“The police don’t care because these are Black women.”

Thirty minutes into documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s latest film, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, we hear these words uttered by Pam, one of the film’s most compelling figures, as she and Bloomfield are driving down the streets of South Central Los Angeles. The documentary follows the case of a South Central serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper by the media due to the belief that the killer waited 14 years between murders. Pam is a former sex worker who had multiple dealings with Lonnie Franklin Jr, the man arrested and charged with 10 counts of murder, and one charge of attempted murder. Franklin is believed to be the Grim Sleeper and responsible for the murders of over 100 women and girls (victims’ ages ranged between 14 and 36) in South Central between 1985 and 2010. In the scene preceding Pam’s comment, Broomfield is conversing with Margaret Prescod, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders and Laverne Peters, the mother of one of the victims, Janecia Peters. The Coalition has been advocating for justice on behalf of the victims since the 1980s. Earlier in the film when we’re first introduced to her, we see footage showing a younger Prescod handing out leaflets outside of a grocery store as she talks to patrons about the murders of young women that, at the time, have been happening for three years.

In her present-day conversation with Bloomfield, Prescod tells him that the police knew that at least 12 women had already been killed before they released any information about the murders, and when the Coalition raised its concerns regarding this, authorities responded with "he’s only killing hookers." These two conversations, juxtaposed, hold the answer to the film’s central question: how could over 100 women disappear over 25 years with virtually nobody hearing about it? The answer is this: because these women were Black; because they were poor; because some were sex workers; because some were drug addicts; because they were expendable. Asked for comment, the LAPD chose to decline. However, the film is as much an indictment of a police force that failed to notify a community of a violent predator in its midst as it is of a society that allowed a number of oppressive factors (racism, dying industries, unemployment, poverty and a crack cocaine epidemic) to work together to let the killings of hundreds of young black women go unreported and unnoticed –Prescod mentions that when canvassing Franklin’s neighborhood, his own neighbors were unaware that murders were even occurring. “Imagine if they would have treated victim #3 as if she was a student over at UCLA with blond hair and blue eyes, how many other people might still be living,” says Nana Gyamfi, another of the films truth-tellers and a member of the Coalition. Their class, race and gender meant that the lives and deaths of the Sleeper’s victims weren't viewed as worthy of consideration.

Throughout the rest of the documentary Bloomfield sets off on a mission to speak with people who knew Franklin. We hear from sex workers, current and former; drug addicts, current and former; friends of Franklin who struggle with the possibility of his guilt; and even Franklin’s son, who seems reluctant to engage at first but eventually agrees to talk to Bloomfield. The film shows us the world in which Franklin slunk around and operated, under the cover of night. We hear tales of Franklin and his friends trading pictures of naked women as they would baseball cards. Twice we hear him described as a “nice guy” by two separate men, while many of the documentary’s other participants describe him as someone who was known to hate, abuse and torture women. One of the men who describes him as a nice guy, seconds later says Franklin hated women, especially drug addicts – but only because his ex-wife, a drug addict, made him that way. Lastly, we hear from women who crossed paths with Franklin and who share their tales of survival. One of these women is Pam, whom Bloomfield engages to take the film crew around the neighborhood in search of women who knew or had come across Franklin. Pam’s presence on screen is undeniably vibrant and she proves indispensable in getting the film crew (made up of white men) access to the neighborhood that would likely have been impossible had she not been present.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper comes at a time when Black people are taking to the streets in protest of police violence in cities across the United States and #BlackLivesMatter has become firmly entrenched in conversations regarding this issue. Black women have been an integral part of organizing, supporting and leading these conversations and yet recognition of the victimization and killing of Black women themselves is often pushed to the margins. Acknowledgment and action around the brutalization and murders of trans, queer and disabled Black women is pushed aside even further.

While state-sanctioned violence is a legitimate and persistent threat, the sad fact is that Black women go missing all the time and are abused and murdered at alarming rates, and although Tales of the Grim Sleeper is made by a white man, it does ask the right questions about whose lives matter and whose lives are given more value in society. The answers lie in the fact that it took a white man making this film for this story to be told on an HBO scale. Although the film is not about police brutality, it does successfully highlight the kind of systemic violence that allowed a serial killer to move freely in a Black community for 25 years, because its members were so marginalized as to not be considered worthy of notification of his presence among them, and because this same marginalization meant that any community members with information regarding the murders would be unlikely to report it to police.

When Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested, authorities found pictures of 180 women in his house. We met some of the women in this documentary. Some of the 180 have been confirmed dead and some are still missing. The film ends with a montage of pictures of some of these 180 women; a haunting tableau of lives lost to multiple levels of violence, but there are countless women whose faces we may never see and whose names we may never know. This film is about one specific community in South Central LA, but the negligence and systemic violence that may have cost so many of these Black women their lives is found in numerous other communities as well. “Yeah, I was out there. That doesn’t mean I’m nothing. Like I’m a piece of trash,” says one of the women who survived her encounter with Franklin to the camera, as she tears up. Be they sex workers, drug addicts or homeless, Black women’s lives should be valued, they should matter, and they do matter.

On Girlhood, a film by Céline Sciamma 
by Fanta

In April, a beautiful teaser of the movie Girlhood was released showing, in one long track, the promise of the great carefree black girl film that could have been. It first lingered on the face of what we presumed was the main character, Marieme (played by Karidja Touré) and then unveiled a line of girls who we cannot hear but who we see lively interacting with each other, Para One's electro soundtrack in the background. The colorful teaser did its job: it made me curious about a film I was skeptical about after having read its synopsis almost a year ago. Then there was the Cannes Festival where the film was shown to critical acclaim. There were murmurs about an unconventional all black, feminist film and a lot of noise about a certain scene involving four black girls dancing and singing to Rihanna’s Diamonds. 

There is no fixed definition of “Carefree Black Girl.” CFBG is constantly conceptualized, re-imagined, discussed through chats, hashtags and reblogs mostly within online platforms and social media spaces and the definition varies according to the person doing the defining. To me, the carefree black girl imaginary has a lot in common with Derica Shields’ definition of “weird.” CFBG is a utopian and futuristic project which imagines a world in which black girlhood isn't constrained, policed or disciplined by any gaze, law, convention or language. It’s about black women’s ability to transform themselves, to change and circulate as they wish. It anticipates black girl joy and freedom. Thus, if “carefree black girl” was a film genre, it would be a sub-category of science-fiction. CFBG should ridicule and render obsolete The Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and other oppressive archetypes. It disrupts and deconstructs conventional and stereotypical images of black girl/womanhood. It inspires new ways of beings on screen and off, unfolds new narratives.

The audacious opening scene of Girlhood shows a group of black girls playing American football. It is complete fantasy, something we have never seen before. It doesn’t look like we’re in France, it doesn't look like we’re in America, and it looks like an unknown elsewhere. I know that Sciamma loves Friday Night Lights and so I am moved by this idea of displacing a territory (America) into another familiar one (the Parisian banlieue) to create a strange cinematic space. For a minute I believed that the film would continue on this direction, that we’d follow these athletic girls forming a powerful and indestructible pack in some weird and unfamiliar adventure. These girls looked like they could make anything happen. It wasn’t the case. Right after this scene, we follow the girls on their way home. They are talking, laughing until they grow silent. Around them we can see young men in the shadows, and we’re meant to deduce that they are the reason why the girls stopped talking. Carefree time is over. 

Banlieue-films are to French cinema what hood films are to Hollywood (banlieue-films are heavily influenced by the American genre.) The genre was born in the 80’s with a desire to document the lives of post-colonial immigrants in the outskirts of France’s major cities. The narratives of banlieue-films usually happen in housing projects. At first, the genre mostly focused on stories about male characters but in the early 2000’s more films started to explore girlhood in the banlieue. The political context influenced this gender shift in the genre. In the 2000’s, a feminist movement (Ni Putes Ni Soumises) emerged from the banlieue, denouncing the violent sexism faced by women and girls living in these urban spaces. These feminists constructed the racist and threatening figure of the "Arab Boy" (could be interchangeably black, Arab, Muslim) this patriarchal and super violent male figure who rapes, and assaults and oppresses the female population. This image was proliferated by media and instrumentalized by many political parties. Films made during this period didn't try to challenge this image, on the contrary, most films centered on black/brown women featured the "Arab Boy," a inhibitor of speech and movement, from whom women must emancipate themselves. Often this emancipation required the physical elimination of Arab or Black male characters. 

In Girlhood, Marieme’s brother provides the figure of the oppressive black/brown man. He physically assaults Marieme and represses her sexuality while the other men in the housing project constantly police her and her friend’s bodies. Suburban black girlhood has been the subject of a few films (La Squale, Ain't Scared) and all of them reduce their black female characters to their social position i.e. victim of an unjust school system, oppressive male presence and racism. All these themes are in Girlhood in a way that feels like Sciamma is just cataloguing situations according to pre-existing images and narratives provided by French cinema or mainstream media about urban, working class black girlhood.

