Discussion I

Film Review

Hollywood on Race in the Age of Obama: Invictus, Precious, and Avatar

Three popular US movies released at the end of 2009, Invictus, Precious, and Avatar, work in related ways to lay bare and also reinforce prevailing ideas in the United States and beyond about the politics of race in the first years of the Obama administration. At first glance the three movies are extremely different. Invictus (Warner Brothers), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, is set in South Africa at the beginning of the post-apartheid era; and it dramatizes a true story. Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (Lionsgate), directed by Lee Daniels, is a stark and somewhat bleak independent film that features little known actors, along with a couple of well-known pop music celebrities (Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz) in understated roles. (Mo’nique, who plays Precious’s mother in the movie, won a well-deserved Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for best performance by an actress in a supporting role.) Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, was by far the most popular North American movie of 2009, and it won Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture and for Best Director. It is a state-of-the-art, partially animated, action-adventure science fiction movie about the impending military and corporate conquest of the planet Pandora tominea precious mineralcalled unobtanium.Avatar pitsthe human invaders and their environmentally exploitive economic and political practices against the planet’s natives, the Na’vi, blue humanoid beings, and their deeply ecological and spiritual connection to their world. It is also an inter-species (and symbolically inter-racial and anti-colonial) love story. At another level, all three films endorse a widely held—particularly among white people—but problematic view of racial politics at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: that countries like the United States and South Africa now have moved into a post-racial era.

These three movies have generated considerable commentary, particularly Avatar and Precious, but little has been said about how they all fit smoothly into a popular end of racism political narrative. On this view, the achievements of the US Civil Rights movement, the struggle to the end of South Africa’s apartheid system, and the presidential elections of two black leaders, Nelson Mandela, in 1994, and of Barack Obama, in 2008, have ushered a truly democratic and post-racial era. In the latter case, this view quickly surfaced in a number of commentaries about how Obama’s election to the US presidency marked the dawn of a new era. For instance, writing in the New York Times the day after the 2008 presidential election, Adam Nagourney declared, “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.”1

New Political Science, Volume 32, Number 4, December 2010

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/10/040627-10 DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2010.520448

Of the three films, Invictus presents the triumph over racism of racism view most unabashedly. It is also evident in Avatar, however, and it even marks Precious, which, given its harsh depiction of incest in a horribly dysfunctional poor black family, might be taken to go against this trend. Any residual legacy of modern racism, these films suggest, can readily be overcome, if it has not already been overcome, through mutual understanding and the efforts—both epic and small— of heroic individuals. Taken together, these films buttress a shift away from anti- racism political projects, which aim to redress deeply embedded, systematic, racialized inequalities in countries like South Africa and the United States (for example, of income, wealth, status, life chances, and political power), to multiculturalism political projects. The latter emphasize the need to respect cultural diversity, a worthy goal, but often at the expense of confronting directly histories of racial domination and structured social inequality.2

Invictus certainly gives the most straightforward version of the idea that multicultural mutual understanding and individual initiative are the answer to the legacy of modern racism. The true story at the heart of the film is compelling. Shortly after the end of apartheid, newly elected President Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman), the country’s first democratically elected president, understands that his country knows his nation remains racially and economically divided, and that he needs to win the allegiance of white South Africans to succeed. Mandela believes that he can unite his people by rallying them, black and white South Africans alike, behind an effort by the Springboks rugby team to win to the 1995 Rugby World Cup Championship, which was to be held in South Africa. This was an unlikely prospect in two respects: the Springboks had long been a symbol of white South Africa and an anathema to black South Africans; and the team was an underdog, not expected to compete seriously for the championship. Mandela joins forces with the team’s captain, Francois Pienaar (played by Matt Damon as a sympathetic post-apartheid patriot); and the mostly white Springboks team came, at least briefly, to symbolize a new multi-racial South Africa, galvanizing both black and white South Africans, as it won the World Cup Rugby Championship in South Africa.3

1 Adam Nagourney, “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls,” The New York Times, November 4, 2004, ,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/ 05elect.html?_r ¼ 1. (accessed January 16, 2010).

2 Iris Marion Young, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference,” in Anthony Simon Laden, and David Owen (eds), Multiculturalism and Political Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 60–88.

