Bias against dark-skinned black actresses in Hollywood
Hollywood actress Viola Davis.
What you need to know:
- The women who were eventually conferred with lead roles did not possess meritocracy and acting dexterity that Viola commanded.
- They had exceptional acting qualities but were bestowed those roles predominantly because they had whiter features that included narrower noses, flatter rears, thinner lips and lighter skin tones.
By 2012, Viola Davis had received two Academy Award nominations for best supporting actress in her scintillating performances in Doubt and best actress for her captivating depiction in The Help. Despite her success, she didn't garner the same preeminent starring roles that were embellished on her white and light-skinned black counterparts.
The women who were eventually conferred with lead roles did not possess meritocracy and acting dexterity that Viola commanded. They had exceptional thespian qualities but were bestowed those roles predominantly because they had whiter features that included narrower noses, flatter rears, thinner lips and lighter skin tones.
Read: Hollywood’s race problem
For decades, the success of actresses in acquiring lead roles in Hollywood hasn't been aligned to talent but has atrociously been predicated upon the similarity of their physical features to Caucasian women. On television and film, womanhood is defined by how classically your appearance falls into the norms of established stereotypes of Caucasian allure. An actress's resemblance to the white race has been the subconscious gold standard, stipulated by not just white but black casting directors.
Viola is a dark-skinned black woman. Culturally, there is a pre-existing and unspoken turbulent narrative rooted in racial discrimination and derived from Jim Crow segregation laws and post-slavery suppression. Colourism within the black community emerged from the indoctrination of blacks into a bigoted Eurocentric system of thinking, which adjudicates that dark-skinned women and black features are undesirable, yet the opposite is correct.
Viola explicitly states in her memoir, Finding Me, that the traits of being an attractive desirable woman, which include being vulnerable and needing to be rescued, did not apply to her and other dark-skinned black female actresses.
Hollywood has maltreated and outrageously patronised the presence of dark-skinned black actresses like Viola as chattel and fodder for desensitised experimentation. Actresses with darker shades of skin have been relegated to play secondary roles that garnish the egos of lead white or light-skinned black actresses on film and television.
They have been handed roles that depict boisterous sassy lawyers, doctors placed at the background of scenes, best friends to lead actresses and seldom seen extras in movies. Their portrayal has always been subjugated to ambiguous sidekicks consisting of an infancy that contains no potent embodiment in film productions.
This has contributed to the deceleration of female talent and dehumanisation of thousands of deserving actresses. Vividly conveying the distinct message that the black community bought into the lie that has innately been fed to them for centuries. Numerous casting directors would repeatedly inform Viola that they were in search of interchangeable black female actresses when denying her roles. Interchangeable is a derogatory Hollywood colloquial that she would disturbingly discover to refer to lighter skinned black actresses with whiter features.
Viola Davis memoir, Finding Me.
The disconcerting inflammatory word was subliminally ordained to arbitrarily degrade black women with prideful African features of luscious lips, protruding hips, voluptuous bodies and darker skin into playing substandard movie roles. Lead roles in movies and television drama series are often handed to white women and the few black women who attain the roles are gauged by what the industry considers a perfect shade of black. Not too dark to be considered unattractive, but not too light with no indication that they're actually black.
Viola's milestone healing role came in 2014 when she was offered her marquee character and the lead role of Annalise Keating in successful legal mystery thriller, How to Get Away with Murder.
The script described her enthralling character Annalise as a sexual, smart, vulnerable, possibly sociopathic, criminal defence attorney and law professor, who had a husband, and a boyfriend. No one who possessed her appearance had ever been conferred with a similar role on network television. When Kerry Washington played Olivia Pope in Scandal, she became the first black female lead actress, since Diahann Carroll played her character Julia, in 1967.
Viola didn't possess the light-skinned, slender, narrow nose whiter features that Kerry had and was not the quintessential definition of a female lead on television. News that Viola had attained the coveted role expeditiously spread and the prevailing brutal thought was that Viola was miscast. Many black men and women in the thespian industry projected that How to Get Away with Murder would tank, with Viola as the lead actress. Their cold calculated and cruel comments were laced with colourism undertones that vilified Viola as not pretty and feminine enough.
Negativity
To counter this negativity, Viola informed the producers that on the first scene, of episode one, she intended to remove her wig on camera. She knew television productions were saturated with script writers who created characters that were not a depiction of true living beings. Taking off her wig and make-up in a private moment would intuitively instigate writers of the series to develop a self-introspective perspective of the character they were writing for.
By not portraying an image that is palatable to the oppressor and individuals who have tarnished and tyrannised the image of black womanhood for centuries, Viola's tenaciously valiant act was an honour to black women. It stated that all of who we are is beautiful, including the perceived imperfections.
In 2014, Viola won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for How to Get Away with Murder, becoming the first black actress to receive the award. She went on to become the only black person to have ever won the Triple Crown of Acting, which is a compilation of aTony, an Emmy and an Oscar for her lead role in August Wilson's Fences.
She completed her coronation on February 5, 2023, with a Grammy Award for best narration and storytelling recording, for her memoir's audiobook. Joining yet another elite club called Egot, winners of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Center (@jeffbigbrother).