In many interviews Céline Sciamma asserted that she didn't want her film to be like most banlieue-films (grim, documentary-like), and this was why she chose to shoot the film during summer time, in 'Scope and write a fictional story, with fictional characters. But as someone who has watched, studied and researched banlieue-films I don’t see much difference between Girlhood and previous films of the genre. It’s true that the film has better lighting, is more stylized, that there is attention paid to color (blue is the warmest color here too…) and the 'Scope makes the housing project look bigger than in most banlieue-films. Superficial changes which left me unimpressed as they do not transfigure or radically question the dominant aesthetic and deterministic ideology of the genre. 

The French title, Bande de Filles ("Band of Girls"), the promotion of the film, the  teaser, all promised a (black) girl power story. This is half of the film. The English title is more honest as the narrative actually focuses on Marieme (played by Karidja Touré) and her individual journey.  Even though she’s the face we see constantly from beginning to end we don’t really know who she is. What is her family name? Where is her father? What’s her mother’s name? What’s her favorite dish? What is the name of the housing project where she lives? A black girl coming of age without a hair routine scene. What? Who does her hair? Is she of Malian descent? Guinean? She loves soccer. Who is her favorite player? What is her favorite team? Details make characters more real and human. We don’t know much about Marieme or her friends. My favorite scene in the film occurs at the hotel room when the girls are laughing after finding out the real name of Lady, the group’s leader. It’s one of the rare moments when we have access to background information about the characters. For a moment they have flesh, and are relieved from the film’s treatment of them as abstract figures, pawns to be moved from scene to scene by the unimaginative hand of the script.

What makes Precious such an idiosyncratic and unforgettable character is the fact that the film’s director, Lee Daniels, doesn't just rely on depicting her social condition as a poor, sexually abused black girl. Daniels seems to understand that sociology isn't enough and that one must also delve into the character’s dreams, desires and fantasies —as uncomfortable and corny they may  be —in order to document a multi-dimensional reality. We are close to Precious and we remember her because we were close to the texture of her dreams. We've had access to her intense inner life which is her own and no else’s.

In Sciamma’s film there is a constant battle between the director’s desire to fictionalize and fantasize (which gives us the best scenes) and her desire to document, to be realistic and authentic, which trumps the other impulse and gives us the clichéd, rehashed tropes, images and dialogue. The greatest scenes are those where the director stops controlling the way the characters talk, lets the camera roll and observes the actresses improvising, so that the characters come to life as they interact with each other. These girls who are unable to live their girlhood publicly (because men! because society!) take refuge in a hotel room to drink, sing loudly to Rihanna and talk. The most radical move would have been to stay in that hotel room. I would watch a 3-hour movie that was a succession of static shots showing black girls talking shit, drinking, sleeping, and talking again until exhaustion. There is so much to explore, so much to say and imagine. It would be vertiginous and formally daring.

I do believe that only a black woman can direct this film, because it requires a certain empathy and therefore knowledge, which most people don’t have when it comes to telling stories about black women. Empathy demands patience, a listening ear and attentive eye. Though I was really moved by Sciamma’s desire to center the lives of black girls because she had also observed the violent absence of black female characters in French cinema, Girlhood is not enough. 

I'll say that the coverage of Girlhood at Cannes and before it was released in France provided some CFBG moments from the four actresses themselves. Four black girls at the Cannes Festival having the time of their lives. A film I’d watch. But I guess until the carefree black girl imaginary reaches our cinema screens, I’ll keep looking for it in other places: in YouTube tutorials, reblogs, uncapitalized text posts, tweets, lyrics, Pinterest boards, decontextualized gif sets, screenshot etc., etc.

 


Girlhood was screened at The Directors' Fortnight during the 2014 Cannes Festival and was released in France on October 22nd.
 
 

Confession: I’m a grown woman with (sadly) no ties to the Pinkett Smith clan, yet I love and support Willow Smith. Is that weird? Maybe, but here’s why I do:

Willow Smith is a carefree black girl.

Now, I didn’t coin that term; its origins are to be uncovered somewhere in the murky waters of the internet by a far more intrepid explorer than I, but if it wasn’t birthed to describe Willow, I would be surprised.

