Red Tails puts Black women in the hurt locker: A womanist critique

Red Tails puts Black women in the hurt locker: A womanist critique

© E-K. Daufin, 2012

            Red Tails, the latest movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, that recently opened nationwide, offers a breath of fresh air for Black men who have been typically so poorly represented on the big and little screen (film and television respectively).  However, Red Tails throws Black women under the bus then stuffs us in the hurt locker, where we are still waiting to exhale…Ironically just in time for Black History Month when the national theme this year is, “Black Women in American History and Culture.”

            The “inspired by a true story” film has been criticized for being inaccurate in several, what to me seem, insignificant ways . . . such as the fantasy of certain flying maneuvers, not showing the airmen smoking cigarettes they all prolifically puffed, but showing another Tuskegee Airman saluting with a pipe in his mouth – a sign of disrespect that would not have been tolerated…Strange that I have yet to see any story about Red Tails that mentions the way Black women were whitewashed from all the airmen’s lives in the film, while a fictionalized romance between the most talented Black pilot and a White Italian woman seemed to absorb a good 20-percent of the longer-than-average 121 minutes of screen time.

            In fact a Montgomery Advertiser story on 93 year-old Herbert Carter, former Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot and aircraft maintenance supervisor, who still travels the country, “touting the accomplishments of his legendary unit,” says Carter thinks Red Tails producer George Lucas “fulfilled his promise to make a realistic movie.”

            The movie was not at all realistic about the role African American women, or White Italian women, played in the lives of our beloved Tuskegee Airman.  Some may blame this inaccuracy on the lack of flashbacks and the time frame in which this film’s story is set, which is after the men were stationed in war time Italy (not a lot of “sistahs’” running around there). Yet Lucas introduced the import of others who were not present in 1944 rural Italy in many ways.  However, none of those “others” were the airmen’s Black mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, fiancés or girlfriends.

 Lucas had airmen deeply contemplating, or flying off to their possible death with cherished photos of a fictional fiancé White woman, a really worshipped “Black Jesus,” or their State-side Black father in their hands or on their aircraft dashboards.   None of them had a photo of any Black woman, no matter how light-skinned, anywhere in the motion picture. 

Surviving Tuskegee Airman Carter says the movie is, “realistic,” but the character of Joe “Lightening” Little, who is rumored to be based on the light skinned aerial daredevil Carter himself, is depicted as a dark skinned womanizer.   The fictional character in the time of legal apartheid in the United States, must have sexually used many a Black woman back home, but he is turned into a self-sacrificing, loyal, marrying man in the film, only when he meets an Italian woman (“Sofia,” played by NCIS: Los Angeles actress Daniela Ruah, of Jewish Portuguese and Spanish descent).

In the film, actor David Oyelowo (who in real life is married to the White Jessica nee Watson since 1998), who plays “Lightening,” has known legions of Black women in the biblical fashion but exclaims that the White Sofia is, “the most beautiful woman” he has ever seen.  Even though the character Joe can’t speak Italian or Sofia English, he falls in love with her, can share emotionally with her, and by-passes buying smokes for himself so he can buy black market lingerie for her. Soon he falls to one knee and asks her to marry him…shortly before he is killed in action.  He dies speaking words of everlasting love to Sofia’s picture on the dashboard. This happens before tying the knot, though after having had sex with Sofia in the small sitting room of her parents’ home.

Another of the real surviving Tuskegee Airmen, James Al Sheppard, told the Maine Public Broadcasting Network that two things didn’t ring true about the wonderful Red Tails was that the actors in the film were much older and buffer than the young, skinny airmen really were and the story about the Black pilot who gets engaged to a local Italian girl was, “a lot of hocus pocus.”  Sheppard says the military strictly discouraged fraternization in Italy, that had until recently been fighting on the side of the Nazis, supposedly not because the airmen were Black but because they were Americans.

If any love story should have been told, mentioned or at least alluded to in Red Tails, it was Airman Herbert Carter’s storybook romance with Mildred “Mike” Hemmons, who also learned to fly under C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson (the chief instructor at Tuskegee and the man considered the father of Black aviation).  According to CNN, Mildred became the first female pilot of any race to join Alabama’s Civil Air Patrol Squadron in 1942, though racism kept her from ever flying under that banner.  The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) rejected Mildred during the war because she was Black.  Seventy years later the government declared Mildred a member and gave a medal inscribed, “The First Women in History to Fly America.”  Both graduated from Tuskegee University at a time when fewer than 1-percent of African Americans had a college education.

Herbert Carter has even admitted that Mildred was an even better pilot than he was.  She mentored many other African American female aviators and traveled the world with her husband speaking out for racial equality. Mildred couldn’t join her husband and lifelong love at George Lucas’ “Skywalker Ranch” to help on the fictional Red Tails.  She did consult extensively with Lucas’ staff on the also recently released History Channel companion documentary on the Tuskegee Airmen, Double Victory, so titled for the Tuskegee Airmen’s double victory of fighting oppression abroad and racism at home.

I join my African American female Facebook friends from around the country to praise Red Tails while at the same time bemoaning the fictionalized interracial romance that leaves Black women out in the cold.  We are the least likely race-gender group in American to be married to, or supported by, a partner of any race, in part because the media cripple the imagination of men and condition them to see Black women to be the least desirable of all women…When it just ain’t so. 

