Hasta La Gadget!

Apparently, interesting things happen when black women are in charge of their own stories. In recent weeks, they gave new life to the angry black woman. Let’s do a quick review. Underground‘s Ernestine (created by Misha Green) helped end the television show’s first season by slowly hanging a man to death and suggesting she would meet him in hell. Scandal‘s Olivia Pope (created by Shonda Rhimes) severely beat a man to death with a metal chair. And, in her visual album Lemonade, Beyoncé destroyed an entire street with a baseball bat and a monster truck.

Clearly it’s no exaggeration to say these ladies were a little angry. But they weren’t the stereotypical angry black women that Hollywood typically delivers. There was no wig snatching, neck snapping, or shade-filled catchphrases–all rooted in no apparent reason except that’s just the way black women are. These stories created about black women by black women are far more complicated and meaningful.

One of the major complications shared by Ernestine, Olivia, and Beyoncé is the history of American slavery. The institution is having a cultural moment given last year’s 150th anniversary of black emancipation and a growing collection of recent media content. The black women creators seemed to be playing with the theme of past as prologue. Slavery is the prologue to the book about black women in America. It set the context for the chapters (or the generations) that followed. The original authors thought black women had limited value and placed many limitations on our existence, making it okay to mistreat and abuse us.

The anger of Beyonce, Olivia, and Ernestine is directed towards certain other characters, but also towards that damn book. Their anger is justified. Their anger is a necessary step towards rewriting the story.

Anger leading to rebellious survival (Ernestine). Ernestine’s connection to slavery is straightforward–Underground is a period drama and the character is a house slave on a southerner planation. For most of the season, she models for her children (and especially her daughter Rosa Lee) ways to survive. And, although Ernestine is from another era, every black person who watched the show knows her, someone in his or her world is cut from Ernestine’s same cloth. The characteristic strength and love of women like her has been clearly passed down from one generation to the next.

Ernestine’s justifiable rage is sparked when the plantation owner and father of her children decides to gruesomely murder their son in order to advance his political career. His later sexual advances and attempts at relationship would be an indescribable form of torture for any woman to endure. As a slave, that damn book would likely suggest limited options–perhaps suicide or insanity.

But, being a show focused on ways in which slaves resisted their condition, the writers had a third option in mind. Ernestine murdered the father in the same way the son was murdered–slowly and at the end of a noose while staring into the eyes of someone who should have loved him (for the father, that person was mother of his children and for the son, that person was his own father). As a slave, Ernestine had no choice but to live her whole life in survival mode. The depths of her anger were a necessary step towards taking justice rather than silently enduring a wrong. She rewrote that damn book to include a radical form of survival.

Anger leading to empowerment (Olivia). Over the course of five seasons of Scandal, fans have watched Olivia Pope battle an arms length list of shady and unsympathetic characters. It wasn’t until this season that she actually murdered someone. The former Vice-President of the United States made her angry. In a speech that, on the surface, referred to a prior incident in which Olivia had been kidnapped and almost sold to terrorists, former Vice-President Nichols clearly and unmistakably invoked images of slavery. He spoke of her sexuality as if it was a commodity, even speculating about how much he could get for her on the auction block.

Perhaps feeling a connection to her foremothers, Olivia screamed as she beat the wealthy and once powerful white man to death, “You don’t get revenge. I get revenge.”

For Olivia, her anger was necessary step towards rewriting that damn book. Instead of being forced to endure disrespect and horrible indignities, she not only took back her power but set her sights on taking all the power through control over the oval office. Although, it’s still unclear how that’s going to work out for her.

Anger leading to healing (Beyoncé). She may have been the one causing all that conversation, but an oddly large number of commentators chose not to discuss the many images reminiscent of slavery and planation life that ran throughout Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade. The work also includes numerous references to generational transfers, beginning with the first few minutes in which she recites the following words from a poem: “In the tradition of men in my blood . . . the past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck! What a fucking curse!”

Certainly Beyoncé would not be the first person to suggest that the tragedy of slavery put a curse on all those who came after, impacting our relationships and the ways in which we see ourselves. But she is likely the first to turn the concept into a major pop culture moment. The work speaks to black women being devalued (most powerfully in a quote by Malcolm X), presumably by the larger society but also by their intimate partners.

So the Beyoncé character got angry, real angry. And like Ernestine and Olivia, she rewrote that damn book, the long-established expectations for black women. In recreating images reminiscent of the past, the women in the visual album are not clothed in rags reflective of the way they were actually treated but luxurious garments reflective of the women they actually were. Serena Williams is not behaving like the “ugly” and “mannish” figure from that damn book, but is dancing without a care in the world like beautiful and sexy woman she actually is. And the focus on the legacy of brokenness and hurt gives way to the brighter light of how our grandmothers taught us to love and make lemonade out of our lemons.

In the end, Beyoncé’s anger was a necessary step towards understanding, forgiveness, true love, healing and hope.

All the Angry Black Women. I referred to the characters of Ernestine, Olivia, and Beyoncé rewriting that damn book. But the rewriting credit really goes to their creators, the black women creators like Shonda Rhimes, Misha Green, and Beyoncé who are demonstrating the value of diversity behind the camera. Through their storytelling, they are encouraging audiences to rethink the character outlines of past, contemporary, and future black women. A legacy of being devalued and forced to endure horrible injustices is continuing to morph into a story of radical survival, empowerment, and healing. In the words of Lemonade, “So we’re going to heal. We’re going to start again . . . The audience applauds but we can’t hear them.”

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