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…
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