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.

The Media -- Project, Perpetuate and Create --Weight Bias

The Media -- Project, Perpetuate and Create --Weight Bias

in Form and Content

The media including all advertising, entertainment and news, provide the primary channel in which notions of what is so-called normal body size, what are the usual behaviors of and health effects of being fat, indeed -- about what causes a person to be fat and how those people should be treated. 

As McCluhan coined, “The medium is the message,” in this case the physical, or rather non-physical act of using media itself increases the likelihood of weight gain.  We saw this whimsically depicted in the blockbuster Disney children’s film,  Wall-E where all the humans  waiting in a space ship for Earth to become capable of supporting life again, regardless of race, were very cute, very fat and used personal electronic media “pimped out” hover-lounges rather than their shrunken chubby legs as their only means of transportation.   Not only does watching television encourage us to be less active (if we would otherwise be doing physically active things), the constant commercials for junk food are created to trigger cravings and further distort our natural sense of hunger.

Media usage studies show that children spend a whopping 7 hours a day using some form of media and that the media rival peer influence and can supersede parental, church, and school influence on myriad indices including notions of weight.  So the media bear the lions’ share of responsibility of weight bias in form and content, especially in a nation where few medical schools even have an “obesities studies” elective option.  It’s sad that the majority of medical doctors themselves usually rely on their inaccurate cultural, rather than medical, knowledge of what makes their fat patients big and how health and weight really are connected and not.   

Some medical doctors whose research does not support popular weight bias say they find it difficult to get their research published in medical journals because of the weight bias of the editors. Often the authors of the medical studies, and certainly the journalists who use those studies for their headline weight biased studies, are basing their information on flawed weight biases rather than accurate science.

Examples of medical bias include doctors, nurses, nutritionists and other health professionals making derogatory comments and jokes about fat people, viewing us as lazy, lacking self control, non-compliant, unintelligent, weak-willed and dishonest[i].  A useful mini-documentary on weight bias in the health care system is at http://www.yaleruddcenter.org/what_we_do.aspx?id=254

Next Week:  Weight Bias is Racist; Fat is a Womanist Media Issue

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[i] Friedman, p. 5

Why Weight Bias is Bigotry

 Fat Is A Feminist (and Womanist)
Media Issue

NOTE: My work uses the term “fat” the way the Fat Liberation movement uses it.  “Fat” is used in a non-pejorative sense, to describe corpulent people rather than a negatively connoted  terms such as “obese” or worse yet, “morbidly obese,” or even “overweight.” It is an effort to reclaim and de-demonize “fat” as African-Americans have reclaimed what was a previously insulting use of the terms Black or African to describe us.  It is also an attempt to reform the language to separate the possibly positive descriptor “fat” from other negative descriptors often coupled with the term fat when it is spat, such as “and ugly,” “and sloppy,”  “and lazy” which readily apply to people of any size. When the biased terms of “obese and overweight” are used they are the terms of others, not this author.

Why Weight Bias is Bigotry

Weight bias is the notion that a person is fat because, she must be eating too much “bad” (but delicious!) food, as well as not exercising and thus by definition is undisciplined, lazy, (the cause and) worthy of all manner of viciousness.  It is also assumed that the fat person is a liar if she claims otherwise.  One of patriarchy’s worst nightmares is a woman not in patriarchal control…not behaving well according to patriarchal standards…Thus a fat woman is considered a villainous beast, not a woman at all.  Fat men are treated better but not much and it’s getting worse for both genders. In fact media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s favorite go-to-guy on health and weight loss – “Dr. Oz” (Much like the fearsome Wizard of Oz, Dr. Oz really is, in my professional opinion, a skinny fat-bigot, wizard breathing fire and smoke) while discussing hormonal causes for erectile dysfunction – says with a sneer on a program about sexuality,  that fat men were castrating themselves, “literally making women out of themselves” because the fat men don’t become thin.

Everyone’s body is NOT the same.  A weight loss diet that works wonders for one or some can cause others who faithfully follow it, to gain weight.  A grossly incomplete  list of the many interacting multiple reasons most fat people are fat includes[ii]: 1. genetic factors – by far the biggest group of complex causes including the way our bodies process carbohydrates, the number of fat cells we are born with, how and when our bodies physically signal hunger and satiation, metabolic factors, how sensitive one’s nervous system is, 2. repeated weight loss dieting, 3. fasting, 4. food pesticides, 5. other pollution and toxins, 6. depression, 7. sleep deprivation,  8. availability of “good” food (the jury is still out on what exactly that may be, 9. biologically driven food preferences, 10. non-biological family heritage regarding food and exercise, 11. lack of time for “sufficient” exercise, 12. lack of safe and pleasurable exercise options, 13. when one eats what, 14. poor available food quality, 15. other food industry practices, 16. increasingly required time sitting at a computer just to survive in most work and even home environments as employers, organizations and businesses force us into more online tasks to save their businesses money, 17. hydration, 18. alkalinity, 19. stress (including crime and all types of abuse) and the list goes on.

Weight Anti-Discrimination leaders urge us to emphasize health rather than weight loss.  To experience good health, virtually all of us should make lifelong efforts to exercise half an hour or more at least five times a week and enjoy organic foods that include large portions of fresh, high quality vegetables, fruits, the right amount of complete proteins and sleep in a dark, quiet well-ventilated room for 7 – 9 hours every night. 

