“American Fiction” is up for five Oscars on Sunday, including best picture, best adapted screenplay (by the movie’s director, Cord Jefferson, from Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure”) and best actor, for the performance by D.C. native Jeffrey Wright. Post Opinions asked three columnists to watch the movie and then email each other about it — and the issues it raises. An edited transcript of their conversation is below. And if you’re wondering, yes, there are spoilers.
Perry Bacon: What does it mean to do public work (art, film, music, book writing, journalism) as a Black person in “woke America”? That’s a question I think about a lot. “American Fiction” is very explicitly about that question.
I should define my terms, because they are important. In my view, a lot of the racial discourse in the 1980s and 1990s was about “multiculturalism.” The 2000s were about “diversity.” Post-Black Lives Matter, the discourse became more explicitly about Black people, as opposed to “people of color.” And there is more focus on racism, as opposed to “race relations” or “race” broadly. Those are good shifts. (We should also talk about women, Muslims, Jewish Americans and other groups. What’s good is more specificity, as opposed to lumping everyone into a category of “minorities.”)
The complicated part is that powerful White people run America. They are the funders, the donors, the bosses in most cases. So by “woke,” I mean that powerful White people have become more awakened and willing to discuss anti-blackness/Black-White racial disparities than before, but still often are not ready to actually address these issues through policies and actions.
America is also capitalist, of course. So art, music, journalism, etc., must usually connect with (or at least appease) the market and White managers/bosses. When Monk, the main character played by Jeffrey Wright in “American Fiction,” says something along the lines of, “My book is a Black book because I’m Black and I wrote it,” he’s getting at a really important issue. I would like to live in a world where Black people decide what counts as a Black book. I think most White power brokers would say they agree.
But in reality, if you want your book/article/play/movie to be heavily promoted by your company (usually run by White people), it will need to fit their definition of what counts as a Black book and one they want to promote. (Your company might agree, for example, that a documentary about reparations is a Black product and also feel it is too radical for them to promote heavily.)
We all work at an institution where most of the bosses and the owner (Jeff Bezos) are White. So sometimes, when I get praise for my work by our managers, I have two questions. Am I producing work that an institution dominated by Black people would also appreciate? Second, does a Black person doing good work at The Washington Post mean they are kowtowing to the institution’s definition of Blackness? (I suspect the answer to both questions is yes. They are not totally contradictory.)
What did you guys think of the movie? Did it raise similar questions for you — or different ones?
Ted Johnson: You’re right, Perry — what it’s like to be Black in a woke America is the central question of the movie. Being able to get a third-party perspective on something you’ve been through makes for a good movie.
Yet I kept waiting for the moment when all the talent on the screen would hit me with an insight or different view about being Black in today’s America that I hadn’t yet seen. That may be too big of an ask, but the promise was there.
A new book and the literary world’s reaction to it drive the movie’s plotline, which plays with the complicated business of profiting from performative racial stereotypes. The folks with the most power get an outsize voice in which stories and frameworks get a platform. The most prevalent ones can become the defining ones. And many times, the decisions in this regard are made without consideration of the people who, in this instance, are Black.
What’s it like to be one of them? A writer who’s so disgusted with literary blackface that he’s going to mock them all by wearing it, just to show them how ridiculous it all is? But then they love it. And it’s profitable. And he needs the money. Now what?
Again, that’s a good movie. But I wanted the cultural commentary to poke me in the chest a little more with Monk’s personal dilemma as a Black writer.
It’s a particular experience to balance wisdom about how the world works — and needing to make a way in it — with a responsibility to guard your culture from undue external influence. It can be a real quandary. Monk, and the movie, kind of tap dance around that question, unfortunately.
But the cast and the look and feel of the film made that small letdown better. I love how Black and Gen X it is, too, tackling issues lots of us are facing for the first time: making a way in a professional world different from the one that raised us, aging parents and their well-being and care, financial pressures to help family or friends outside your household, loved ones and classmates passing away.
Karen Attiah: I agree that this movie is brilliant and multilayered. It hits a little close to home on many levels, both professionally in journalism and publishing and also personally, navigating changing family relationships as age sets in with my elders.
