by Roxane Gay
When Oscar picks Tatiana up from day care, they race back to the car, their bodies so full of joy it’s like they’re trying to outrun the feeling. Actor Michael B. Jordan, best known as Wallace, the sixteen-year-old dealer from The Wire, and Vince, the high school quarterback from Friday Night Lights, expresses that joy from his face to the kick of his heels. In scenes with Diaz, Jordan brings out the raw appeal of a young man in his prime—slow drawls, sexy smiles, toned body. He also expresses openness and vulnerability when Oscar confesses to Sophina that he has lost his job and when, in prison, he begs his mother not to leave him alone.
As Wanda, Octavia Spencer is the movie’s moral center. She embodies nurturing, tough love, and the small ways a mother never lets go. She chides Oscar for driving and talking on his cell phone, urging him to take the train home so he doesn’t drink and drive. In a powerful flashback, Wanda visits Oscar in prison. He’s in his uniform, thrilled to see a familiar face. Wanda is loving but weary, trying to hang on to what normalcy she can. During her visit, Oscar gets drawn into a verbal altercation with another inmate, revealing the aggressive, defiant man he can be when pushed. Wanda tries to calm him. But it’s too much, how he has to straddle two worlds, and when he sits back down, his body is coiled with frustration. Wanda tells Oscar she won’t be coming back to see him. Spencer’s handling of the moment, with quiet control and resolve and no hysterics, is heartbreaking.
There are moments of levity, like when Oscar has to buy a birthday card on behalf of his sister. Despite the sister’s express instructions not to, he gets a card with white people on the front. Such moments not only humanize Oscar, they allow the audience to laugh, to exhale. We need that.
Director Coogler had only the length of a movie—ninety minutes, in this case—to give us a sense of who Oscar Grant was, someone to mourn when the end came. He conducted extensive research on Grant’s whereabouts on that final day and overcame the family’s apprehension to work closely with them. In a prophetic scene, Oscar comforts a bleeding dog hit by a car, whispering kind words so the animal won’t die alone. When Oscar is at the grocery store buying crab for his mother, a young woman at the butcher counter wants to fry fish but is unsure how. Oscar gets his grandma Bonnie on the phone to school her. On the streets of San Francisco after midnight, surrounded by revelers, Oscar and his friends convince a store owner closing shop to let their girlfriends, and the pregnant wife of a couple they don’t know, use the restroom. The men enjoy the camaraderie of strangers, and we see Oscar plan for a future he will not be part of.
At times, Coogler’s choices verge on the sentimental, if not manipulative. His investment in Grant’s story is palpable. There are indulgent directorial choices, like the superimposing of text messages and phone numbers on the screen when Oscar is using his cell phone. It is a testament to the movie’s excellence that the flaws are in the details.
Fruitvale Station could have been an angry movie, but Coogler has crafted an intimate, at times exuberant, portrait. This was a deliberate choice, costar Octavia Spencer said during the question-and-answer session after the screening: “Anger without action leads to riots. I didn’t know if that was the best emotion to associate with this film.” Still, it is hard to consider what made the movie possible without surrendering to some amount of rage.
As Coogler notes, “Grant’s murder came at a time where people in Oakland were optimistic about race.” In one night, that optimism was taken away. Oakland, the eighth-largest city in California, is a particularly difficult place for young black men. According to a June 2011 report from the Oakland Unified School District’s Office of African American Male Achievement, “In Oakland, African American male students have the worst outcomes of any demographic group, despite improvements in some areas in recent years.”
The world beyond the school system provides little statistical solace. According to the NAACP, nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million Americans in prison are African American. Further racial disparities persist in the length of sentencing and the effect of incarceration after release. These institutional biases make it difficult to envision how young black men can succeed. Or as Oscar seems to say in the movie, feeling defeated by a series of failures, I’m tired. Thought I could start over fresh but shit ain’t working out.
Year after year, we discuss these statistics and the impossibility of them. Year after year, we tell the same stories, using these statistics, to show how shit ain’t working out. Accurately conceiving of what young black men face when we talk about them as numbers, though, is difficult. Some statistics loom so pervasively they have become myths. For example, a commonly recited “fact” is that more black men end up in jail than attend college. Ivory A. Toldson, a professor at Howard University, refutes this statement, noting in a series on black education for The Root that “today there are approximately 600,000 more black men in college than in jail, and the best research evidence suggests that the line was never true to begin with.” Behind the statistics for black men in Oakland and across the United States are men who are being failed by society. These statistics, when offered without any kind of reflection, do little to advance the conversation, and when they go unquestioned, as Toldson suggests, they distort the conversation.
It is in this context that Fruitvale Station works compellingly to treat Oscar Grant as a man. Forced to decide whether to sell drugs to support his family, Oscar makes what we hope is the right choice, throwing a large quantity of marijuana into the bay. He tries to get his job back at a local grocer after being fired. Not only are his options drastically limited, his learning curve is steep. There is little room for error. For some young black men, there is no room for error at all.
