It’s Hard Out There

Host John Stewart said it best at Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony: “It just got a little easier out here for a pimp.” Yes, and that’s just what we need—for it to get just a little bit easier to pigeon-hole black performing artists into demeaning roles and to reward them for upholding the negative stereotypes that so many have spent years trying to break down.

While it may appear to the naked eye that the Oscar situation has been improving for black performers in recent years—with Jamie Foxx’s best actor win last year, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington’s simultaneous best actress and actor victories in 2002, Morgan Freeman’s reception of best supporting actor honors, and increasingly abundant nominations across categories—this perception represents a grave oversimplification of reality. In terms of their treatment of black actors and films, the Academy Awards have often been at best disappointing, and at worst, downright offensive. This year, however, most certainly marks the lowest point in recent memory. Certainly the Academy has been taking steps in the right direction, most notably with its naming “Crash” as best picture of the year on Sunday. However, outside of this victory, the Academy still hesitates to reward nearly anything beyond portrayals of black people as ignorant, hypersexual, subservient, or criminal.

To begin, the victory of Three 6 Mafia in the category of Best Song could fairly be viewed as open mockery of Black America. “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” is the explicit and offensive rap song brought to us courtesy of “Hustle and Flow”—a movie that seeks to inspire our sympathy for Terrence Howard’s character by showing us just how hard it really is to exploit and abuse women. Its win on Sunday provides a clear example of mainstream America’s willingness to take notice of and uplift music and films that portray black Americans in the most negative possible light. While some insist that Three 6 Mafia’s win represents a positive turning point in the history of the Academy—that perhaps they are finally beginning to accept and respect rap music as a legitimate form of art—I can’t help but think that they could have found a better way to do it than applauding a song with lyrics like “gotta have my hustle tight, makin’ change off these women.” But it doesn’t end there.

Howard’s nomination for Best Actor for “Hustle & Flow,” while certainly encouraging for Howard as an individual, proves far more troubling for black people in the film industry as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, no one is saying that the acting skills Howard displayed in his portrayal of a desperate, struggling black man living a life of crime and exploitation weren’t worthy of some praise, but he also did a fantastic job this year in “Crash,” portraying an upper-middle class black man struggling to maintain his dignity and hope in an oppressive white world, and was unsurprisingly nominated for the former role. The Academy’s choice to nominate Howard for his portrayal of a stereotypical pimp, rather than to reward his much less predictable and more nuanced role in “Crash,” suggests a sadly familiar unwillingness to accept black actors outside of the traditional, offensive roles.

The Academy’s tradition of awarding black actors for fulfilling clichéd roles—when it awards them at all—is one that can be traced back to over 75 years ago, when, as George Clooney noted on Sunday, it “gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the back of theaters.” While Clooney undoubtedly meant this observation as praise for the Academy’s boldness, McDaniel’s Best Supporting Actress win was actually an affirmation of the sexless and happily subservient mammy role that she played in “Gone with the Wind”—hardly a progressive move on the part of the voters. Similarly, more than half a century later, another black woman, Halle Berry, was awarded by the Academy, this time for a role that found her imprinted in the public imagination as a rough, nearly animalistic sex object for a white man—not coincidentally, the other prevailing image of black women. That same year, the Academy also rewarded Denzel Washington for his portrayal of—surprise!—a criminal. It’s widely agreed that this wasn’t Washington’s best role—did anyone see “Malcolm X?" “The Hurricane,” perhaps? Yet, as usual, the Academy singled out the stereotype.

However, in my haste to place the blame for this problem on the shoulders of the Academy, I’ve been ignoring the elephant in the room—the fact that songs like “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” and performances like Halle Berry’s in “Monster’s Ball” were produced and released for public consumption in the first place. After all, if rappers were responsible enough not to celebrate misogynistic and violent behavior in their songs, and black actors and producers had enough foresight to think twice about the harmful images of black people that they advance through film, the Academy could not glorify them with awards. Until these changes are made, the unfortunate reality is that the entire black race will continue to be identified based on the above examples of modern-day minstrelsy that the Academy and the mainstream media so eagerly consume.



Ashton R. Lattimore ’08 is an English concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.