This movie is about the absurdities of White “woke liberals,” for whom the language of inclusion and allyship masks patronizing behavior, stereotyping, etc., which maintains White power over the types of Blackness that get platformed.
Ten or 20 years ago, we heard a lot about Black people having to “code-switch” in White spaces — be relatable and non-threatening to White people.
Monk represents a new and extreme form of code-switching according to the sensibilities of “woke” White people, who represent a certain type of racial capitalism that is only interested in Black trauma, violence and broken homes.
Part of what makes this movie so compelling and so uncomfortable to watch are the contradictions and tensions that Monk exposes and experiences, but also embodies as a flawed character himself. In more ways than one, we see that Monk is judgmental of others, including his own family, girlfriend and, of course, successful black author Sintara Golden (played by Issa Rae). He believes Golden doesn’t deserve her success because of her education and her privilege — meanwhile he doesn’t even bother to read her book. He claims that White America isn’t interested in the nuances of Black experiences that don’t have to do with trauma, but we see that he is distant from his family, doesn’t know what is going on with them and looks down on his gay, plastic surgeon brother who is struggling after a divorce.
Perry Bacon: Two scenes from the movie will stick with me. The first is when there are five judges (three White, two Black) who are deciding which book will win an award. The three White judges choose the Black-authored book full of cringy stereotypes about Black people, over the objections of the two Black judges. One of the White judges, justifying her decision, says, “It’s time to listen to Black voices,” as the two Black judges look down.
That perfectly captured the dynamics of today. “Listen to Black voices,” “Trust Black women,” all of these mantras that became popular in 2020 are, of course, overly simplistic. But even if an organization decides to listen more to its Black staffers, the obvious question is, “Which Black voices are we listening to?” After the 2020 protests, it became clear that Democratic Party leadership (mostly White) was going to listen to some Black voices (Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and other Black folk in the political establishment) and not others (the activists who called for defunding the police).
There is a second scene that I will remember — because it fell flat. The two Black authors, played by Rae and Wright, are debating the merits of the book written by Rae’s character.
I was hoping for a really forceful debate about Black art and how much it should try to appease the market and White power brokers. But the film seemed unwilling to go there. The scene implies that Wright’s character might just be depressed or snobby or envious of Rae’s character’s success. I agree that people’s motives are often complicated. But I wanted the film to lean more into “Black art is suffering from wokeness,” or “Black art is not really suffering from wokeness” or an alternative position. I wanted the film to say something, and it felt like punches were pulled there.
Karen Attiah: The scene with Monk and Golden did stick out to me. What I find interesting about it is its ambiguity. Monk assumes Golden’s book is bad and pandering without having even read it. She tells him that her book is based on actual research and interviews with Black people. Meanwhile, he just made up characters out of thin air. Both Monk and Golden are highly educated, privileged Black people, also themselves gatekeepers in a way. How do we talk of the “Black elite,” the “Talented Tenth” who are chosen to speak for and about the Black experience? Did Golden handle that task more responsibly by basing her work on interviews? I wish we got more insight into her. She knows how the system works, and instead of fighting it, she uses it to her advantage.
Ted Johnson: I love that we’re lingering on this moment in the movie. The Monk-Golden exchange was one of the film’s flashes of brilliance. It uses a little story twist to shock the audience out of its preconceived notions. When Golden tells Monk her characters are based in pavement-pounding qualitative research, my jaw slipped just like Monk’s. And Issa Rae as Golden perfectly delivered the blow in her eyes and tone, never having to say it: Of course I did the work — what serious person doesn’t?
It’s meant to hit the audience in the gut, asking, “Oh, you thought she was doing racist vaudeville when she was really just sharing her findings?” Dialect is culture. If something about it bothers you, there’s a judgment in there about how you see the people who use it. This gets to the intraracial phenomena that Karen raised: The “Talented Tenth”. Respectability politics. Which Black is beautiful — the Evans family in the sitcom “Good Times,” or the Huxtables of “The Cosby Show”? Isn’t the 1970s’ Blaxploitation film genre a distinct art form because it does social commentary and parable and parody all in one?
Perry Bacon: To bridge a bit away from the movie itself, I think it’s worth asking two questions.