Depicting this reality was Coogler’s primary aim because, he says, “we struggle with a mass loss of life [in the Bay Area], and the root of these issues is a demonization of young black men.” Contemporary black cinema will not end the demonization of young black men, but a movie like Fruitvale Station offers us a necessary insight into the consequences.
When black movies fail at the box office, too often it becomes a race to see who will first say, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Take the case of Red Tails, produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway, which only earned a bit less than $50 million domestically.
In interviews at the time of the film’s release, Lucas, having put his own money behind the project to ensure it would receive a wide launch, essentially insisted the moviegoing public bore a responsibility to see the movie. In an interview with USA Today, Lucas said, “I realize that by accident I’ve now put the black film community at risk [with Red Tails, whose $58 million budget far exceeds typical all-black productions]. I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are for quite a while. It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that [lower-budget] mold.” Self-important and grandiose as his statement is, Lucas also gets at a frustrating truth. Each time a black movie is made, it has to succeed or risk fallout for the movies that follow. Fruitvale Station, though, bodes well for both the commercial viability and the artistic promise of black film. Early box office returns were excellent. In its opening weekend, Fruitvale Station grossed $377,285 with a $53,898 per screen average, and the movie went on to gross more than $16 million domestically during its theatrical run. The quality of the movie itself offers the hope that a broader range of quality black movies might be made and that we will see black people portrayed in more nuanced ways.
Movies matter. But still, there is this painful reality. Each time Oscar says good-bye to his girlfriend or family in Fruitvale Station, he adds, “I love you.” Coogler remarked that many young men in the inner city do this because “every time we leave the house, we know we might not make it back.” Such is an uncanny burden. There is also this. Oscar Grant was twenty-two years old when he was murdered. Johannes Mehserle, after serving just one year of a two-year sentence, was released from prison on June 13, 2011.
When Less Is M
ore
The Internet tells me I’m supposed to love the television series Orange Is the New Black. The show is reasonably well written, there’s an “interesting” premise, and the cast is diverse. You can’t blink without someone celebrating the show’s diversity. Orange Is the New Black is very, very diverse. Did you know?
I should love Orange Is the New Black for the same reason I should (but do not) love Red Tails or The Butler or 42. Here is popular culture about people who look like me. That’s all I should need, right? Time and again, people of color are supposed to be grateful for scraps from the table. There’s this strange implication that we should enjoy certain movies or television shows simply because they exist.
The critical response has been overwhelmingly positive. Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s television critic wrote, “Smart, salty, and outrageous, the series falls squarely in the tradition of graphic adult cable drama; were you pitching it poolside in Beverly Hills, you might call it the love child of ‘Oz’ and ‘The L Word.’” The description is perfect—there’s grit and heartache balanced by charm and the soapy, outrageous goodness of melodrama. Orange Is the New Black also has impressive staying power in the cultural conversation, particularly given that the show streams exclusively on Netflix, a subscriber service.
By the way, did you know this show is remarkably diverse?
I put off watching Orange Is the New Black because I read the memoir, which was good, and watching the show didn’t feel necessary. I never felt a need to move from one episode to the next, and toward the end, getting through the season became a chore.
There are, undoubtedly, merits. I’ve enjoyed getting to know some of the characters. Sexuality is addressed in interesting, often nuanced ways, at least for the imprisoned white women. There is an amazing Nicholson Baker reference that made word nerds around the world rejoice. How the women build community and seek connection offers a compelling observation about what people need to survive.
Laverne Cox is unequivocally outstanding as Sophia Burset, a transgender woman with a wife and son. This detail is exactly what makes Orange Is the New Black as good as it is infuriating. Burset’s story is original and refreshing. Cox and Tanya Wright, who plays Burset’s wife, Crystal, create beautifully acted scenes that are intimate, bittersweet, and honest. Their story line is the one thing on this show that is genuinely unlike anything else on television, the one element that lives up to the hype.
It is frustrating that Orange Is the New Black is not nearly as good as the rapturous reception suggests. Creator Jenji Kohan can’t commit to excellence or mediocrity. Instead, she dances along the razor-sharp line between the two.
So many opportunities for the show to be truly original and smart are missed by wide margins. There’s a Haitian character, Miss Claudette, quite the rarity, but her accent is inconsistent, bizarre, and bears no resemblance to a Haitian accent. She doesn’t even seem like a Haitian woman. Perhaps, on this point, I am biased because I am Haitian American. Another inmate, Crazy Eyes, is more caricature than character. She is fixated on Piper. Her infatuation is supposed to be funny because crazy people are, I guess, hilarious. To be fair, her character is more fully developed as the season unfolds, but the early going is rough. In one scene, Crazy Eyes pisses just outside of Piper’s bunk, the whites of her crazy eyes shining in the dark. I laughed along because Crazy Eyes is entertaining and the talented Uzo Aduba makes the most of the role. The pleasure, though, is guilt-ridden because I’m too aware of how cavalierly dignity is sacrificed for pleasure’s sake.