The existence of the carefree black girl isn’t new, however. If you were a young girl in the 90s, as I was, you probably recognize her in Lisa Bonet. Denise Huxtable and Lisa Bonet somehow fused to become the ultimate carefree black girl: confident, stylish and supremely herself. I didn’t know many girls who didn’t want to be her. Didn’t we all dream of attending Hillman College? Had Hillman not been fictional, it probably would have been full of carefree black girls. Black girls with self-assurance so strong, you couldn’t help but admire it. I know I did then, and still do, even in someone as young as Willow Smith.

Willow exudes the confidence of a young girl who has been given the space and freedom for self-exploration as far away from the pressures society places on young girls of color as a privileged upbringing can afford. As others have rightly pointed out before me, Willow’s ability to explore various interests and forms of expression stems from a place of significant privilege—a fact that cannot be overlooked, and while her parents are indeed famous and wealthy, it is undoubtedly also their commitment to a manner of parenting that favors such exploration that has resulted in her confidence.

While Willow is not your average young black girl due to her upbringing, she is still subject to attempts to force her into the narrow silos in which black girls are allowed to exist. As witnessed in the YouTube comments section for the video of her latest output as one half of the duo Melodic Chaotic, a song called Summer Fling, respectability politics are already being bandied about regarding her musical and visual choices. Willow’s public existence and determination to explore all versions of herself represent a narrative that we don’t see nearly enough—one that moves away from the constraints placed on young black girls regarding their own bodies and their true, full selves. While many have focused on what they deem wrong with the Smiths’ parenting choices, perhaps the focus should shift to what it means to have a young black girl in the public eye who exhibits such a strong sense of self, as well as how to nurture that same sense of self in other girls.

Willow Smith’s commitment to herself is admirable; however, this issue extends beyond her. The larger issue at hand is one of young black girls being afforded the luxury of self-expression in a manner that is generally reserved for their young white counterparts. While young white girls, simply by virtue of being girls, face a host of pressures, their experiences differ greatly from those of young black girls with respect to the freedom to exercise agency over their own lives. Thanks to persistent societal inequality, black girls don’t often find the carefreeness with which white girls travel through childhood and adolescence mirrored in their own lives. The actions and bodies of white girls are not coded in the same manner as those of black girls, creating a disparity in perception and reception of their respective activity. With songs like Whip My Hair, or even Summer Fling, Willow Smith has tapped into a space that has publicly primarily been reserved for young white girls; a carefree space that should be open to all young girls, yet isn’t.

Ultimately, Willow represents what it means when young black girls are presented with a variety of potential paths to self-determination and self-acceptance; paths to a carefreeness that releases them from the pressures of a society wherein everything from their hair, to their language, to their bodies, to their names is fair game and policed. For evidence of this, one only has to look back to 9-year-old Beasts of the Southern Wild star and Academy Award nominee, Quvenzhané Wallis whose name was mocked and mangled during the entire award season, and who was sexualized in the name of comedy during the night of this year’s Academy Awards show. The bigger issue here is one of black girls moving through the world with a sense of freedom from the restrictions placed on their every move; one of young girls fully standing in their bodies despite outside forces attempting to minimize them at every turn.

So yes, I love and support Willow Smith, as well as every young carefree and not-so-carefree black girl who is just trying to make her way through this world on her own terms, because to be a carefree black girl is to be courageous and defiant in the face of sustained pressure to the contrary, and to be one at an age as young as Willow’s is to be definitively ahead of the curve.

 - Fatima

I grew up watching a lot of comedy with my dad. It was the 80s. I loved Punky Brewster and polka dots. I barely knew how to count to 10; there was no way that I understood George Carlin. But I watched anyway, laughing when my dad laughed, nodding when he did too, desperate to feel a connection in that living room where the giant wood-paneled television set sat on the floor. It wasn’t until I saw Whoopi Goldberg on stage with a white shirt on her head to resemble the flowing “long, luxurious blonde hair” that she wanted in order to appear on The Love Boat that I stood up a little straighter. There was something about that monologue that meant more to me than any other joke or comedy routine that I had watched in that living room. There was something about that joke that bridged that gap between performer and viewer for me, although I doubt that I was able to articulate why it meant something to me. Had my father – or anyone – asked about my thoughts on it, I would have responded with simply, “It’s funny!” Despite this childlike inability to explore the depths to which this joke reached me, I did know that it was something unlike any other joke that I had ever witnessed. I wasn’t just watching Goldberg perform this routine, but I was a part of that routine. It was my story too, and one that I would carry with me like a disease for two tragically painful decades.

