Class Warfare

It's amazing just how powerful the images of so many talented black actors in one place truly are….

…because it almost distracts me from the fact that these talented black actors deserve way better than this romantic comedy nonsense.

I really really want better for Loretta Devine. She's an actress who can be downright luminous. I really enjoyed her on Fox's Boston Public, particularly in that first season when her unique ability to play flighty and exasperated put an interesting spin on her bipolar character, what could have been a really awful character.

But I can't imagine that this film will treat Black people's issues with class in an interesting way. Not when its shorthand is a light-skinned woman = money and loud, boisterous and rude = lower-class black.

All the characters will learn something by the end of the film – of course only so the two main characters can get married, which is stupid – because that's what these films are about. 

But it'd be nice if we could show this kind of diversity in black communities in such a way that we celebrate it and not make it about what is and isn't "authentically black."

About tlewisisdope

I write. I live in DC.
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