3 A powerful counterpoint to Invictus is the documentary film Fair Play, directed by Connie Field (Clarity Films, USA, 2007). It is part of an excellent, recently completed seven- part film series by Connie Field, Have You Heard from Johannesburg (Clarity Films, USA, 2010). Fair Play looks at the South African Sprinboks team from a different angle in the apartheid era. Then the team was a symbol of white South Africa and apartheid, and from the late 1960s through the early 1980s it became a key target of international boycotts against South African apartheid sports teams. The sports boycott emerged when many western governments were reluctant to take action against the South African government. The film, which covers the period from 1958 to 1981, highlights the work of activist from England, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, the Americas, and the Eastern bloc that aimed chiefly at the International Olympic Committee, other international sporting organizations, and their home governments. See ,http://www.clarityfilms.org/joburg/ index.html. .

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Invictus conveys well just what an astute political leader Mandela was. At the same time, as directed by Eastwood, it presents of distinctly American and Hollywood take on the thorny transition in South Africa to an inclusive “post-racial” democracy: it features a classic tale of a victorious underdog where the sporting victory represents a larger triumph of solidarity and the human spirit; the partnership of two admirable individuals—one black and one white; and American film-goers might guess, wrongly, that with Mandela’s wise leadership and the Springboks team’s timely victory, South Africa had forged a thorough racial reconciliation, quickly undoing the damage of apartheid. Politics made easy with history over-simplified.

Indeed, Invictus implicitly ratifies uncritically the Truth and Reconciliation approach to redressing South Africa’s many years of brutal apartheid rule: that mutual understanding and apology will make ample amends for the brutal, systematic injustices of the past that have so deeply shaped the present. That is, racial justice can be achieved in South Africa after apartheid through mutual understanding and mutual acceptance, without more tangible reparations to black South Africans that would make more substantial political and economic demands on the white South Africans who have benefited from systematic racial oppression. Invictus at times addresses vividly the injustices of South African apartheid, but in a manner that envisions reconciliation without reparations: it shows continued social and economic segregation of black and white South Africans; and, in a climactic scene, it dramatizes a visit by Pienaar and his teammates, before their World Cup championship match, to Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town, where Mandela was incarcerated from 1964 to 1982. (He was moved to Pollsmoor Prison, on the mainland, from 1982 to 1990.) In a subsequent scene, we find a pensive Pienaar, on the eve of the match, pondering how Mandela could be so magnanimous now toward white South Africans after being unjustly imprisoned for so long.

In these ways, as a US movie about South African racism, Invictus betrays the dearth of historical memory common among Americans, particularly white Americans, concerning the extent to which the modern world has been shaped by white racism. Matt Damon exemplified this tendency incidentally while speaking on National Public Radio, in December 2009, about his role in the film, playing the Springboks captain, Francois Pienaar, an Afrikaner: “As an American going there, to grasp the nuance of that culture is probably impossible. The fear and the guilt and the shame and all of those things probably could only truly be expressed by somebody who’s from there.”4

This remark, I suspect, was honest and well intended, and my point is not to pick on Damon. Yet it reveals a common form of white American historical forgetting, or false innocence, concerning the long history of white racial domination and ongoing racism in the United States—historical forgetting that in the US is now put forward forcefully by the new anti-government, anti-Obama Tea Party movement. To be fair to Damon, the political and cultural nuances the history of white racism in South Africa, and of South African Afrikaners in particular, obviously are somewhat alien to Americans. Nonetheless, the white

4 “Matt Damon Shapes Up to Play a South African Hero,” from “All Things Considered,” NPR, December 11, 2009, ,http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s tory.php?storyId ¼ 121236643. (accessed April 22, 2010).

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racism that has so deeply marked South African’s history and present is not so different from the white racism that has a long history in the US. Moreover, this white racism has hardly disappeared in Damon’s own lifetime; and Damon likely is familiar with the battles in the 1970s over school busing in the public schools of his hometown of Boston. (He was born in Boston in 1970.) Boston’s Busing Battle epitomized the resistance of many white Americans to concrete actions needed to fulfill the promise of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)—which declared school segregation unconstitutional—and of the larger civil rights movement.5 At the same time, Damon’s moment of historical racial forgetting—a decidedly white American moment and standpoint—matches the shortcomings of how all three movies engage politics of public memory regarding the legacy of modern world racism and colonialism.

