America Behind the Color Line (30 page)
I think some people did have race on their mind when I went to sign up. But people came over to me and asked me my name and what I was studying in school. I told them, I’m a music major. I like to sing. I love Jesus and that’s why I’m here.
The first semester I was in the choir, I sang a duet. It was the most rewarding part of my singing career so far. If I hadn’t joined the choir, I bet you the rest of my life I would have gone on thinking they wouldn’t let me in, and that since I was white I might as well not even try. I didn’t join the gospel choir to make a statement. I was just doing what I wanted to do. More white people have joined the choir since then. Maybe that’s because they saw me up there. I took an opportunity to sing for God, and in return I was blessed.
Chris played saxophone at an all-black church once when we were looking for a church to join, and I said, why don’t we join there? He had to tell me he didn’t think they wanted us there. We weren’t looking to make an issue. We wanted to sit in church and do what we wanted to do. Chris thought that joining wouldn’t necessarily be bad from our point of view, because by and large nobody was going to come up and tell me, you don’t belong here. It was almost for the benefit of the other parishioners that we didn’t join. Chris felt he didn’t want anybody to be distracted because we were there.
Chris isn’t the best black saxophone player of Montevallo; he’s
the
best. The teachers call on him, the staff calls on him. He’s a performer. He takes pride and I take pride in his talent. There’s not anybody in front of him, and that’s what matters. When he was going to a church in Montevallo and playing the saxophone down there, a guy came to church with his white girlfriend and it was disruptive. Everybody was talking about it. We felt that even if nobody was bothering us directly, we would just feel uncomfortable with the whispers and the stares. I guess that in time, they’d be all right with me. But we’d rather start out on a better foot than that.
When we did find a church to join, I was a pregnant, unmarried girl in an interracial relationship. Right before Aria was born, the entire church threw us a baby shower. We were so blessed. It was great to feel welcomed, especially in a Baptist church. I grew up believing that Baptists thought Catholics are going to hell. But in South Side Baptist Church, we don’t have to worry about being judged. Finding our place in it was another lesson in acceptance. If only others could close their eyes and open their hearts!
Chris
I grew up in a predominantly black community and learned about the history and struggles of African Americans and about the Civil Rights Movement. I felt fortunate to have experiences that taught me a person doesn’t necessarily love me because they’re black. And I had other experiences that taught me a person doesn’t necessarily hate me because they’re white. So it’s humbling to think that once upon a time, someone would have come and gotten me and dragged me out of my house and lynched me for living with a white woman. What offsets that is knowing that even today if I’m in the wrong black neighborhood, I might be dragged out of my house or out of my car, whether I’m by myself or with someone. So I tend not to get into that argument about race.
What does get to me is that at times I don’t think we’re very far removed from that mind-set. When I was in college, before I met Lura, there was an older woman, a white woman, who had come back to school to finish her degree. She had a daughter about my age. The woman and I were in the hallway and I made some comment about her daughter, like, she sure is pretty; I wonder if she’d like to go out sometime. When I mentioned that, the woman’s whole mood changed. This woman had never had one ugly word to say to me, but now all of a sudden she had a different perspective. And this was the year 2000. She looked at me and said, why would you do that to yourself? From her perspective, she was giving me motherly advice by saying, don’t do that to yourself. Why would you put yourself in a position for your family to be hated, and for your children to catch a tough time because they’re biracial? Why would you do that to my daughter and me, when you could just as easily stay with your own kind and find somebody and be as happy as a bump on a log?
This was a person whom in all other instances I had a lot of respect for. That conversation let me know we’re not that far removed from the days of lynching, because if she thinks that, then she probably has a husband at home who thinks the same thing, or a young son or a nephew or an uncle who thinks the same thing. As much as I would like to think that no one would bury a cross in my yard and set it on fire in these times, every so often you hear of somebody getting dragged down the highway chained to the back of a car. Or some policeman is beating someone shitless for seemingly no reason. I’m not going to dwell on it. There are moments when I wonder, have I taken a step that my family could pay a price for? But the answer tends to be that Lura is worth the risk and my child is worth the risk.
It’s difficult to say why people get upset, black and white, when they see Lura and me together. It seems to go back to tradition, to people’s heritage. People keep going back to what Grandma or Granddaddy told them. I realize that twenty or thirty years ago, Lura would have paid a big price by allowing herself to fall in love with me. She would probably have been disowned by her family and even by her race in some quarters. I’ve read books about people being disowned, seen TV movies about it, and heard the stories. I have an appreciation and a feel for it, but it’s a hard reality to grasp, not ever having had to face it myself.
Black women friends of mine asked me, why would you date a white girl when there are so many perfectly good black girls to date? I tried to explain to them that when I met Lura and developed feelings for her, I didn’t have a grocery list of things I was looking for in a woman. We met; we became friends; we developed a relationship. I feel very strongly about her, and she’s a regular person, just as much a wonderful young lady as you are. I let them know, I’m sorry if you don’t agree. You may as well come out from under that veil of ignorance that old Booker T. always talked about and get with it.