Through no fault of actor Taylor Schilling, Piper, the central character, is the least interesting, primarily because Orange Is the New Black is a lovingly crafted monument to White Girl Problems. Certainly, Piper suffers as she comes to terms with the reality of her incarceration. There are deeply affecting scenes illustrating her plight. She has a wry sensibility that translates well. And still, we cannot ignore how the show’s diverse characters are planets orbiting Piper’s sun. The women of color don’t have the privilege of inhabiting their own solar systems. This is what we consider diversity these days.
Orange Is the New Black is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir. The source material concerns a privileged white woman serving a prison sentence. This show cannot be anything but what it is, and that’s fine. Unfortunately, we will never see a similar show about a woman of color as a stranger in a strange land, bewildered by incarceration. We will never see someone dare to write against the dominant narrative about women of color and incarceration.
There is also the grating sense that we should congratulate Kohan for making a good choice, a long overdue choice, instead of an easy choice. We should be grateful diverse actors finally have more opportunity to practice their craft, despite the fact that Orange Is the New Black is diverse in the shallowest, most tokenistic ways. In The Nation, Aura Bogado notes,
With very little exception, I saw wildly racist tropes: black women who, aside from fanaticizing about fried chicken, are called monkeys and Crazy Eyes; a Boricua mother who connives with her daughter for the sexual attentions of a white prison guard; an Asian woman who never speaks; and a crazy Latina who tucks away in a bathroom stall to photograph her vagina . . .
This is the famine from which we must imagine feast.
I’m tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual. I’m tired of the extremes.
So few movies or shows fall between those extremes, but thankfully the ones that do—The Game, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, Love & Basketball, The Best Man, Jumping the Broom, Peeples, and the like—are good, not always great, but well within reach. We need more. We need pop culture that demonstrates not only the ways people are different but also the ways we are very much alike.
In her review, Nussbaum also says the show is “smarter and subtler about the entire range of female-female dynamics than almost anything on TV.” She’s right. The bar is so low for portrayals of people out of the mainstream that “smarter and subtler” seems like so much more than it actually is. Why are we still talking about Orange Is the New Black? The conversation is a measure of how much we are forced to settle or, perhaps, how much we’re willing to settle.
[POLITICS, GENDER & RACE]
The Politics of Respectability
When a black person behaves in a way that doesn’t fit the dominant cultural ideal of how a black person should be, there is all kinds of trouble. The authenticity of his or her blackness is immediately called into question. We should be black but not too black, neither too ratchet nor too bougie. There are all manner of unspoken rules of how a black person should think and act and behave, and the rules are ever changing.
We hold all people to unspoken rules about who and how they should be, how they should think, and what they should say. We say we hate stereotypes but take issue when people deviate from those stereotypes. Men don’t cry. Feminists don’t shave their legs. Southerners are racist. Everyone is, by virtue of being human, some kind of rule breaker, and my goodness, do we hate when the rules are broken.
Black people often seem to be held to a particularly unreasonable standard. Prominent figures have a troubling habit of coming forward with maxims about how black people should be and behave. One such person is Bill Cosby. In an op-ed for the New York Post, Cosby identified apathy as one of the black community’s biggest problems. If we just care enough about ourselves and our communities, we will reach a hallowed place where we will no longer suffer the effects of racism. Most of Cosby’s commentary on race, in recent years, might be summarized as such: if we act right, we will finally be good enough for white people to love us.
CNN anchor Don Lemon offered five suggestions for the black community to overcome racism: black people should stop using the N-word, black people should respect their communities by not littering, black people should stay in school, black people should have fewer children out of wedlock,
and, most inexplicably, young black men should pull their pants up. Lemon also offered anecdotal evidence that he rarely sees people litter in white communities. He then played on the assumption of homophobia, explaining, with regard to sagging pants, that “in fact, it comes from prison. When they take away belts from prisoners so they can’t make a weapon. And then it evolved into which role each prisoner would have during male-on-male prison sex.” Implicit in Lemon’s argument was that the white, heterosexual man is the cultural ideal toward which we should all aspire—curious thinking from Lemon.
Cosby, Lemon, and others who espouse similar ideas are, I would like to believe, coming from a good place. Their suggestions are, on one level, reasonable, mostly grounded in common sense, but these leaders traffic in respectability politics—the idea that if black (or other marginalized) people simply behave in “culturally approved” ways, if we mimic the dominant culture, it will be more difficult to suffer the effects of racism. Respectability politics completely overlook institutional racism and the ways in which the education system, the social welfare system, and the justice system only reinforce many of the problems the black community faces.
We are having an ongoing and critical conversation about race in America. The question on many minds, the question that is certainly on my mind, is how do we prevent racial injustices from happening? How do we protect young black children? How do we overcome so many of the institutional barriers that exacerbate racism and poverty?