Why We Feel Weird About Queen & Slim

Popular Black Cinema is now black trauma porn cosplaying as post-BLM, well-meaning white liberal fan-fiction and I hate it. I just hate it. There's no way around it, no nice and fluffy way of saying it but I hate it and to be honest, I saw this coming but wow am I still disappointed that we actually got here. To be fair, A lot popular black cinema, or at least movies that actually allowed black people to speak, from my own childhood were no better. The 2000's were full of feel-good, white savior movies in which the entire goal was to portray racism as a series of misunderstandings between good white people, their docile and noticeably silent black friends, and completely monstrous, mustache-twirlingly evil white people.

These movies that *oh yeah* almost never take place in the present day because real racism ended in 1982 with the release of the smash hit "Ebony and Ivory", typically follow the same formula. A good white person (preferably in the 50's or 60's) meets a group of happy, sweet negroes under usually unbelievable conditions. Let's say they are a new teacher, conveniently placed in a school on the "wrong side of the tracks" that has the gang, drug, teen-pregnancy trifecta of "bad school" issues, or the story follows a coach tasked with taking an "under-privileged team" to some championship (sidenote: big yikes that a lot of these white savior movies are of teachers using little black and brown kids as crutches to be better versions of themselves) or even a disabled former soldier goes to a planet and becomes the leader of a tribe of blue natives that likely would've been better off if he never showed up.

This good white person then notices the oppression of their new friends and wonders what they can do to help and they usually settle on one of two courses of action: 1) defeat the evil white person who conveniently represents everything bad in the lives of the non-white characters or 2) educate the poor, dumb non-white characters and/or tell their story on their behalf so that things improve. The outcome is always the same however, things instantly improve, racism ends, and there is no one to thank but our white savior and since these characters were often self-insert based characters, there is no one to thank but YOU the well-meaning white person in the audience. While terrible and harmful in their portrayal of all people of color especially black people, these movies (many of them unfortunately considered black media) are a lot less insidious then our current black media and may end up being a lot less harmful in the long run.

Over the last few years, specifically from 2012 onward, we've seen a massive shift around the conversation of race in America. For one, we're having it and we really weren't having it before. And don't act like we were because we really weren't (at least not in an honest way) and hadn't been for a long time so you can stop right there. Between the black lives matter movement and several beauty and hair acceptance movements, as well as the never-ending stream of racist videos emerging weekly, we are finally in a place to truly explore not only racism in America, but the actual black experience in our country. We can finally tell these stories in a way that's honest and makes sense and eventually, we will finally be able to tell black stories that aren't about racial trauma. These are good times.... or at least they were supposed to be.... but instead of honesty we got... Queen and Slim????

Ok, let me stop being mean. What I mean to say is, instead of exploring this new cinematic world we've created for ourselves, many of our filmmakers and writers instead turned their attention towards making their movies palatable for well-meaning white audiences like the white savior movies of the 2000's. But how?? "How do we make movies that easy to swallow?", they asked, "In this new, gritty, racial reality what can we make that still lets well-meaning white people feel good about themselves?". It turns out the answer was trauma-porn. But not just ANY trauma-porn. This trauma-porn almost always centers around police brutality and instead of racism and police violence being this big, scary thing we read about when we open our phones, it's now boiled down to misunderstandings between cops and black people. Mistakes by white people that are just trying to do better. ACCIDENTS. For example in "The Hate You Give", that police officer didn't mean to kill that young black boy. He thought his hairbrush was a gun, and why would you reach for a hairbrush during a stop anyway, right? See, all one big DEADLY misunderstanding. These movies also now center black people *ooOOOOOOOoo* that go out and grab their justice *snaps* and fight for their freedoms in increasingly unrealistic ways and doesn't that just tug at your white liberal heartstrings.

What makes this so insidious is that we have never before had so much time and space on our side to do better. We have never had so much of the spotlight, or so much control of the conversation. We also, especially the black community, have a lot more faith and patience in black creatives to do better and make the art we want to see. It's why we've single-handedly promoted so many small obscure singers and rappers to fame in such a relatively short amount of time. Sza, Ari Lennox are some examples that come to mind. We saw them and believed in them and we are more than willing to do so for black actors, directors, and writers too so it hurts when I see that instead of embracing this faith we have in them, they're instead revolutionizing the feel-good white liberal experience. Especially when they have less of a reason to. And no, I'm not saying stop making exploitative trauma porn that purposefully misses the mark and only exists to reinforce the pre-conceived notions people have about racism and police brutality but.... that's exactly what I'm saying.