By Sikivu Hutchinson
Every child in the U.S. should be required to see Selma for at least two reasons.
First, Ava DuVernay’s powerhouse film captures the political complexities
and tactical ambiguities that informed civil rights movement organizing; from
the behind-the-scenes factionalism among movement organizers to the FBI’s war
on activists to the media’s influence on bringing black resistance to Southern
terrorism straight into white Middle America’s living rooms. Highlighting the contributions of black women
activists and other lesser known unheralded organizers, the film reminds young
people that historical change does not spring from the exceptional actions of visionary
individuals but from collective action. In
this regard, Selma is an important
antidote to mainstream portrayals that fixate on Martin Luther King as the sole
impetus for the movement.
Second, the lessons of Selma itself are relevant to DuVernay’s
“omission” from the Academy Awards nomination for Best Director. True to Frederick Douglass’ assertion that “power
concedes nothing without demand” the snub of DuVernay is criminal but of course
not unprecedented. Just as sustained
organized action brought down Southern apartheid so must sustained organized
action be directed at Hollywood’s billion dollar White Boy’s club. Each year, people of color flock to inane
comedies and big budget action flicks in record numbers (Latinos have the
highest film going rates and the lowest rates of representation in mainstream
film). In the few theater chains that
deign to operate in the "ghetto", we watch white people play out themes of heroism,
romance, swashbuckling, leadership and political intrigue underwritten by multinational
corporations which rarely endorse people of color portrayals that don’t hinge
on minstrelsy. Given this, why would the
Academy, helmed
by a cabal of older white men like the Tea Party, give a brilliant fierce
black woman like DuVernay its imprimatur for disrupting one of white
supremacy’s most sacred preserves? Shaming
white Hollywood into “validating” a few token nominees of color every five years
does nothing to address its apartheid structure; refusing to support its lily
white fantasies at the local multiplex does.
In Selma, DuVernay
alludes to the limits of dismantling de jure segregation vis-à-vis de facto
segregation. Toward the end of his life,
King confronted economic injustice and the intractability of capitalist exploitation.
Moving from “reform to revolution”, his
final push for the Poor People’s
Campaign underscored the divide between ending Jim Crow voting rights
restrictions versus redressing deeply embedded structural race and class inequities. In some respects, DuVernay’s exclusion from
the film industry’s white male director canon exemplifies the elusiveness of
the latter. While white Hollywood
post-Charlie Hebdo recently patted
itself on the back at the Golden Globes for supporting free speech and the increase
in diverse portrayals of (white) women, conditions for women of color are still
in neo-Aunt Jemima territory. Critiquing
this civil liberties’ love fest, black feminist writer Britney Cooper slammed
white Hollywood’s empty activist rhetoric as it ignored the Black Lives Matter
movement.
Ripe for parody, liberal and progressive whites are obsessively
fond of trotting out their savior on the cross allyship with downtrodden people
of color. To wit not one prominent white
actor, actress, director or producer has spoken out about white supremacy in
Hollywood greenlighting, financing, casting and decision-making. But as Selma foreshadowed, the wages of
whiteness are a far more insidious regime than segregated lunch counters.
