20 Black Movie Characters Hollywood Should Learn From

By Ian Boucher / August 1, 2013

1. The Tuskegee Airmen (Red Tails)

Red Tails is certainly not the best movie on this list, but it earns the Number One spot because of what it tries to do, and where it fits on the timeline of film history. Although Red Tails has many flaws, I enjoy it a lot as a whole for reasons I will get into in a moment. After I saw it for the first time, I started reading up on the reviews, many of which, as we know, were negative. Many of the reviews also implored me to watch HBO€™s 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen, lauding it for doing much greater justice to the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, who had to go through incredible adversity just to be able to fight for their country. So I bought a copy of the HBO version and watched it. And you know what? Red Tails may have some very hokey, stereotypical moments, but in my opinion, it does the Tuskegee Airmen much more justice than the actually more historically accurate HBO version, and, especially as a mainstream big special effects movie with an all-black leading cast, I think Hollywood can learn a lot from the potential it represents. And I€™m not talking about the special effects. Like the other movies on this list, the characters in Red Tails, especially the younger ones, are just characters, sometimes stereotypical, but mostly engaging to watch and in this case likable characters on their own€”just people, not faces for issues to be saved (probably with the help of white people). And like many of the other movies on the list, it brings a myriad of other aspects to the big budget arena. Firstly, Red Tails is absolutely unapologetic about its truth and is not concerned with representing it in a delicate way. It shows racism as racism, and doesn€™t need to hold the hands of white people while doing so. In the HBO version, Laurence Fishburne€™s character Hannibal is seen off by a large group of enlightened white people who are open-minded and seem to know him personally. I find it highly unlikely that a middle class black man would be seen off in such a fashion at that time, but more importantly, the movie seems very intent on emphasizing sympathetic white characters who endorse the legitimacy of the Tuskegee struggle every step of the way, such as Colonel Rogers at Tuskegee Army Air Field, or some of the white senators and soldiers. Some of this representation is at least somewhat historically accurate from what I know of the subject, but the movie seems to take special pleasure in this. I€™ve met some white people who, due to not being used to movies with all-black casts, turn off at the first sign of black characters discussing their frustrations about racism without white characters around, and I think it€™s because there€™s not a leading white character present to frame and solve the conflict with them. Red Tails is not afraid of its all-black leading cast and has no need to justify it. Black actors can certainly carry a movie on their own just like anyone else, and the tone of Red Tails introduces such a universe to beginning learners pretty well. It doesn€™t need a sympathetic white narrator to witness any of the atrocities witnessed by the characters; it trusts the audience to be able to experience them from their fellow humans€™ perspective. The HBO movie, on the other hand, seems to have been made for a white world arguably more so. Next, Red Tails takes place within a world full of racism, and that€™s partially the essence of what a comprehensive story of the Tuskegee Airmen is all about, but Red Tails takes its subject matter to a wider level, because it€™s not the job of the characters, black or not, to solve racism in two hours, as many viewers have been conditioned to expect with movies starring black actors, especially in period films. Racism is a part of the characters€™ world and the obstacle they must fight to overcome, but racism is bigger than any movie. Racism is a fact of the world, and the real Tuskegee Airmen did overcome some areas in which it was found, but there was still a lot more to do to change the reality of the 1940s.

This brings us to the fact that, since racism isn€™t the primary focus of Red Tails, Red Tails can just be a war movie with its own characters and style with respect for the Tuskegee legacy within it, and it achieves this, playing like a 1950s post-World War II movie with fast-talking, cheesy lines, and mostly fun and interesting characters. This doesn€™t make it better than HBO€™s version, but it makes it a noteworthy example in film history. George Lucas wanted to create a standalone war movie getting right to the action while respecting the pilots at the same time, getting to the essence of their story and bringing it to the forefront of cultural awareness but making a fast-paced plane movie, and why shouldn€™t he be allowed to do that? Why can€™t we have an artistic statement on war movies with an all-black leading cast? This isn€™t a definitive film on the Tuskegee Airmen, and it doesn€™t have to be. Another reason that particularly puts Red Tails above the HBO version for me is that in Red Tails, the characters aren€™t dying needlessly at every turning point€”sure, there are some stereotypical deaths, but not needless ones every step of the way. The HBO movie also has a first-rate leading black cast, but still follows the Brother Rule. Even though the actual pilots were historically some of the best and brightest of the generation (and are depicted as such in the movie), the HBO movie treats the characters, like many black males in American cinema, as if they are too emotionally unstable or afraid to be the particularly successful pilots they were in real life. Most telling of all, the actual surviving airmen have supported Red Tails a great deal, and I say, regardless of how entertaining it is for us youngsters, that is the biggest compliment of all. But I think that for many viewers, historical accuracy wasn€™t the central issue in the quality of either of these films. It was how much it fit into what we repeat to each other as a culture. Red Tails doesn€™t give us what we expect. I think if the amounts of hokiness were minimized, people could have seen the movie€™s points better and it could have been more financially successful, but Red Tails shouldn€™t be written off as a movie. We still need a comprehensively good Tuskegee Airmen movie, but in many ways, Red Tails expands narrative horizons, can be used to expand Hollywood€™s horizons, and can help expand audiences€™ horizons. Its audaciousness cannot be ignored. So there you have it. 20 characters. These were only a few examples, and even fewer that came to mind were women. What characters would you add? The big questions here are, in good times and in bad, who are we watching, who are we applauding, who is allowed to play which characters, and why? How do we best learn from history? What viewing options are already out there, and how are they produced, acquired, and marketed? Is Lionsgate€™s new division Codeblack Films the right way to bring more movies with black characters, new and existing, into the mainstream? Hollywood doesn€™t have to mimic reality with the different ways it portrays the world, but isn€™t reality watching it? I do think the small club of Hollywood is expanding. It€™s never too late to change what we do.