I have forever been surrounded by white girls.

We moved from one housing complex specifically for University of Illinois graduate students to another housing complex that consisted mostly of U of I post grads, graduate students whose spouses got better jobs, single moms, and low income families before I even began attending elementary school. I was too young to really remember any of my friends from that first complex, but it was while we were at the second – and where I would live until 8th grade – that I began attending the elementary school the next town over. My mother had enrolled me in Girl Scouts while I was in Kindergarten. I started from the bottom as a Daisy and was later transferred to a troop in my new school district, where I would remain until 6th grade when I decided that I would not begin my middle school career as a Girl Scout. Throughout my time in that troop, there was only one other black girl. By the time she came along, I had already shimmied my way into the periphery of the cool girls. I had worked hard to narrow the distance between myself – the other – the little black girl whose mother would not yet allow her to have a relaxer put in her hair even though she desperately, desperately wanted one and opted instead for a short, natural hair cut adorned with a ribbon headband less people think that she’s a boy, and the pretty white girls with long, luxurious hair and for whom the cute white boys were always vying attention. At one point, I had to “try out” to be a part of this clique. Remembering the audition process, and the part in which I was asked to run across the playground in zigzags because “boys are always chasing us so we need to know how to run fast,” and remembering that I complied without hesitation is absolutely mortifying. But I needed to belong there. And so when I did, if even just a little bit, I was determined to not screw it up. That other little black girl who joined our Girl Scout troop threatened my position within the in crowd. I panicked that the other girls, the pretty white girls with long, luxurious hair, would align me with her, would remember that I too was a little black girl who did not belong, and I would be thrust aside, forced to fend for myself. On a Girl Scout camping trip I somehow convinced her to wear her bathing suit backwards. I stood and whispered and giggled along with the other girls as she emerged from the bathroom in a bathing suit that was clearly on wrong. The lesson that I should have learned from this was that despite my efforts, this girl did not seem to give a shit about her wardrobe malfunction and likely had more fun than any of us that weekend. Instead, I smiled to myself knowing that, at least for the moment, those girls with the long, luxurious hair knew that I was one of them.

This self-hatred and near manic desire to distance myself from blackness was something that I had perfected along with my times tables, and continued through middle school, high school, and college. By 6th grade, I was finally allowed to get a relaxer and relished in the straight hair that seemed worlds away from the naps that accrued near the nape of my neck. I continued to surround myself with white girls with biblical names and blonde hair, and I continued to be the always boyfriend-less funny black sidekick. I moved to live with my father in Western Massachusetts when I was thirteen and attended a high school that was so white that Senior year I had to convince my guidance counselor to just give me the original scholarship application for African-American students rather than make me a copy simply because “no one else is going to need it.” I went to college on Long Island, realizing now that it was perhaps among the absolute worst environments that I could have put myself in, with an infinite sea of pretty white girls with Coach bags and Gucci sunglasses, driving their graduation present of a BMW or a Lexus around campus.

The ways in which my self-hatred manifested itself slowly changed, however. It became a raw, dangerous internalized hatred. I was less likely to point it outwards, less determined to make another black or brown girl feel my same pain. Yet I was more likely to patronize myself, to deem myself so worthless that whatever I chose to do – or not do – simply did not matter, more likely to blame my blackness for everything that was wrong in my life and the ultimate reason why I was so unhappy.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what changed. I do know that the presence of beautiful, strong, black women in my life now has helped immensely, but also know that a change like this – to be able to somehow get out of a space in which you hate yourself so deeply that you almost feel like you don’t belong to you – is something that had to mostly come from within. I suppose you reach a point where the energy it takes to be so sad and angry is too exhausting to bear. 

I remember watching Goldberg perform that long, luxurious, blonde hair monologue and laughing, believing that I understood comedy. And perhaps I did understand comedy then, but more importantly, I understood what it was like to be a little black girl who wanted to be a little white girl. I understood what that felt like and was soon going to spend years seeing how that manifested itself. Like the little black girl that Goldberg portrayed, who longed for the perfect hair to get her on The Love Boat, I believed that long, luxurious, blonde hair – or rather, whiteness – was going to bring me happiness. Like that little black girl, I had to learn that it wouldn’t. And I did. And I’m here. And I’m fine.

-Ramou