Is Hollywood A Western Weapon Against Pan-Africanism?

Sidney Poitier with his Oscar Statuette at the 36th Annual Academy Awards in Santa Monica, California, for Best Actor for his role in "Lilies of the Field," in 1963. Image: Associated Press

Many critics argue that Hollywood is a weapon of the West to fight against the promotion of Black African history and Pan-African heroes.

BY SABASTIANE EBATAMEHI

KEY POINTS

Black people receive the least lead roles in Hollywood, with only 11%

Movies with Black People receive the lowest investment in both production and promotion

Critics fault what they say is a deliberate action by the Academy to sideline movies that centre around Pan-African Heroes for awards

Critics also argue that Hollywood is a weapon in the hands of the West to silence Pan-Africanism

On the surface, it doesn’t appear that any form of discrimination against Blacks exists in Hollywood. Mainly because actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington – or, even much earlier, Sidney Poitier have received leading roles – have won prominent awards over the years.

However, critics say that that is more than meets the eye and that Hollywood may be likened to an apple that is fresh on the outside but rotten in the core. They argue that racial discrimination has been part and parcel of Hollywood since its inception.

Only a few black roles existed in films at the beginning of the 20th century, and whites, such as Uncle Tom, initially portrayed them. At the end of the 1920s, Afro-American roles were still played by whites and civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), fought the way African-Americans were treated in the movie world.

But critics say that there still exists a huge disparity on the grounds of colour in Hollywood. A report released by McKinsey & Company revealed that while their overall representation among film casts is broadly in line with the Black share of the US population, Black actors play only 11 per cent of leading film roles and are often funnelled to race-related projects, which typically receive lower investment in both production and promotion.

What is even more disturbing, they say, is the way and manner stories with strong pan-African imprints are treated. Is Hollywood a weapon of the hands of erstwhile colonial masters to fight the publicity and promotion of African history and Pan-Africanism through film?
The Academy Awards Says It All

Academy Awards, popularly known as “Oscar” — the award of the American Academy of Cinema — is the most famous and prestigious award in the filmmaking industry, both domestic and international. The first award ceremony, “Oscar”, was held in 1929.

However, it took until 1964 before a Black man won an Oscar. Sidney Poitier was the first Black winner of a Lead Actor Oscar in 1964. At the 36th Academy Awards, held in Los Angeles to celebrate the best films of 1963, the comedy Tom Jones took home the Best Film award, but it was in the acting category that history was truly made.

Sidney Poitier won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the movie, “Lilies of the Field”. After this, the American Film Institute named him one of the Greatest Male Stars of all time.

Since then, some African American actors have won Oscars – with Eddie Murphy once famously saying African Americans get an Oscar once every twenty years. Another area where critics have accused the Academy of racial discrimination is in the category in which the Blacks received the awards.

Lilies of the Field was a Comedy/Drama, and it appears – according to critics – that when the movie's theme is more about African history and Pan-Africanism, an Oscar is often hard to come by.
The Denzel Washington Theory

Critics have developed a theory that states Hollywood is against the promotion and publicity of stories about African history and pan-African heroes. In the centre of the theory is none other than one of Black Africa’s most talented actors to ever grace the movie screen – Denzel Washington.

Denzel Washington remains the most nominated Black actor in Oscars history, with 10 Academy Award nominations. Of the ten nominations, Mr Denzel has only won the award twice – one for the movie Glory – released in 1989, where he played an enslaved person, and Training Day – released in 2001, where he played a rogue cop.

Critics say that other movies like the 1987 movie Cry Freedom – where he played Steve Biko, the 1992 movie titled Malcolm X, where he played Malcolm X; and the 1999 movie – The Hurricane – where he played Ruben Carter, all deserved Oscar awards. Interestingly, the Black American actor was nominated for an Oscar in all three movies but won none.

According to critics, there appears to be more than meets the eye. They claim that he did not get Oscars for these movies because of the underlining stories of the characters – who all pass across as heroes of Pan-Africanism.
Denzel Washington is Not Alone

Apart from Denzel, there are many other Black American actors whom critics claim have been marginalized due to the colour of their skin or the type of character they portrayed in movies.

