Just before the film Suffragette came out, I read a piece by Ijeoma Oluo, an American reviewer, who had decided not to review the movie.
Her reason was simple:
I didn’t want to write this review because I’m tired of writing about white people. I’m tired of fantasy worlds where people of color don’t exist. Where even the made up—excuse me—composite characters are white. It gets really disheartening to see yourself written out of popular culture, written out of history time and time again.
She spoke to the director who tried to explain why her movie was made the way it was but Oluo wasn't satisfied.
As a person of color, I’ve heard time and time again similar excuses for why people of color have not been represented, especially in history. But the truth is, we are not a recent invention. . .There’s photographic evidence that there were. . . women of color in the suffrage movement. But the written record is primarily white.
Neither Oluo nor the director, Sarah Gavron, used the words "historical accuracy" but that's what I heard and that's why this article resonated with me so strongly. I can't count the number of times that I've fought with men about women being "written out of history" in what was explained away as "historical accuracy" — in science, in music, in war and other distasteful activities. Australian author/feminist Dale Spender wrote a whole book called Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them to show what has happened to women in literature.
Based on all my own experiences, I thought Oluo made an excellent point that if, in fact, your main character is fictional, you don't have much of a leg to stand on if you cite historical accuracy as the reason for omitting women of colour from your movie.
Oluo got a lot of support for her position — rightly so — and in some markets, there were protests, calls for boycotts and negative press.
Suffragette was getting mixed reviews and I was having mixed feelings about whether to see it or not. When I finally decided I would go see it, I looked it up for time and place of showing. I discovered it was no longer playing here. I'll have to wait for it in some other medium.
Meanwhile, I had gone to see Trumbo and Spotlight which I wrote about here. They're both good movies, getting good reviews, sure to be up for some big awards.
And guess what? In these big American movies, made by and starring high-profile actors, there are no people of colour and not a whisper of criticism about this omission. All the criticism on this subject has been reserved for a woman-centred movie, made by women, starring women, about a series of events that changed women's lives.
Suffragette was set in 1911. I'm not sure what the multi-cultural demographics in England looked like in 1911 but I'll tell you this: there were plenty of black Americans around in the 1950s when Trumbo was set and there were also plenty in the 2000s when Spotlight was set. None of them however (with the exception of a black police officer in a short scene in Spotlight) made an appearance in these two films.
It's even more disappointing when you consider that Trumbo was centred around people who were in trouble for being Communists — and the American Communist Movement was always seen to be a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. And although Boston had many problems around integration, it seems likely that in the early 2000s there must have been people of colour at the Boston Globe and at other places around town.
Once again, the standards for a film made by women and about women have been set much higher than contemporary films by their male counterparts. It's an old story.
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