That’s hard enough even for high income working people, nearly impossible for most of the rest.  What is tragic is that even doing all of that and more will never make most of those considered fat – thin enough to escape weight bias.  In fact media weight bias actually contributes to making people fatter and/or sicker in the effort to prove ourselves as worthy of being treated humanely and judged on the content of our character rather than the calibrations of a cruel scale.

Citing thousands of current studies, Australian researchers Michael Gard and Jan Wright say that the “obesity epidemic” and its resulting hysteria is the result of cultural ideology, rather than science or medicine.[iii]  In her book Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight  Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting,  New York Times reporter Gina Kolata takes a historical survey of the diet industry and body ideals and dispels the assumption that the lack of will power is at the root of all fat people’s weight issues.[iv]

Next Post: 

The Media -- Project, Perpetuate and Create --Weight Bias

in Form and Content

This is the second in a series of posts from a paper I presented at the AEJMC Annual Conference 8/9/09. 

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[i] Roberta R. Friedman, ScM, , “Weight Bias: The Need for Public Policy,” (Yale University Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity: New Haven Connecticut) 2008, 11 pages.

[ii] Various works including: Lisa Sanders, M.D., The Perfect Fit Diet: Combine What Science Knows About Weight Loss With What You Know About Yourself, (Rodale Inc.: United States) 2004, 358 pages.

[iii] Citation for Michael Gard and Jan Wright The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology

[iv] Citation for Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight  Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting,

Unfair and Damaging Weight Bias Exists in the Culture

Welcome to my home country - DAUFINation where all the definitions are daufinitions.

The next few posts will be excerpts from a presentation I made at a previous Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference in Denver.  The Minorities And Communication Division and Commission on the Status of Women co-sponsored the session.

NOTE: My work uses the term “fat” the way the Fat Liberation movement uses it.  “Fat” is used in a non-pejorative sense, to describe corpulent people rather than a negatively connoted  terms such as “obese” or worse yet, “morbidly obese,” or even “overweight.” It is an effort to reclaim and de-demonize “fat” as African-Americans have reclaimed what was a previously insulting use of the terms Black or African to describe us.  It is also an attempt to reform the language to separate the possibly positive descriptor “fat” from other negative descriptors often coupled with the term fat when it is spat, such as “and ugly,” “and sloppy,”  “and lazy” which readily apply to people of any size. When the biased terms of “obese and overweight” are used they are the terms of others, not this author.

Unfair and Damaging Weight Bias Exists in the Culture

A few years ago the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University examined weight bias[i].  Rudd Center Director of Public Policy Roberta R. Friedman, ScM reports that “obese and overweight adults” experience weight discrimination from employers, doctors and teachers.   He says that weight discrimination causes serious medical, psychological, economic and social damage to the 66% of adults and 50% of children in the United States.  Rudd Center researchers and others say that weight bias, rather than fatness in and of itself, increases the risk that the victims will suffer depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, poor body image, suicidal acts and thoughts AND weight gain. The Center calls for public policy that includes weight in the list of categories that are covered in anti-discrimination laws on the local, state and federal level as is race and gender.

Next Post: Why Weight Bias is Bigotry

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[i] Roberta R. Friedman, ScM, , “Weight Bias: The Need for Public Policy,” (Yale University Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity: New Haven Connecticut) 2008, 11 pages.

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

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©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

Mrs. Obama, We ALL need to exercise regardless of size.

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                I am so relieved that First Lady Michelle Obama’s plan to work on childhood obesity is focusing NOT on weight loss dieting but instead on getting more and better grocery stores in low income neighborhoods.  She’s also promoting financial support for schools to get rid of their deep fryers, start organic school gardens, cook more nutritious food, as well as have it available in school vending machines.  Still, I wish the messages I see about her “war on childhood obesity” focused more on increasing activity for ALL CHILDREN rather than creating a “Biggest Loser – Kiddy Version” for only the queen and king sized kids.  In her nationally televised PSAs we should see smiling active big children with her, not just the slim ones.

            I beg the First Lady to be mindful that street crime and school yard teasing also make it difficult for inner city kids to be active.  I was a fat kid and not only did my dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood make every venture outside a risky proposition, but verbal and physical harassment, much like what we saw the large leading character in the award winning film Precious version of the novel  Push endure. 

We all should focus on more activity and better health rather than weight loss diets.  Weight loss diets actually make you fatter.  They also increase depression because repeated, desperate effort and failure as well as the notion that there’s nothing too horrible to subject yourself to if it makes you lose weight or at least claims it will is more than disheartening.  I ask the First Lady as well as anyone supporting ending childhood (or any) obesity, to also realize that following Mrs. Obama’s good initiatives will increase muscle (which weights more than fat) and MAYBE decrease weight a little but some of us, at any age, will never be as thin as she and her daughters are, or the media and medical doctors lead us to believe we should be. 

Black/Latina Women Worth Our Weight in Gold

Welcome to my home country - DAUFINation where all the definitions are DAUFINitions.

It's a White supremacist and patriarchal act to beat down Black women for having the highest weights.  Not only did our ancestors pick cotton and drop babies, get regularly whipped and raped...surviving all that on a biscuit and a chitterling if we were lucky.  Until Black women and Latina's are widely considered worth our weight in gold we need to stop judging all women by how much we weigh.  The stress of battling racism, sexism and the speed of American life now make it hard for most of us to get day to day.  Look at stress, abuse, safety issues and the insinuation of sugar into virtually everything for the solutions, not more disparagement of people of color.

Diversity in Hi Ed post 11/10/10 In response to, “Researching Obesity’s Complexity and Impact,” by Katti Gray, posted the same date.