As a point of contrast to the vision of post-colonial racial justice offered up by Invictus, consider the great anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon’s classic formulation of the anti-colonial, anti-racist political project in his book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Fanon declares, “Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. . . . Deportations, massacres, forced labor, and slavery have been the main methods used by capitalism to increase it wealth, its gold and diamond reserves, and to establish its power.”6 Given this historical back drop, Fanon adds: “We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too.” “The truth,” Fanon insists, “is that we ought not to accept” the conditions that are on offer. “We should flatly refuse the situation to which the western countries wish to condemn us.” He points out that after World War II, given the damage that Germany’s Nazi regime inflicted during the war on Europe in general, and on European Jews in particular, the “governments of various European nations called for reparations and demanded restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them.”7

This view of the debt that white European peoples owe to the black and brown peoples who they have colonized, enslaved, and subordinated during the last five centuries is hardly a popular one these days, particularly among the powers that be. But it remains a clear-eyed summing up of the score to be settled for the forms of racial and colonial injustice that have shaped the current world disorder.8

Meanwhile, Invictus – along with Avatar and Precious, as I will explain— contributes to a premature post-racial whitewashing of the post-colonial scales of justice.

Superficially, James Cameron’s Avatar is not about race and racism at all, although it has a strong anti-imperialist message. Avatar has provoked considerable commentary for its technological innovations in movie-making, its ecological ethos, and its big box-office impact. The movie’s ecological and

5 See George Lipsitz, “Afterword: Racially Writing the Republic and Racially Righting the Republic,” in Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris (eds), Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 101.

7 Ibid., 102, 101. 8 See Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New

York: Basic Books, 2002).

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multicultural horizons are rather strained. In Daniel Mendelson’s words, “the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized.” They are simultaneously at one with their environment and organically networked.9 Regarding Cameron’s technical inventiveness, Michael Wood notes “the sleek and amazing invisibility of any sort of gap or transition in [Avatar ] between photographed human figures and digital construction.” Wood quotes Cameron (from a New Yorker interview) saying that he aimed “to ‘put a patina of reality in what is basically a fantasy.’”10 In so doing Cameron engineered new ways for movies to blur fantasy and reality. “It’s just escapism,” David Brooks comments on the New York Times op-ed page, but only after dedicating one of his columns to the cultural and political significance of the movie. Brooks aptly pegs Avatar as the latest Hollywood incarnation of “The White Messiah Fable” in “a racial fantasy par excellence.” Its technical novelty aside, Avatar repeats the pattern of recent movies—including Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), Dances With Wolves (1990), and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)—that invert the plot line of old Hollywood westerns that celebrated a Manifest Destiny of white European peoples.11

In the case of Avatar, its hero, Jake Sully is a disabled and drifting white former Marine. He begins the story working on Pandora with a group of scientists in the employment of a big corporation that is working to exploit the planet with military backing. Eventually, Sully realizes that he is working on the wrong side, with the bad guys. He switches sides as a Na’vi-avatar, a human in a technologically simulated Na’vi body, and he becomes a Na’vi hero and lover boy. While the Na’vi, as Brooks says, “have hot bodies and perfect ecological sensibilities,” they nonetheless need the “White Messiah to lead and inspire” their defense “[w]hen the military-industrial complex comes in to strip their homes.”12

Brooks is right on target about the weaknesses of Cameron’s White Messiah fable, but he refuses to acknowledge the basic validity of the movie’s storyline:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. . . . It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.13

Avatar certainly relies on stereotypes, and this undercuts the power of its anti- imperialist and ecological message. As Woods says, “the point is the patina [of reality] rather than the reality.”14 So, it remains mostly a technically adept action- adventure fantasy even as it mirrors troubling earth-bound realities. Regarding these realities, however, Brooks conveniently evades the movie’s more

9 Daniel Mendelson, “The Wizard,” The New York Review of Books 57 (March 25, 2010), p. 13.

10 Michael Wood, “At the Movies,” London Review of Books, ,http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/ n02/michael-wood/at-the-movies. (accessed January 22, 2010).

11 David Brooks, “The Messiah Complex,” The New York Times, January 8, 2010, ,http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html. (accessed January 8, 2010).