There are things you can’t govern, and love is one of them. If two people are going to love each other, they’re going to do it, and if it’s illegal, they’ll do it anyway. If state statutes dictate that I can’t legally marry Lura, I can still give her a ring and we can have our ceremony and we’re still going to be in love. I hope our daughter, Aria, is going to grow up to be just as loving as we are and to have the same ideal about love that we have. No one can govern who our daughter will love.
I wouldn’t say that Lura and I don’t experience racism. We’ve never had a person come up to us while we were out together and make a racist comment. But you tend to feel the things that people aren’t saying. You feel people checking you out. Once in a while if I’m by myself with our baby, I can see the look of concern on someone’s face, either a black person or a white person. They’ll look at Aria and look at me and notice enough resemblance to think she’s my daughter, but I can see them wondering, is her mother white? In most instances, they will keep whatever they think about it to themselves, but they’re definitely interested, and I find that peculiar. I would like to think that the time has come when my little existence and the color of my wife or child are not of concern to other people. I’d like to think that people have enough going on in their lives that they wouldn’t get angry or upset over these things.
We happen to be in a neighborhood and a college and a church where people tolerate our being a biracial couple even if they have a problem with it. So our experiences have been reasonably good, except for a few friends of mine who were critical and who let me know they didn’t like my relationship with Lura. And even in those instances, once people meet Lura and get to know her, and they see the smile on my face and the smile on her face, they realize there’s nothing wrong with this situation. Eventually, they all come around. The same girl who gave us the hardest time has been calling me and asking, where’s my wedding invitation? I didn’t get it. Aren’t you sending it? Are you upset with me? I want to be there.
When people do ask nosy questions, they always try to be politically correct about it. If Lura is out with the baby, they might comment that Aria has really dark skin. But if the baby’s with me, they’ll say, oh, she has really light skin. There’s always a question behind the comment about the race of the other parent. Sometimes people just come out and ask me if her mother is white. Yes, ma’am, or yes, sir, she is, I say. And then I look at them as if to say, next question? Or, what about that do you want to know?
There are still issues that black America has to deal with. But in terms of Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind society, I want to concentrate on being Chris McMillan, and I want my daughter to concentrate on being Aria. I don’t always want to have to qualify my race or prove myself on the basis of race. The goals I’ve wanted to achieve and the jobs I’ve applied for don’t have the word “black” as qualifiers. MTV has awards and BET has them and Soul Train has them, but everybody wants the Grammy. If you win the Grammy, you are not just the best “black” artist, you are the best artist, period.
I recognize that I’m going to have to prove to someone in some way that I’m a good enough musician and teacher even though I’m black, and get my foot in the door that way. It’s one of those things that you deal with. But I feel like I’m not doing Dr. King’s dream a service if I make it more of an issue than anybody else does. I want to be treated fairly, but I’m not necessarily going to ask for a black student union to be built at the college. I just want to be able to hang out at the student union and be treated like anyone else.
We haven’t decided whether we’ll have our daughter attend school in the South. In most any school in the South, there’s a predominance of black or white students, and that’s still hurting race relations. I have a friend whose only experience with a white person is a boss she had when she was a gas station attendant. He treated her very abusively, so in her mind, that’s white people. Even though her experience with white people is not far-reaching, it’s almost understandable that she developed a sense of enmity toward them. She would never admit she’s a racist or that she hates white people, but relations with white people have a negative connotation because of that one experience at the gas station.
When people stick predominantly with their own race, they have very little experience of another race to go on. And when the few experiences they have are in line with the stereotypes, then even when there’s not hatred, there’s definitely a fear. You don’t know if this white person is going to turn out to be that devil that they always talked about. Or you don’t know if this black person is going to turn out to be that thug they always talked about. So I would love to get Aria out of the South, to some area where there’s a little bit more diversity.
When I get my degree and get ready to teach, I will definitely want to go to the inner city or a lower-income community. I’d like to teach in a poor black high school and try to make a difference for those kids. But when it comes to music, there’s a part of me that just wants to be a great musician, and whether it’s a band full of Chinese kids or Latino kids, I want to have a great group of musicians and make some great music. Do I owe it to my community to go back to Tuskegee and make a difference there? Do I owe it to myself to just do the best job I can? I wish I didn’t have to think along those lines. I wish I could shake it off and just be a human being.
