We Need More Black Women Represented in Fiction

Black women are one of the most oppressed groups in the United States of America. Even if you have yet to recognize it in real life, no where is it clearer than how they are represented in TV and Film. Often relegated to side characters, or worse, antagonists, who fit at least one of a few stereotypes, obnoxious and mean, exotic and hyper-sexualized, or meek and servile. It is the age old habit of seeing women, particularly black women, through the severely outdated white male gaze.

Prissy from "Gone With The Wind"

According to "Why is Society Intent on Erasing Black People in Fantasy" The struggle of black women, and black people in general, is used frequently in narrative’s like X-Men & Harry Potter, but seldom do you see actual black characters in these narratives that make a metaphor of their struggle. At most you only get a “token”. Whether it's Storm in the X-Men or Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter series.

Removing black people from metaphors for their own, real, hardships is incredibly ignorant and disheartening. As it neglects to address the idea that the story is, or should be, about struggles of race, and ultimately causes white audiences to completely miss the point, even when the allegory is obvious.

Parallels between Civil Rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. with allegorical counterparts from X-Men

Another, similarly frustrating beyond “tokenism” and outright exploiting the struggles of black people in America for the sake of writing compelling fiction without including black people, is the outright absence of black people in the genres of fantasy, action adventure, and science fiction, in general. There is an overwhelming abundance of fantasy that focuses around fictional locations that still manage to be highly euro-centric in their mythological inspiration and melanin-deficiency, but despite it clearly being a fictional worlds where things like dragons and robots exist, gods forbid you have people of color in your story. Let alone women of color!

This is especially true of black women in historical fiction and biopics, there are hundreds of amazing, brave, intelligent black women throughout American History, but how many movies about them can you name? The Color Purple? Hidden Figures? Chisholm ‘72? How long did it take for these women to be noticed by Hollywood and have them think these stories and think they were worth telling, thirty years, forty, a century or more? It’s not enough.

Not only that, but it has been proven by several studies that positive representation of marginalized people benefit mentally and emotionally from seeing identities that reflect themselves in media, and that the same positive representation can reduce misunderstanding and hostility from white people who do not often interact with said marginalized groups. Take the uproar of positive feedback for the trinity of strong, black women it brought to the forefront with Nakia, Shuri, and Okoye?

Movie posters for "Black Panther" featuring the three female protagonists

Except, black women should not have to scream the praises of a movie where they see themselves portrayed positively in an ocean of film and television that has come before, and will come after have not. No one should have to beg to be seen. Nor should the person who has bothered to look at them for the first time not look at them again unless that person screams their thanks for even being considered worth looking at.

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Even worse, if you look at points made in the article "Why Hollywood's Portrayal of Black Women is Problematic" more often than not, the roles that black women are praised for in movies like Precious and Ma they are the most antagonistic, unsavory, immoral characters imaginable, from portraying drug addiction or unhappy marriages as traits of an "Evil Black Woman" which are not only problematic and misogynistic for their own reasons, but it perpetuates modern interpretations of the same stereotypes there have been about women of color for centuries. When are we going to see women like Octavia Spencer, or Annalise Keating get an Oscar for playing a protagonist who isn’t a murderous, crack smoking divorcee?

Black women deserve to be respected and see themselves in the powerful positive role models of the black women from our history as well as in works born of our imaginations, they can, should, and have every right to be.