A star is born — and she is confounding Hollywood’s entrenched racial paradigm
Nyong’o’s experience is unique for a black actress, writes Stacia L Brown
LUPITA Nyong’o’s story is one of an elegance carefully cultivated. This is no sudden ascendancy to delicate silks and bold brocades, no tale of a girl plucked from obscurity or hardship. It is, instead, a story of privilege — a privilege enjoyed by so many white actresses, which makes it then also a story of justice. It is what happens when a Kenyan politician entrusts his daughter’s post-secondary education to the Yale School of Drama, rather than insisting she study medicine or law or finance. When such a daughter is daring enough to pursue a life in films, in a family of professors, physicians and politicians, the Academy Award is what happens.
This is not a reality well known to American black girls with silver screen ambitions. We watch our actresses languish in Hollywood for decades, delivering pounds of flesh for bit parts: girlfriends in black films and girlfriends in white films and staid, put-upon wives in comedies, action films and biopics. And yes, even now, the occasional brave domestic, even now, the harrowingly tortured slave.
Our ingénues rarely win Oscars. It is our seasoned comediennes, sassing their way through lines such as “Molly, you in danger, girl!” or throwing frying pans at their pregnant daughters, who take home the gold. It is the reality star who belts a gut-wrenching beggarly torch song to a man already walking away, or the naked, grieving mother sexing the guard who executed her husband. They are the ones who win. And we are proud of their achievements. We take everything we get and we are glad for it.
We black women know how hard those actresses had to work to get it, how many lowbudget straight-to-DVD flicks they made to keep themselves visible, how many blonde wigs and gold teeth and fishnets they had to don and exactly how much of their bodies they had to bare just for the opportunity to be seen. And we swallow the painful realisation that although many a role easily procured by a Paltrow, Portman or Witherspoon could be played, if not better, certainly just as well by an actress of colour, the film would probably not be attended by as large an audience.
This is our sisters’ lot in all of the US workforce. We are offered little, we earn less, we hustle harder and stress more — all in response to the idea that our appearance and thoughts and work are not as marketable as those of a white colleague.
This is why we are gathering our awe and placing it like so much frankincense and myrrh at the feet of Nyong’o. This awards season she has become the symbol of every black girl’s dream deferred. Nyong’o herself speaks of the significance of women who look like her ascending in highvisibility markets. She cites Alek Wek and any number of US black actresses as her own self-image inspirations.
And she is aware of what it means to be a literal projection of an audience’s desires, history and needs.
But the story of Nyong’o’s near instant entree to the A-list is uniquely her own. She stars in an elegant, brutal British film about American slavery, deeply connecting with part of the diaspora experience that is foreign to her family in ways it is not to the American black. And she graciously accepts a well-deserved Oscar for that portrayal without having to carry the full weight of the award’s contentious racial history.
If she hears any naysayings, any claims that she only got the Oscar for playing a slave or that the win is not one the black community can fully claim because she “isn’t ‘black’ enough”, the criticism, I imagine, will not dampen the moment, will not force her to interrogate her joy to the degree
She has become the symbol of every black girl’s dream deferred
that it would for an American black actress. Nyong’o is a carefree black girl par excellence — and we have yet to see what the career of a black actress this successful with just one feature-length role under her belt, and this comparatively unburdened by Hollywood’s racist legacy, looks like.
It is this that excites me so about Nyong’o. We have yet to see what happens when a privileged black woman begins her acting career with an Ivy League theatre pedigree, unchallenged fashion icon status and an Oscar for her very first role. It would be easy to succumb to the scepticism I have been keeping at bay. I know the US; it’s my homeland. I would imagine — and I could well be wrong — that Nyong’o is coming to Hollywood with the unselfconscious approach to race that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah heroine, Ifemelu (and indeed, Adichie herself) have brought with them to the country.
Adichie was famously quoted last year as saying: “In Nigeria I didn’t think of myself as black. I didn’t need to. And I still don’t when I’m in Nigeria. Race doesn’t occur to me. But in the US, yes . . . When I came to the US, I hadn’t stayed very long, but I already knew that to be ‘black’ was not a good thing in America, and so I didn’t want to be ‘black’.”
Although I do not get the impression that Nyong’o, having spent the last two years of her life immersing herself in portrayal of the slave experience, would hold the same perception of US blackness as Adichie initially did, it is safe to say she can still hold herself aloft from it. For her, blackness, in a context of white American oppression, is a role. It is not intrinsic to her identity. She will play plenty of other roles, but she will not feel “relegated” to stereotypical portrayals in quite the way that US black actresses do.
Not that she will not be pigeonholed. I already know what Hollywood will try to make her. I know the gradations of blackness they will implore her to learn. What I do not know is how she will resist. I do not know what she herself will teach. But she is entering the field with just enough privilege and confidence to inspire my hope that she will do just that: instruct rather than simply accept — and learn from black actresses (rather than white directors) how best to navigate this space. — © Slate