Hi friends!
I’ve been looking forward to launching my TV/Film/Culture criticism newsletter Black Girl Watching, where I’ll process my obsessive consumption of the best (and worst) of TV and film through my Black feminist lens. Some may remember that I hosted a podcast with a friend under the same name, recapping Lovecraft Country at the beginning of the panny. If you’re on this list, you’ve subscribed at some point to my old newsletter or blog updates and are now subscribed to the free tier of Black Girl Watching, where I’ll also share exciting updates—like, that I’m a whole filmmaker now! But more on that in the next newsletter.
It’s because of my move into filmmaking that I wondered if I should just give up criticism. Filmmakers aren’t generally fond of criticism and can see critics as a hindrance to the creative process rather than a crucial part of it. This can decrease opportunities for critics-turned-filmmakers, as the golden rule is to never publicly critique a potential colleague’s work. And then of course, journalism as an industry is continuing its collapse, with mass layoffs happening several times a year. Culture critics are usually the first to be let go as “nonessential workers.” Even at the most “radical” and non-profit outlets, culture criticism is non-existent, focusing instead on investigative journalism and politics, while dismissing culture and entertainment reporting as “frivolous.” Even those outlets who understand and profit from culture criticism are hesitant to do so, thanks to an atmosphere of “access journalism”—i.e., if you piss off the wrong celebrity with honest critique, you’ll lose access to them/their friends/whoever else their talent agents represent. I’ve seen celebrities (and even barely celebrities) absolutely do this —most often to Black outlets with the least resources and the most to lose. In the end, though, without criticism, we all lose.
I’ll never forget the day a Black celebrity called me up at 9AM on a holiday to lecture me about my (excellent) review of their movie for 37 minutes. My bosses had already been harassing me for doing good journalism that entire year because it was upsetting people in power and I thought, if I entertain this celebrity’s call, perhaps they won’t complain to my boss (for the second time!) and make my hostile work environment worse. There was desperation in the celebrity’s voice, frustration—anger, even. How dare I infringe upon the artist’s right to make the art they want to make? Of course, I hadn’t infringed on that right—the movie was in theaters and would continue to be, despite my negative review, which didn’t call for its removal from theaters in the first place. But it became immediately clear that the celebrity feared negative reviews meant never being able to make movies again.
It’s true, Black flops damage Black careers far more often than white flops damage white ones. But that’s a problem with the white supremacist studio system, not a call for unmitigated Black applause out of fear that “they’ll never let us make another one.” Still, that is the expectation—that as a Black critic at a Black outlet, I had betrayed them by not thoughtlessly congratulating work that I thought was pretty explicitly anti-Black.
They asked me if I had any questions about the film that they could explain to me; I said no—I’d interviewed them on the record about the film already. They suggested perhaps I’d misunderstood the message of their film. I said I’d watched it twice. We were at an impasse. It wasn’t until near the end of the call that they finally expressed what they wanted from me: to write up their arguments against my review and publish it as the celebrity’s rebuttal. I declined. I hadn’t been recording the call and had no intention of rebutting my own work and besides, it was a holiday; it was a courtesy to take their call on my vacation anyway. Their next call was to my boss.
This is the rigamarole of being a Black critic, where “rooting for everybody Black” doesn’t mean telling Black people the truth, it means uncritical praise. It means uncritical defense of Black art because, under our white supremacist systems of power, it’s a miracle that Black people get to make any kind of public art in the first place. But I find it deeply anti-Black not to think Black art deserves deep thinking and rigorous critique, as any other art form does. If the art is too precious for review, lock it in a diary. But if it is meant for public consumption, let us eat.
Of course, under our white supremacist systems of power, some public Black art gets greenlit and funded more than other kinds, and anti-Black art by Black people will be first on the fast track. But it’s just entertainment, right?
There’s a reason some of our sharpest thinkers have specifically written books of film, TV and literature criticism—bell hooks’ Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies; Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Toni Cade Bambara’s Why Black Cinema?— film, TV, music, books, entertainment is culture, and culture (who gets credit for making it, who gets to profit from making it) is political.
Look no further than the fact that the United States military has several divisions that partner with and supervise Hollywood studios to produce entertainment in line with its agenda. From Marvel’s Iron Man franchise to DC’s Wonder Woman 1984; from the Transformers franchise to the Top Gun franchise, the U.S. Department of Defense has approved an astonishing number of scripts of the movies we consume before they even go into production, dating all the way back to World War II and the dawn of Hollywood. Because, to the powers that be, messaging matters. Entertainment matters. Culture matters. How much more, then, should it matter to the people?
This is why we need critics. Critics think deeply about the art we consume; we research; we study; we are libraries of literature, film and TV history from which we pull to contextualize a piece of art. Whether it’s a good or bad piece of art isn’t even the most significant assessment we make, though of course, it’s what matters most to celebrities, studios and filmmakers. Criticism itself is an artform to be celebrated and consumed. Critics are artists too. And, as with all artists, some are great, some are good, some are neither. We’re not immune from our own profession. But we are necessary, now more than ever.
