidarity, hooting and hollering, “All righty then!”
And when the hunk whips out the nail polish and paints the honey-dipped beauty’s toes scarlet? The largely female audience squeals, apparently embracing the film’s thesis, as uttered by one character:
“At the end of the day, it’s not about skin colour. It’s about the love connection.” Well, yeah. Except when was the last time that you saw a white Adonis literally worshiping at the feet of an African American beauty? Or saw a chick flick in which the Meg Ryan/Cameron Diaz character sips her no-foam lattes at Magic Johnson’s Starbucks and comes equipped with some hair issues and an ethnic moniker like “Kenya”? Indeed, the new romantic comedy Something New presents a new paradigm in the Hollywood Shuffle.
It is perhaps no coincidence that it arrives in a package written, produced, directed by and starring black women. In it, Kenya is a product of the black bourgeoisie: She’s beautiful, rich, black—and alone. She’s looking for a man, specifically, a black man. Fixed up on a blind date with Brian, a white landscape architect, she bolts. An eligible black man begins pursuing her, but she can’t stop thinking about the white guy. It’s an equal-opportunity love triangle.
Is Something New a step forward — or backward? Even in 2006, the notion of black/white love still comes fraught with some heavy-duty historical baggage. “We’re still back where we were 60 years ago, when it comes to race and sex,” says psychologist Kellina Craig-Henderson, author of “Black Men in Interracial Relationships.”
Yes, folks of all colours have been mixing and matching since the beginning of time. After all, fully 70 to 90 per cent of African Americans are estimated to be of mixed race. But much of the history of race-mixing is filled with danger and ugly images: Lynchings just for perceived interest in a white woman, sexual exploitation and rape of black women working as domestics.
That was the reality, but on the big screen, black women from Sapphire to Beaulah were Aunt Jemima-ed, neutered, erased. Or they were crazy sluts like Carmen Jones. Or, in the case of Pinky, Showboat and Imitation of Life, if they were deemed beautiful, “tragic mulattoes” cast as the love interest of a white man, white actresses were cast in these roles more often than not. So no wonder the on-screen love connection between an African American woman and a Caucasian man is almost always viewed through a political prism.
Taking a lead
African American men get to play the romantic lead these days. But not with a black woman, as Will Smith bemoaned in an interview, because then the movie will be deemed “black” and not worthy of big-bucks marketing.
He can’t kiss a white woman, Smith says, because that’s deemed too scandalous for mainstream consumption. So lighter-skinned Latinas like Eva Mendes and Jennifer Lopez get to split the difference. Even in “black movies” such as 1992’s Boomerang, and 1999’s The Best Man, the romantic fantasies of black women are given short shrift. Notwithstanding Halle Berry’s Catwoman and Die Another Day roles, African American women rarely get to be the chased-after babes. Which is why they were cheering at Howard, Washington’s historically black university.
“We build our role models on the media,” senior Asso Aidoo, 21, says.
Something New doesn’t necessarily advocate for black women dating white men, producer Stephanie Allain says. “We wanted to put something on film that we haven’t seen before. ... Why shouldn’t we have choices as women? Just as we can be sitting at a table (in a business situation) with 12 white men looking at us for our opinion, it was high time to show a woman in that position being sought after by a lot of different men. It echoes the promise of endless possibilities that haven’t always been available to us.”
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