Spike Lee once used unprintable words when asked about Selma’s snub at the 2015 Academy Awards. It’s a difficult sentiment to disagree with. It was baffling to see Selma – the soaring portrayal of a key turning point in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement – nominated for Best Picture, with only one other nomination – for Best Original Song.

Critics were bewildered that the movie could be nominated for Best Picture but not Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, any of the supporting categories, script, or costume. The movie was so good that Common and John Legend won an Oscar for a song in the film – Glory. Yet the movie was conspicuously ignored for all the other categories it was nominated in.

But again, many critics were not too surprised. Selma only joined the long list of Black American movies that have been ignored over time for international recognition. The Academy ignored Chadwick Boseman’s electrifying performance as James Brown in Get On Up (2014) and Chris Rock’s razor-sharp delivery in Top Five (2014).

Other movies that have been ignored by the Academy and other top Hollywood award organizers include; Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction (1994), John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991), Gabourey Sidible’s Precious (2009), Quvenzhane Wallis’ Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Sidney Poitier’s In The Heat of the Night (1982), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne in What’s Love Got To Do With It (1993), Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), Ryan Coogler, Octavia Spencer, and Michael B Jordan in Fruitvale Station (2013), Ava Duvernay for Selma (2015). The list goes on.

READ ORIGINAL ESSAY HERE

Oscar Winner And Groundbreaking Star Sidney Poitier Dies

Poitier poses with his Oscar for best actor for "Lillies of the Field" at the 36th Annual Academy Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. on April 13, 1964. (AP)

BY HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Sidney Poitier, the groundbreaking actor and enduring inspiration who transformed how Black people were portrayed on screen and became the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for best lead performance and the first to be a top box-office draw, has died. He was 94.

Poitier, winner of the best actor Oscar in 1964 for “Lilies of the Field,” died Thursday in the Bahamas, according to Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas.

Few movie stars, Black or white, had such an influence both on and off the screen. Before Poitier, the son of Bahamian tomato farmers, no Black actor had a sustained career as a lead performer or could get a film produced based on his own star power. Before Poitier, few Black actors were permitted a break from the stereotypes of bug-eyed servants and grinning entertainers. Before Poitier, Hollywood filmmakers rarely even attempted to tell a Black person’s story.

Messages honoring and mourning Poitier flooded social media, with Whoopi Goldberg writing on Twitter: “He showed us how to reach for the stars.” Tyler Perry on Instagram wrote: “The grace and class that this man has shown throughout his entire life, the example he set for me, not only as a Black man but as a human being will never be forgotten.” And musician Lenny Kravitz wrote that Poitier “showed the world that with vision and grace, all is possible.”

Poitier’s rise mirrored profound changes in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. As racial attitudes evolved during the civil rights era and segregation laws were challenged and fell, Poitier was the performer to whom a cautious industry turned for stories of progress.

He was the escaped Black convict who befriends a racist white prisoner (Tony Curtis) in “The Defiant Ones.” He was the courtly office worker who falls in love with a blind white girl in “A Patch of Blue.” He was the handyman in “Lilies of the Field” who builds a church for a group of nuns. In one of the great roles of the stage and screen, he was the ambitious young father whose dreams clashed with those of other family members in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Debates about diversity in Hollywood inevitably turn to the story of Poitier. With his handsome, flawless face; intense stare and disciplined style, he was for years not just the most popular Black movie star, but the only one.

“I made films when the only other Black on the lot was the shoeshine boy,” he recalled in a 1988 Newsweek interview. “I was kind of the lone guy in town.”

Poitier peaked in 1967 with three of the year’s most notable movies: “To Sir, With Love,” in which he starred as a school teacher who wins over his unruly students at a London secondary school; “In the Heat of the Night,” as the determined police detective Virgil Tibbs; and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” as the prominent doctor who wishes to marry a young white woman he only recently met, her parents played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their final film together.

