So I’m psyched about Queen of Katwe (Disney), starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, based on the true story of young Ugandan chess champion Phiona Mutesi, which just came out. I’m definitely gonna see it this week.
I am also looking forward to the release this winter of Hidden Figures (20th Century Fox), starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae, based on the true story of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, and their foundational mathematical contributions to the US space program. I have never ever ever seen a black female mathematician in a major film before.
This got me thinking: in my entire life up til now, have I ever seen a film released by a major Hollywood studio that centered on a brainy black woman and her brainy pursuits? I’ve been musing on this for about 24 hours now. I thought of exactly one: Akeelah and the Bee.
Can you think of any others?
Update 9/29: I thought of two more candidates. They don’t have that same “this woman is taking over the world with her mind alone” quality as all of the above, but they do have something:
Home (20th Century Fox, 2015): it’s not a major theme of the film, but the generally resourceful and awesome main character, voiced by Rihanna, does at a key point figure out the mechanism of a piece of alien technology while boasting of her “A in geometry”…
A Raisin in the Sun (Columbia Pictures, 1961): Beneatha’s intellectual pretensions don’t exactly drive the plot, but they are pretty central to her character. If you want to see what I mean and are up for being made a little upset, click here (the “in my mother’s house…” scene if you know it).
I want more! Please help!
Update 1/7/17: Having sat on this blog post for a few months now, I feel that the previous update dilutes the point a bit. Akeelah and the Bee, Queen of Katwe, and Hidden Figures, are the only movies of their kind I can think of. (Per the description above: produced by Hollywood, centered on a brainy black woman and her brainy pursuits.) I earnestly want to know if more exist. I am very excited there have been 2 inside of 6 months.
If I ask for “that kind of movie” only without the requirement that the lead be black and female, then we are swimming in them: Good Will Hunting, Theory of Everything, Imitation Game, Beautiful Mind, The Man Who Knew Infinity, Little Man Tate, Searching for Bobby Fischer, … shall I keep going?
For a quick and dirty numerical sample of the status quo: here is a list, compiled by a random IMDB user, of “movies about geniuses.” I found it among the first few hits upon googling “movies about smart people.” On this list I see 35 distinct titles. (The list says 42 but I see 7 repeats.) Of these, by my count the “geniuses” include 32 white boys/men, 1 black man, 1 East Asian man, and 1 white woman.
The fact that I managed, scraping my memory, to find a movie (Home) centered on a black girl who at some point in the film does something cool with her brain, is irrelevant to this stark picture. (This is not a knock on Home, which I loved.) If we want to bring it into the conversation, then we should put it in the context of every movie centered on a character that at some point does something cool with their brain. This is a lot of movies, way too many to make any kind of list.
If I allow the character in question not to be the main character (as in Raisin in the Sun; and if I allow us to leave Hollywood, 2012’s Brooklyn Castle and 2002’s Spellbound come to mind), then we are talking about every movie containing a character with plausible intellectual aspirations. Again, way too many to start listing.
The upshot: representations of brainy black women in (Hollywood) film have been exceedingly, shockingly rare. If you have taught in any place that has black people, you know that brainy black women are not rare in real life. Our national culture has had a very limited imagination in this regard. So let’s all effing go see Hidden Figures as soon as we possibly can. Independent of all this, I’ve heard it’s very good.
Research in Practice 