OPINION: Jeffrey Wright delivers a stellar performance in “American Fiction,” a smart comedy about how we perform Blackness and react to the white gaze.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
“American Fiction” is one of the best movies of the year because while you’re laughing at the hilarity of Jeffrey Wright’s Monk Ellison walking awkwardly through a web of lies, you’re also confronted with a big question: How should you perform your Blackness? Many Black people will feel triggered or defensive at the notion of “performing Blackness,” but academics will tell you all of identity is a performance. You may not be consciously choosing how to present yourself as a Black person (or a man or a straight person or a person from Atlanta who’s now living in L.A. or whatever your identity is), but when you present yourself to the world, you are most certainly performing your personality.
One of the choices Black people sometimes wrestle with is this: Do you perform a version of Blackness that speaks to your education and your refinement or do you perform a version that evokes the street? Wrapped up within that question is this one: Do you perform your personality with Black people in mind or are you performing for white people? This is some of the ground that “American Fiction” tackles brilliantly and hysterically.
I would watch Jeffrey Wright do anything, he’s one of our great actors. Here, he gives us Monk Ellison, a writer and professor who’s extremely intelligent. His name evokes two of the towering giants of Black art. But Monk’s books are not selling. No one cares about his nuanced vision of Blackness. Then he encounters Issa Rae’s Sintara Golden. Monk wanders into Sintara’s book event to find her conversing with an interviewer and sounding very, let’s say, articulate. That’s shorthand. Y’all know what I mean. She’s using her white people voice and pronouncing every part of her words. Nothing wrong with that. (Some people say that’s how I talk.) But then the interviewer asks her to read a bit of her very successful book, and Sintara breaks into an entirely different performance of Blackness. Suddenly she sounds, let’s say, street. Or, perhaps, stereotypical. This is not code-switching. It’s pandering to the white gaze and white expectations of Blackness. She has become what white people imagine Black people to sound like.
As Sintara reads in grossly non-standard English about an unwed mother who’s just found out she’s pregnant, the white people in her audience are enraptured. She finishes reading, and we see Monk in the back of the room with a confused face that says, what is this madness? But then a white woman stands and applauds as she blocks our view of Monk as if to erase his Black confusion with her white approval. In this moment, we see the commodification of Black pathology and the white savior complex smashing together in an amazing way.
This leads Monk into an existential dilemma that many of us have faced at some level: Do I continue to perform Blackness in a way that honors, let’s call it, “articulate Blackness,” or do I perform Blackness in a way that excites the whites because it honors their attraction to the street Blackness? The first option feels better, the second option pays better. The film follows Monk as he works through his dilemma: Should I continue delivering “articulate Blackness” which is, to him, authentic, or join Sintara’s charade and get the white folks’ money? You know what he chooses. Chaos ensues. Don’t miss “American Fiction,” a really smart comedy about how we perform Blackness and how we react to the white gaze.
Touré is a host and Creative Director at theGrio. He is the host of Masters of the Game on theGrioTV. He is also the host and creator of the docuseries podcast “Being Black: The ’80s” and the animated show “Star Stories with Toure” which you can find at TheGrio.com/starstories. He is also the host of the podcast “Toure Show” and the podcast docuseries “Who Was Prince?” He is the author of eight books including the Prince biography Nothing Compares 2 U and the ebook The Ivy League Counterfeiter.
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