Theater owners named Poitier the No. 1 star of 1967, the first time a Black actor topped the list. In 2009 President Barack Obama, whose own steady bearing was sometimes compared to Poitier’s, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor “not only entertained but enlightened ... revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”

His appeal brought him burdens not unlike such other historical figures as Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was subjected to bigotry from whites and accusations of compromise from the Black community. Poitier was held, and held himself, to standards well above his white peers. He refused to play cowards and took on characters, especially in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” of almost divine goodness. He developed a steady, but resolved and occasionally humorous persona crystallized in his most famous line — “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” — from “In the Heat of the Night.”

“All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value — to you I say, ‘I’m not talking about being as good as you. I hereby declare myself better than you,’” he wrote in his memoir, “The Measure of a Man,” published in 2000.

But even in his prime he was criticized for being out of touch. He was called an Uncle Tom and a “million-dollar shoeshine boy.” In 1967, The New York Times published Black playwright Clifford Mason’s essay, “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” Mason dismissed Poitier’s films as “a schizophrenic flight from historical fact” and the actor as a pawn for the “white man’s sense of what’s wrong with the world.”

Stardom didn’t shield Poitier from racism and condescension. He had a hard time finding housing in Los Angeles and was followed by the Ku Klux Klan when he visited Mississippi in 1964, not long after three civil rights workers had been murdered there. In interviews, journalists often ignored his work and asked him instead about race and current events.

“I am an artist, man, American, contemporary,” he snapped during a 1967 press conference. “I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”

Poitier was not as engaged politically as his friend and contemporary Harry Belafonte, leading to occasional conflicts between them. But he participated in the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights events, and as an actor defended himself and risked his career. He refused to sign loyalty oaths during the 1950s, when Hollywood was barring suspected Communists, and turned down roles he found offensive.

“Almost all the job opportunities were reflective of the stereotypical perception of Blacks that had infected the whole consciousness of the country,” he recalled. “I came with an inability to do those things. It just wasn’t in me. I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.”

Poitier’s films were usually about personal triumphs rather than broad political themes, but the classic Poitier role, from “In the Heat of the Night” to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” was as a Black man of such decency and composure — Poitier became synonymous with the word “dignified” — that he wins over the whites opposed to him.

His screen career faded in the late 1960s as political movements, Black and white, became more radical and movies more explicit. He acted less often, gave fewer interviews and began directing, his credits including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder farce “Stir Crazy,” “Buck and the Preacher” (co-starring Poitier and Belafonte) and the Bill Cosby comedies “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Let’s Do It Again.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, he appeared in the feature films “Sneakers” and “The Jackal” and several television movies, receiving an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination as future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in “Separate But Equal” and an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and De Klerk.” Theatergoers were reminded of the actor through an acclaimed play that featured him in name only: John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” about a con artist claiming to be Poitier’s son.

In recent years, a new generation learned of him through Oprah Winfrey, who chose “The Measure of a Man” for her book club. Meanwhile, he welcomed the rise of such Black stars as Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Danny Glover: “It’s like the cavalry coming to relieve the troops! You have no idea how pleased I am,” he said.

Poitier received numerous honorary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute and a special Academy Award in 2002, on the same night that Black performers won both best acting awards, Washington for “Training Day” and Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”

“I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney,” Washington, who had earlier presented the honorary award to Poitier, said during his acceptance speech. “I’ll always be following in your footsteps. There’s nothing I would rather do, sir, nothing I would rather do.”

Poitier had four daughters with his first wife, Juanita Hardy, and two with his second wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, who starred with him in his 1969 film “The Lost Man.” Daughter Sydney Tamaii Poitier appeared on such television series as “Veronica Mars” and “Mr. Knight.”

His life ended in adulation, but it began in hardship. Poitier was born prematurely, weighing just 3 pounds, in Miami, where his parents had gone to deliver tomatoes from their farm on tiny Cat Island in the Bahamas. He spent his early years on the remote island, which had a population of 1,500 and no electricity, and he quit school at 12 1/2 to help support the family. Three years later, he was sent to live with a brother in Miami; his father was concerned that the street life of Nassau was a bad influence. With $3 in his pocket, Sidney traveled steerage on a mail-cargo ship.