How big and important of a problem is the issue that the movie is grappling with — the challenge of being a Black “creative” in a time when there is an appetite for more content produced by Black people but deep disagreement about what that content should be? This is obviously less important than police shootings of unarmed Black people. Does this conflict matter?
And how do you personally grapple with this issue?
Let me start with the first question. Culture matters. Policy matters more, but culture matters. I want more people watching “The 1619 Project” documentary series on Hulu and perhaps fewer watching Tyler Perry movies. The Republicans who are trying to ban books and classes that center systemic racism understand this. I think it’s critical in mainstream and left-wing media and cultural spaces to move beyond “diversity” (we have a movie starring a Black woman) and “wokeness” (the characters in our movie say “Black Lives Matter”) to “anti-racism” (our documentary series explains how police departments reject reforms that will make their policies less discriminatory).
Black creators need to be willing to fight for products that challenge the power structure of the country. Managers (usually White) need to stop blocking or softening content created by Black people that challenges power structures.
To put this very directly, I love that Karen’s s columns often challenge the beliefs of both major parties. Her pieces are not, “Here is my life, as a Black woman,” but, “Here is why America should change, informed by my perspective, which includes being a Black woman.”
I reached out to Karen early in my tenure as a columnist. I was complaining about the feedback I had gotten from a piece I had written, from someone I knew from my days in political reporting. Karen said something to the effect of, “You’re free now.” I don’t want to overstate this. I was never not free — I was born in 1980. The Black people in my generation and those who have followed are the freest ever.
But I took Karen’s comment to mean that you can write what you think without the hypothetical political operative/moderate voter/elected official/editor (read: centrist White man) in your head, shadow-editing your columns.
The movie reminded me how obsessed I was with appeasing White power brokers for most of my career, before I became a columnist. Because those power brokers could make or break your career. And I was sad thinking about how I assume most Black people in journalism and other creative fields still have to appease them.
Ted Johnson: Similar to y’all, my background is in a profession where objectivity was a watchword. In my previous military life, opinions about the world around you were best kept out of your work. But as a writer, a moment arrives when you have to give yourself permission to say what you think and how you feel. Out loud and in public. This means letting the world into your thoughts and ideas, giving the audience access to your beliefs and values. There’s a vulnerability required that’s hard to prepare for; you kind of have to experience it.
And then there’s the big question of where your work can do the most public good. For example, if, because of my résumé, White conservatives are willing to hear me out on structural racism or Blackness — do I have a responsibility to lean into a space that isn’t as accessible to lots of Black writers? If I just do me instead, have I become a free rider by refusing to do my part, so to speak, in the pursuit of pro-democracy reforms or modeling dialogue across differences?
There may be financial or professional incentives for choosing a different path, but I do think we have a responsibility — especially as Black opinion writers at The Post — to say what the younger versions of us could not, and what Black folks in lots of places cannot. Not as race representatives, but to exercise rights long denied to folks like us.
Karen Attiah: *Smiles mischievously*
Is this the point where we can grapple with the fact that our White editor wants us, among the few Black WaPo columnists, in a virtual room so that we can be observed and studied in how we think and navigate this world? Are we the subject of a Black Studies inquiry? Haha.
For me, my whole raison d'être of doing this type of work stems from knowing from a pretty early age that Black and African issues, perspectives and, well, humanity were erased and distorted in the West more generally. I have heard trepidation from White colleagues and bosses who say I shouldn’t feel pressure to cover only race or Black things. But frankly, I don’t feel pressured. No one says people who cover, say, politics or economics or foreign policy are being “boxed in” in some negative way. I do have varied interests, yes, but I find it a privilege and an honorable responsibility to dive into the Black world’s past, present and future.
If other audiences find these topics interesting, then that is nice. But it is not my main goal to educate or center non-Black people on Black people. Nor do I think the main goal is to champion every single thing a Black person does (see: my critical pieces on Beyoncé and Kamala Harris). I think a lot about interviews with novelist Toni Morrison, or Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, when they were asked whether they worried about appearing to marginalize Whites or Europe in their work. Morrison rebuts, saying basically, Black people and our stories are the mainstream. Sembène says, “Europe is not my center. … Why be a sunflower and turn toward the sun? I myself am the sun.”
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