In an age of rising fascism—that absolutely did not begin with Donald Trump, but will certainly accelerate under his next reign of terror—journalists, critics are supposed to hold the line. The disintegration of the media and its position as reliable and truth-centered is intentional under fascism. You are supposed to doubt your lying eyes and ears.
Throughout more than 400 days of Joe Biden’s U.S.-Israeli live-streamed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been targeted and killed by the zionist entity for exposing the truth of their war crimes and genocide. Western media’s uncritical spouting of Israeli propaganda and refusal to even use the word GENOCIDE has eroded what remaining trust in the media there was. Black media is no exception.
So many of my pitches to Black media outlets this year that mention the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians have been declined for fear of retribution from the powers that actually run “Black” media. My most recent piece of criticism, a review of Eldorado Ballroom, Solange Knowles’s three-night concert series in LA, was killed at the Black vertical Refinery29 Unbothered by the white people who run Refinery29, over my explicit use of the word genocide to describe Israeli war crimes in Palestine. Despite the fact that Black and Palestinian people have been in struggle and solidarity for generations—and that many Palestinians are also Black—Black outlets have proven to be no different than white ones in their mission to censor and silence criticism of the US-Israeli genocide. (The piece, “Solange’s Eldorado Ballroom Offered a Soundtrack for the Grief of a year of Genocide” was later published on Mondoweiss, a political site dedicated to news about Palestine, instead.)
People hate critics because we live in an unaccountable world. Seven of the last ten U.S. presidents, from Biden to Nixon have been credibly accused of rape without recourse (Obama, Carter and Ford, notwithstanding). Biden, who authored the 1994 crime bill that locked up so many of our children for drug use, has now pardoned his own child from the consequences of his law. Next, a twice convicted, twice impeached predator and charlatan in Trump will now hold the highest office in the country for a second time. White supremacy hates accountability and thrives in its absence. It teaches us to be unaccountable and to champion unaccountability intrapersonally so that we won’t be able to hold the powerful accountable either. Being accountable and holding systems to account, therefore, is some of the most radical work we can do in this moment to defeat fascism.
Critics—Black critics. and all the intersections therein—can see the jig and speak to it in a way that others may be conditioned to ignore. It took Black feminist icon and scholar bell hooks to point out the rampant misogyny in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. It took Imani Barbarin, a Black disabled woman critic to breakdown the ableism in the audience reaction to Wicked’s disabled character NessaRose. As one of the few early critics of the beloved movie Green Book, I spoke to the film’s raging anti-Blackness in a way that challenged its position as the feel-good buddy comedy of our time. Though my critique did not likely change the way those specific filmmakers make movies, I’ve had countless studio executives tell me it changed how they greenlight films. One of my favorite critiques, my review of Queen & Slim as an “artful wound with no medicine,” has been cited many times for the litmus test I coined in it, the Hurston-Walker Test. I coined this test for engaging with Black art from a sentence in Alice Walker’s introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine.”
Criticism—from and by people who love us—can be medicine. It can show us our wounds and another possible world. It can be as powerful in building culture as the other forms of media we consume because criticism is also filmmaking. It is also fiction-writing. It is also musical experiences, as Solange showed us with Eldorado Ballroom and rapper Redveil did at Tyler the Creator’s music festival last year to protest the U.S.-Israeli murder of children in Gaza.
At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I watched Black filmmakers create incredible, critical medicine. Colman Domingo and producer Monique Walton’s prison abolition film Sing, Sing, not only told the story of art as a healing agent, but also revolutionized Hollywood pay scales by paying its A-list star and its lowest level worker the same salary and giving ownership stock in the film’s success to each person who worked on the film, including all of its formerly incarcerated cast. Mati Diop’s powerful documentary Dahomey called to task the French government for its theft of thousands of treasures from the kingdom of Dahomey and its paltry return of only 26 artifacts to what is now the country of Benin. Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl took on the African patriarchy that protects men who assault the women and girls in their families. The Agbajowo Collective’s The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos held the Nigerian government accountable for its state-sponsored destruction of slums and the people living there. Patrice: The Movie tells the story of disabled activist Patrice and how the U.S. government prevents disabled people from getting married without losing access to life-saving aide. Lupita Nyongo’s animated film The Wild Robot might be the most radical film of the year with its anti-capitalist message of socialism as a cure for our intentionally divided, hyper-individualized, soul-sick society.
Nina Simone said that an artist’s duty is to reflect the times. She said that people shouldn’t even call themselves artists if they don’t uphold that duty. That’s accountability. That’s critique. When we love each other, when we want more than just our survival but our liberation—this is the work we do. Black filmmakers, Black artists, Black critics need each other; we are each other. Our imaginations are what build the culture and change the world. The service we provide —to create beauty from ashes, to hold up the mirror for each other, for ourselves—is what will help us build the world we all deserve.
That’s the work I aim to contribute to here at Black Girl Watching: critical analysis with love, for a better possible world. I hope you’ll join me (and become a paid subscriber!) on the journey.
Stay watching!
Brooke
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