“The smell in that portion of the boat was so horrendous that I spent a goodly part of the crossing heaving over the side,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, adding that Miami soon educated him about racism. “I learned quite quickly that there were places I couldn’t go, that I would be questioned if I wandered into various neighborhoods.”

Poitier moved to Harlem and was so overwhelmed by his first winter there he enlisted in the Army, cheating on his age and swearing he was 18 when he had yet to turn 17. Assigned to a mental hospital on Long Island, Poitier was appalled at how cruelly the doctors and nurses treated the soldier patients. In his 1980 autobiography, “This Life,” he related how he escaped the Army by feigning insanity.

Back in Harlem, he was looking in the Amsterdam News for a dishwasher job when he noticed an ad seeking actors at the American Negro Theater. He went there and was handed a script and told to go on the stage. Poitier had never seen a play in his life and could barely read. He stumbled through his lines in a thick Caribbean accent and the director marched him to the door.

“As I walked to the bus, what humiliated me was the suggestion that all he could see in me was a dishwasher. If I submitted to him, I would be aiding him in making that perception a prophetic one,” Poitier later told the AP.

“I got so pissed, I said, ‘I’m going to become an actor — whatever that is. I don’t want to be an actor, but I’ve got to become one to go back there and show him that I could be more than a dishwasher.’ That became my goal.”

The process took months as he sounded out words from the newspaper. Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater and was again rejected. Then he made a deal: He would act as janitor for the theater in return for acting lessons. When he was released again, his fellow students urged the teachers to let him be in the class play. Another Caribbean, Belafonte, was cast in the lead. When Belafonte couldn’t make a preview performance because it conflicted with his own janitorial duties, his understudy, Poitier, went on.

The audience included a Broadway producer who cast him in an all-Black version of “Lysistrata.” The play lasted four nights, but rave reviews for Poitier won him an understudy job in “Anna Lucasta,” and later he played the lead in the road company. In 1950, he broke through on screen in “No Way Out,” playing a doctor whose patient, a white man, dies and is then harassed by the patient’s bigoted brother, played by Richard Widmark.

Key early films included “Blackboard Jungle,” featuring Poitier as a tough high school student (the actor was well into his 20s at the time) in a violent school; and “The Defiant Ones,” which brought Poitier his first best actor nomination, and the first one for any Black male. The theme of cultural differences turned lighthearted in “Lilies of the Field,” in which Poitier played a Baptist handyman who builds a chapel for a group of Roman Catholic nuns, refugees from Germany. In one memorable scene, he gives them an English lesson.

The only Black actor before Poitier to win a competitive Oscar was Hattie McDaniel, the 1939 best supporting actress for “Gone With the Wind.” No one, including Poitier, thought “Lilies of the Field” his best film, but the times were right (Congress would soon pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for which Poitier had lobbied) and the actor was favored even against such competitors as Paul Newman for “Hud” and Albert Finney for “Tom Jones.” Newman was among those rooting for Poitier.

When presenter Anne Bancroft announced his victory, the audience cheered for so long that Poitier momentarily forgot his speech. “It has been a long journey to this moment,” he declared.

Poitier never pretended that his Oscar was “a magic wand” for Black performers, as he observed after his victory, and he shared his critics’ frustration with some of the roles he took on, confiding that his characters were sometimes so unsexual they became kind of “neuter.” But he also believed himself fortunate and encouraged those who followed him.

“To the young African American filmmakers who have arrived on the playing field, I am filled with pride you are here. I am sure, like me, you have discovered it was never impossible, it was just harder,” he said in 1992 as he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute. “

“Welcome, young Blacks. Those of us who go before you glance back with satisfaction and leave you with a simple trust: Be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey.”

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AP Film Writer Jake Coyle and former Associated Press Writer Polly Anderson in New York contributed to this report.