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Wood, “At the Movies.”

Film Review 631

challenging truths. It is not that white people simply are rationalistic, greedy, and technocratic; rather, as Avatar suggests, modern pan-Euro-American capitalist civilization is rapacious and environmentally destructive: it draws ever more of the Earth’s lands and peoples into the cash nexus; and it reconfigures earlier forms of racial European colonialism in neo-imperial and neoliberal forms through giant multinational corporations, international organizations, and US military might. Despite the recent rise of (increasingly capitalist) China and India, the pan-Euro- American (white) world has not yet lost the capital and power it accumulated in the era of modern racial colonialism and imperialism.

Moreover, this historical ground is just where Avatar’s depiction of capitalist imperialism on a fictional planet meets David Brooks’s evasion of the harsh realities of contemporary Western neo-imperialism. While Avatar projects Earth- bound racial and colonial conflicts into outer space, the freighted history and legacy of actual racism and colonialism largely drop out of the picture (just as in Eastwood’s Invictus). Tellingly, the human military force stationed on Pandora to subdue the blue humanoid Na’vi species or “race” is itself multi-racial. More importantly, Avatar presents an all-too-easy moral response to inter-racial or intercultural encounters: simply leave “others” alone in their homelands; safeguard their independence to respect their way of life. This is something akin to the proto-multiculturalist “prime directive” of the Star Trek franchise: a moral and political code of non-interference for human intergalactic voyagers in their encounters with humanoid species on distant planets.

The crucial difficulty here is that doing the right thing in otherworldly science fiction is much tidier than making reparations and achieving racial justice with respect to actual Earth-bound post-colonial realities. This was the gist of Frantz Fanon’s point about the reparation that European nations owe to the non- Europeans peoples they have colonized: just amends for racial colonialism and imperialism have not been paid when the colonizers merely “withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories.” Because the violent exploitation of colonialism and imperialism, with slavery, forced labor, and the pillaging of resources, “[t]he wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too.”15 National independence therefore is not sufficient moral reparation.

In a non-fiction epilogue to Avatar, James Cameron recently interceded in a conflict in Brazil that offers a counterpoint to his own fantasy simplification of historical colonialism. In April 2010, he traveled with his wife to a spot along the Xingu River in the Amazon region in Brazil. There he met with more than seventy indigenous leaders who gathered to consider how they might stop the Belo Monte dam project planned by the Brazilian government. Cameron was holding a spear and dressed with a chief’s feathery yellow and white headdress along with orange warrior marks painted on his face. His trip made the front page of the New York Times, accompanied by a photograph and the headline, “Tribes of Amazon Find an Ally Straight Out of ‘Avatar.’”16 Cameron is trying to help the indigenous people to stop the dam. According to the Times, “It would be the third largest [dam] in the world, and environmentalists say that it would flood hundreds of square miles of

15 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 101–102. 16 Alexei Barrionuevo, “Tribes of Amazon Find an Ally Straight Out of ‘Avatar,’” The

New York Times, Sunday, April 11, 2010, pp. 1, 4.

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the Amazon and dry up a 60-mile stretch of the Xingu River, devastating the indigenous communities that live along it.”17

Cameron deserves credit for using his considerable resources and celebrity to champion the cause of the indigenous people. In doing so, however, he is playing the role of the white savior that he scripted for his hero in Avatar. Even so, as in his movie, he highlights a basic truth of contemporary capitalist globalization. Cameron told the Times that the dam is a “quintessential example of the type of thing we are showing in ‘Avatar’—the collision of a technological civilization’s vision of progress at the expense of the natural world and the cultures of the indigenous people that live there.”18 (As Karl Marx famously says of this dynamic in The Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”19)

Cameron’s movie is, of course, a part of this process. As of April 2010, it had reached nearly $2.7 billion in global ticket sales. And before Cameron arrived in the Amazon, several members of the local Arara tribe gathered at the house of the Arara chief to watch a DVD of Avatar. This irony indicates a larger problem: there are serious limits to the idea that the damages inflicted on indigenous peoples and the global poor can be addressed adequately through a combination of corporate social responsibility, multicultural mutual understanding, and the initiatives of heroic individuals.