Even when the historical truth was of a Black man loving a Black woman, George Lucas chose not make it real for the millions who will see, have already seen his film. So far the film has grossed almost $35 million.  I hope Lucas makes back the $58 million he invested in the film out of his own pocket and then some, because I want other filmmakers and investors to back powerful, entertaining films about Black people.  I just want them, in all future films, to give Black women their due rather than leave us as daughters of the dust.

Those who are still criticizing the fictional Red Tails for inaccuracies that don’t matter much may be surprised to find that the actual incidents of the Black officers of the Tuskegee Airmen being expelled from an officer’s club, actually happened on U.S. soil not in Italy.  But it happened.  And an incredible Black fighter pilot loved, married, and lead a life of service with an astounding Black woman aviator.  Black women and girls who are bombarded by media images of romantic love that seem to leave them out, were again made invisible, not as beautiful, not as loving ,or as good as a White woman in Red Tails.  Lucas could have chosen to be a little more realistic about the Black women the Tuskegee Airmen loved.  But he didn’t.  And for that his tail ought to be whooped until it’s a brilliant crimson red…figuratively speaking that is.

Stop in the Name of Love and Legality: HBCU Fat Discrimination

Welcome to my home nation – DAUFINation, where all the definitions are daufinitions.

©2009 Rev. Dr. E-K. Daufin

I am a plump African American professor at the oldest public HBCU in the country and a national expert on media weight discrimination and people of color in the professoriate.  I am concerned about some of the statements in Dr. Marybeth Gasman’s response to the Historically Black University Lincoln’s policy that penalizes its students who are “heavy” in body as well as mind by forcing them to pass an additional “Fitness for Life” course or refusing to graduate them.  The policy is certainly unethical, probably illegal and ironically racist, sexist classist AND counter-productive.

The policy is racist because African Americans whose ancestors survived slavery – i.e. were able to work 12 hours a day on little more than a single chittlin’ and a biscuit under horrific psychological stress – have a very efficient metabolism and for a many reasons tend to be fatter than other Americans.  Most of these reasons don’t have to do with being lazy, pigging out or ignorance about ideal healthy lifestyle choices.  We are constantly facing so much discrimination based on our body size already that it is a scary second (third, fourth…) slap in the face to have an HBCU that has a concentration of African American women discriminate against us too.  By matriculating in college, the students signed up to show intellectual rigor in order to graduate rather than be punished by an extra course to pass.  Those who were born with a luckier genetic draw from the deck get to do their graduation march on their academic merit rather than their weight.

The policy is sexist because African American women tend to weigh more than all other race women in the country and Understanding Gender At Public HBCUs reports that females are 63% of the students enrolled at HBCUs.  It’s also physiologically harder for women to lose weight than it is for men.

The policy is counterproductive because fat people, especially fat women, are already under full attack on every front.  We know we are fat.  Others who feel they have the right to openly harass big people, just as it used to be okay to harass us because we are Black, wouldn’t let us forget it even if the media did.  Just last a couple of years ago, as an HBCU African American full, tenured professor, a male student screamed repeatedly at me from an open dorm window “Dr. D -  Fat Ass!”  Fat female students are under even MORE harassment than fat male students.  Naturally thin students with abominable eating and exercise habits in speech, broadcast and online journalism courses want to lecture the fat students and me, their fat teacher, about what they assume are our poor eating and exercise habits. 

Lincoln’s policy is classist because as a group, students who go to HBCUs are more likely to be first-generation college students; poorer than any other 4-year college student; often overscheduled and over working to earn part or all of their way through university, usually with no financial help from their impoverished parents. Lincoln’s policy places greater time AND financial demands on students who are struggling with far more than their weight.   Also poor people are more likely to be bigger too because they have less access to affordable, tasty, healthy food.

Preventing students, no matter how brilliant, from graduating from college just because they are big is counterproductive.  It only adds to their humiliation and stress, increasing the likelihood that they will exercise less and, if they do compulsively eat – eat more of the wrong kinds of foods.

If Lincoln University really cares about the obesity epidemic in the Black community it ought to require ALL students, not just the ones with “more bounce to the ounce,” to complete their Fitness for Life class as they do (or as part of) Freshman Orientation or any physical education requirement.  The thinner students may be as unhealthy as some of the fatter students or worse.  Notice I said, “SOME” of the fat students because one can be fit and fat.  I eat a well-balanced, health-oriented diet, exercise 5 times a week and I am still a plus-sized woman. I refuse to use the “O” word because I am NOT a walking disease or symptom for that matter.  I am not alone.  Many of our thinner counterparts are couch potatoes and eat far more so-called bad foods.  Also thinner students who eat poor diets and don’t exercise regularly may find themselves slipping in to the discriminated size range as their youthful metabolisms age.

I hope Lincoln University stops this ugly size discrimination before a big student with deep pockets successfully sues them for a gigantic number of dollars and contributes to the demise of another precious HBCU.  Gasman is wrong when she says physical education has long been part of our intellectual development.  It’s part of our physical development that, in the effort to attract more students with faster-to-complete programs, most colleges have dropped as a requirement. Also at a time when colleges are offering more online degrees, ending physical education and even exit exam requirements, Lincoln University should be ashamed of their nasty fat phobic fitness course. I would implore them that as their namesake “freed the slaves,” may Lincoln University let my chubby people go.  Let freedom ring and let my chubby people graduate if they’ve got the grades… to go.

Submitted to Online  Diverse Issues in Higher Education 11/30/09

To see Gasman’s story see http://diverseeducation.com/blogpost/183/1.php