God Is Black

            On my 21^st Birthday there was a Twitter trivirus (trivial virus) going around the site claiming Morgan Freeman was dead, no more, and ceased to exist. After a frantic few minutes of Googling the newsfeeds I found it was just another strain of faked celebrity deaths that occur throughout the year. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest while I swiveled in the computer chair in relief. Nothing would have killed my day more. Bringing it to my dad's attention, he went on one of his many soft tirades about how Morgan transcended race. I don't remember what else he said, because his thesis is usually the only thing intelligible. Was he right in some uncomfortable way?

             When we see Freeman portray God in the Almighty movies, do we cringe or do we calmly nod and say, “That makes sense. That will do.”? I believe that Freeman poses no threat to our white subconscious and is seen as a neo-uncle figure. He's been around, likes to tell stories, and won't cause a ruckus. In recent years he's been the narrator of nature documentaries, a loveable inmate, a dying man with a list of dreams, Batman's personal scientist, the President, and a flurry of various analytical and soft spoken police detectives. Nobody remembers his portrayal of Malcom X in the made for TV movie, “Death of a Prophet”. That's not the Morgan we know.

               Unlike Bill Cosby, who is a similar grandfather figure now, Morgan is not outspoken in the affairs of his race. Is he the aged Sidney Poitier of our generation? Not seeing him as a sex symbol or degenerate? To white people Morgan Freeman is a idealization of what we wish from race relations. He doesn't bring into question his own hardships and the hostile past treatment of his people. We'd like to forget about it, and Morgan doesn’t seem to be pointing fingers.

                The Great White Guilt has made Morgan their flagship for this new silent cinema. Will Smith, Samuel L. Jackson, Lawrence Fishburne, James Earle Jones, Denzel Washington, and Danny Glover have all taken mainstream roles that either gloss over race or throw the issue out all together. That's not saying all films need to address this issue all the time, but Hollywood rarely holds a mirror up to itself. I'm not sure if they have perfected a formula that makes white people comfortable in those dark cinemas, or they are doing it out of some deep seated fear. In middle school we watched “Remember the Titans” until the tape melted so we would know that when a white football team combined with a black team, we all end up singing Diana Ross in the locker room.

                   I wish I had some other perspective on the matter, because maybe it's not a big deal? Still though, when House of Payne comes on the TV or when a Tyler Perry movie came to the theater I worked at, I couldn't help but to view it as an oddity. I get to know what a white actor looks like as a glow in the dark extra. Our stage presence has zero ummph to it. In this fake scripted world we truly know what it feels like to have no power, and that is why we scream “IT'S RACIST!” without thought. If we thought about it we would know that it wasn't.

                  In his stand up, Indian American comedian Aziz Ansari responds to a story of a reporter who asked him if he was excited about the success of “Slumdog Millionaire” during an interview about his television show on NBC. Being polite he said he thought it was great to the reporter, but to his audience at the show he asked the white people if they got excited for almost every movie that came out of Hollywood. “Citizen Kane! We are in that!”, “Erin Brockovich! She looks like us!”. It's funny, but it brings up the point that race matters to the audience when its not them, or completely against them. When we invest in a movie, cringing is the last thing we want to do. That is why Sleeping White America accepts Morgan Freeman. That is why my Dad points these things out. That is why cinema can never be free from the shackles of it's own audience. 

My point exactly.