In the case of Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, the movie’s focus on a poor black character in Harlem, New York signals clearly that this is a movie about race. It certainly is in part; yet, the movie presents the problems of Precious and her family as those of members of a black underclass and not primarily as due to racism and its legacy. Precious is set in 1987. The main character, Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), is an obese, illiterate, black sixteen-year-old. The centerpiece of the story is her struggle to survive her deeply dysfunctional family: she has been raped and twice impregnated by her father, and her unemployed mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), physically and emotionally abuses her. Her first child has Down Syndrome and is cared for by her grandmother, and after Precious becomes pregnant for the second time her junior high school principal has her transferred to an alternative school.

Precious uses her imagination to disassociate herself from the domestic abuse she experiences, and she begins to take hold of her own life when she is inspired to learn to read by a teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), in her new school. She also sees a social worker (Mariah Carey) who learns about the incest in her household and who, with limited success, tries to understand Precious’s struggles and offer her support. Eventually, Precious gives birth to her second child, breaks away from her mother and learns from her mother that her father has died of AIDS, moves to a halfway house, finds a measure of love and affirmation through Ms. Rain, discovers that she (but not her new child) is HIV positive, and makes plans to earn a General Educational Development (GED) degree while caring for two young children.

The movie explores a troubled slice of contemporary black American life, and it has garnered both praise and criticism (particularly among black critics) for its

17 Ibid., 4. 18 Ibid. 19 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1967), p. 83.

Film Review 633

particular sort of truth-telling. Writing for Dissent magazine, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington notes the film’s flaws but concludes it “is easily one of the most important American films of the last thirty years.”20 Ishmael Reed, in the New York Times, reports “widespread revulsion and anger” among black men and women for the movie’s portrayal of dysfunctional black ghetto life. “The blacks who are enraged by ‘Precious,’” Reed says, “have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them.”21 He notes its enthusiastic reception among white audiences and critics. It has won awards at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals in 2009, along with acclaim at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and two Academy Awards.

Precious is notable in several respects. As Wellington notes, for instance, simply by casting Sidibe in the lead role the movie “is in itself a critique of the one- dimensionality of Hollywood body images.”22 For present purposes, Precious and its reception are a good barometer of some prevalent views of race and racism in the age of Obama, particularly with respect to the status of black Americans. The film’s African American director, Lee Daniels, comments, “‘Precious’ is so not Obama. ‘Precious’ is so not PC. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against people who are darker than me. Anybody that’s heavy like Precious—I thought they were dirty and not very smart.”23 Speaking to the matter of truth-telling, Daniels acknowledges but dismisses the idea that his movie reinforces damaging stereotypes. He contends that the election of Obama as US president has put African Americans “in an interesting place.” “We want to aspire to [the level of achievement that Obama represents]. But part of aspiring is disassociating from the face of Precious.” He says that he initially was “embarrassed to show this movie at Cannes. I didn’t want to exploit black people. . . . But because of Obama, it’s now OK to be black. I can share that voice. . . . I’m proud of where I come from. . . . ‘Precious’ is part of that.” It is significant that Daniels and others involved with the film have experienced domestic abuse, a central part of Precious’s story.24

At the same time, the way Precious focuses on brutal dysfunction among poor blacks reinforces problematic beliefs about a black urban underclass, the problems of which are supposedly self-inflicted, due to defective behavioral and cultural patterns and not due to the legacy of racism. Wellington writes, “Neither incest nor familial dysfunction are racial themes; Precious shows how social illnesses . . . are exacerbated by ignorance and poverty.”25 This is all true, but as a film Precious reiterates well-established ideas (particularly among white Americans) about pathologies of the so-called black underclass, including stereotypes about the

20 Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, “Sex, Race, and Precious,” Dissent online, March 6, 2010, ,http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id þ 340. (accessed March 31, 2010).

21 Ishmael Reed, “Fade to White,” The New York Times, February 5, 2010, ,http://www. nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05reed.html. (accessed April 23, 2010). See also Ishmael Reed, “The Selling of ‘Precious’: Hollywood’s Enduring Myth of the Black Male Sexual Predator,” Counterpunch, December 4–6, 2009, ,http://www.counterpunch.org/ree d12042009.html..

22 Wellington, “Sex, Race, and Precious.” 23 Lynn Hirschberg, “The Audacity of ‘Precious,’” The New York Times Magazine, October

25, 2009, ,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/25precious-t.html.. 24 Ibid. 25 Wellington, “Sex, Race, and Precious.”

