Black Women in 1950s and 2020s

A few years ago, Netflix dropped a new film entitled “Cuties” and there has been nothing but outrage over the film sexualizing children and exploiting them. Some make the argument that it empowers young women.

“Anna Lucasta” is a différent form of an empowered black woman. The story centers around a young black woman who is kicked out of the house by her overbearing and alcoholic father. She wanders the streets like a vagabond hustling for her next meal and conversing with low-level thugs.

Many black women in the 1950s cinema have been played and portrayed as the tramp or the lower-class female to their white counterparts. It has become the norm that black women have a certain hedonistic and unsavory demeanor about them in the realm of cinema in the 1950s, when they weren’t playing the maids or servants or even thieves for that matter. Black women were never shown in an extremely and overwhelmingly positive light like white women have been shown in.

Almost never have you seen an African-American woman as a princess or a high-level and high-class woman. She is often depicted as the mammy or an undesirable. White women have been compared as almost the total opposite. Almost always, the African American woman in question is light-skinned or at the very least, for cinematic purposes for the audiences, they have some sort of white features that are prominent in their face, their body or how they act or dress.

It depicts a biased account of the subject of race in cinema and has not at all aged well, in the process, with a less progressive method and thinking that only holds the African-American race back.

Fastforwarding to 2020, we have a more progressive stance when it comes to African-American men and women. We live in a world of cinema where diversity is encouraged and African-American characters are more glorified than anything like for example, T’Challa/Black Panther of Marvel Comics, President Barack Obama and Pop icon Beyonce Knowles.

Not only that, but we live in a world of body positivity and social inclusiveness and that sounds really good, but that doesn’t mean that all that inclusiveness doesn’t come with its drawbacks. It’s one thing to have sexual dominance and positivity with grown, well-adjusted and mature, black women, but in the case of “Cuties”, exploiting children and exposing them to a hypersexual society that would most likely scar them for the rest of their lives, is despicable and wrong in every sense of the word. The problem with progressive society is that we now support this smut that we see on our television screens and it is not just African-American women but women in general.

Women are used as objects for “decoration” for amusement and sexual arousal for the consumers. It makes people wonder if progressivism really is progressivism and not just more propaganda for politicians and media outlets for notoriety and recognition.