634 Film Review

dangerous and sexually uncontrolled black men (Precious’s father) and “welfare

queens” (her mother, Mary) who are “psychologically dependent on welfare.”26

As Reed observes, in films like Precious, “white characters are always portrayed as

caring. . . . Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African Americans.

Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their

culture, their lack of personal responsibility.”27

This idea of cultural pathology among poor blacks has a long lineage. The

economist Gunnar Myrdal discussed it in his influential book about the US “race

problem,” An American Dilemma, published in 1944: “American Negro culture is

not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted

development, or a pathological condition of the general American culture.” He

added that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a

group to become assimilated.”28 Myrdal’s account at least conveyed an

understanding of how the cultural patterns of poor black Americans were not a

thing apart from the “general American culture,” and that white racism generated

the “pathological conditions.” Later reiterations of the underclass shifted the

emphasis. For instance, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report, The

Negro Family: The Case for National Action emphasized the breakdown of the black

family rather than white racism as the prime source of the “pathologies.” In this

view, “the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without the

assistance from the white world.”29

This dimension of Precious is reinforced by the movie’s colorism, its favoring of

lighter-skinned over darker skinned African Americans (which is both an

intraracial and an interracial problem), despite Daniels’s sensitivity to this issue

(see above). As another black critic, Armond White says, Daniels “casts light-

skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey,

nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’s firstborn)

and dark-skinned actors as terrors.”30 In effect, the “blacker” characters in Precious

are members of the self-sabotaging black underclass; its lighter-skinned (nearly

white) blacks are upstanding middle-class Americans. This pattern supports

Wellington’s point that “the subtext of the movie is the theme of whiteness—or

how the social construction of whiteness [as represented vividly in Precious’s

fantasy life] has had its impact on life in a black ghetto.”31 In fact, the light-skinned

black characters—especially the schoolteacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton)—meet or

exceed prevailing white norms of beauty; the dark-skinned black characters fall

well short of these norms.

26 Ibid. 27 Reed, “Fade to White.” 28 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), Vol. II, pp. 928–929, quoted

in Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 85.

29 Daniel Patrick, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancy (eds), The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 93. The Moynihan Report did acknowledge that “[t]here centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of Negro Americans” (p. 93).

30 Armond White, quoted in Wellington, “Sex, Race, and Precious.” 31 Wellington, “Sex, Race, and Precious.”

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In this regard, Precious also reflects a significant development within the US black community during the post-civil rights era: the widening class divide among black Americans. In 2007, the Pew Research Center reported that because of this divide 37% of African Americans believed that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race.” In addition, “By a ration of 2 to 1, blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”32 These inequalities are still due to the history of anti-black racism, but through subtle cumulative processes that are no longer grow “out of a massive and mutually reinforcing, legal and extralegal, public and private system of oppressive” that was broken down by the civil rights movement.33

As a piece of film-making, Precious, a bleak, small-scale movie that cost about ten million dollars to make, could hardly be more different than Invictus and Avatar, which are more conventional Hollywood fare. Yet all three films convey the bogus idea of an already achieved post-racial America and a post-racial world. They all testify to a widespread desire—at least among white people—to pretend that a post-racial world has already been achieved, or, alternatively, to deny that it has not yet been achieved. If we are ever to achieve or approach such a world, however, we cannot just imagine it to be so. At the same time, we need to be able to imagine the possibility of a post-racial world as well as how we can make it so; and we need an honest accounting of the distance we still need to travel to get there. We need to face squarely the continuing racialized inequalities of wealth, power, and life chances; the ongoing indignities of racism; the way that racism shapes struggles over immigration and citizenship in many countries; and the continuing power of normative whiteness. Movies can help expand people’s political imaginations in these ways, but not these movies; they instead advance false hopes and political complacency.

BRUCE BAUM University of British Columbia, Canada q 2010 Bruce Baum

32 Quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Forty Acres and a Wealth Gap,” The New York Times, November 18, 2007, ,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18gates. html..

33 Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, “Beyond Discrimination: Understanding African American Inequality in the Twenty-First Century,” Dissent 55 (Winter 2008), p. 63.

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