Black Hollywood
Until recently, Hollywood screen icons were mostly white. Today they come in Technicolor. In 2002, for the first time in the same year, two African Americans even received the top Oscar awards—and a third received an honorary Oscar for a lifetime of achievement in film—forcing many of us to wonder if racism in Hollywood is a relic of the past. Halle Berry’s widely quoted acceptance speech declared that Hollywood, one of the most contentious battlefields in the Civil Rights Movement, had at long last opened its doors to people of color. Hollywood is famously surreal, a million miles away from Harvard, where I teach. I’m here to discover what it’s like on the inside, for black people: as an A-list film star, a top director, a struggling actress, and whether or not Halle’s and Denzel’s recent Oscars do spell equal opportunity for black people in Hollywood. Where does fantasy end and reality begin?
I have to confess that Los Angeles has grown on me. It’s like a sprawling F. A. O. Schwarz for adults: the sun always seems to shine, it never rains, and everyone is dressed to kill. The people here wear the faces of America’s future: black, caramel, sepia, beige, white—multicultural eye candy.
It’s so easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve left the East Coast’s hierarchy of race and class behind, that it’s different here. In Los Angeles, people tell you over and over: the only color that matters is green . . . it’s money, not race, that powers the machine.
Is Hollywood like the U.S. Army, color-blind in its pursuit of excellence and, in this case, profit?
My first appointment was with a man whose enormous success is certainly a sign that some things have changed. I met Chris Tucker, the star of
Rush Hour
. When the film grossed $241 million, comedian Chris Rock called Tucker “the biggest star in the world.” Chris moved smoothly from the regional black comedy circuit to Hollywood’s A-list. He has what executives call crossover appeal—his movies are as popular with suburban whites as they are with blacks. From humble beginnings in Atlanta, Chris now inhabits a very different world.
I spoke with Chris in his home in an exclusive gated community in the San Fernando Valley. “Do you think we’re on the verge of a renaissance for black people in Hollywood . . . is it wide open?” I asked him.
“There’s a broader audience now for black people in Hollywood. But Hollywood is still a tight niche. You flip in through the door to get a movie, and then getting a hit movie is like trying to get into heaven . . . That’s why there’s only a few black comedians you can name, a few black actresses you can name. You can name a few white actors at the top who are really making a whole bunch of money, really doing good.”
Had he experienced racism before making it onto the A-list—or since? “When you make films in Hollywood, you experience everything . . . Whatever you do, there’s gonna always be somebody who don’t like you or somebody saying you ain’t good enough, or we want to do this or we want to use you for that . . . My thing is to just maneuver right around and step right over whatever it is and keep going.”
Does he feel a special responsibility to his black audience?
“I definitely see myself as having a particular responsibility for black people out there,” answered Chris. “I’ve got a responsibility and I’m real hard on myself, harder than anybody. We are blessed here in America, but that brings a lot of responsibility. If you’re blessed, you have to help others.”
Chris is as levelheaded as he is talented and ambitious. You certainly need to be grounded to survive in this town. He makes no secret of the fact that his religious faith keeps him anchored, and he invited me to attend his church with him one Sunday morning in South Central. This being Los Angeles, I should have known that other stars would worship here as well.
I thought I was hallucinating when I got there—Stevie Wonder
and
Ali Ollie Woodson of the Temptations performing a duet in a black church in the ghetto. And they were just the warm-up act. If Stevie Wonder and Ollie didn’t do it, Bishop Jones’s spellbinding sermon made me almost get the Holy Ghost. But for most people in Los Angeles, the new religion is not found in places like this; it’s about money.
California is the world’s fifth largest economy, and Los Angeles is its showcase. Here, conspicuous consumption reigns supreme. Through homes and cars, clothes and jewelry, wherever you look, people display their success . . . or the illusion of it. But what role do blacks play in a city that appears at first glance to be a giant ATM? Hollywood is not long on history, so I wanted to get the perspective of a veteran of the business, someone who has witnessed and participated in change over the past three decades. One of the most talented actors in Hollywood today, and one of my cinematic heroes, is Samuel L. Jackson. He’s fitted me into a busy day in a voice-over studio in Santa Monica.
“In Hollywood, many individuals are very liberal without a doubt . . . but is there institutional racism?” I asked.
“There are many ways to answer the question whether Hollywood is racist,” said Jackson. “The direct and honest answer, I guess, is yes, only because Hollywood is anti anything that’s not green . . . Hollywood can be perceived as racist and sexist, because that’s what audiences have said to them they will pay their money to come see.”
“There’s now a critical mass of black actors. That’s unprecedented, isn’t it?” “For a very long time, the people that were in power were white men,” Jackson said. “As we get younger producers and younger people in the studios, we have a generation, or several generations, of people who have lived in a society where they have black friends. They have Asian friends. They have Hispanic friends . . . So all of a sudden you see a different look in the movies, as they reflect the way this younger generation of producers and studio executives live their lives.”
To be successful, a big-budget film has to gross as much money as the GNP of a small African country, and that’s just one film! Every decision a producer or director makes—from who stars to the number of car crashes— affects the difference between profit and loss. A film like
Daredevil
has a production budget of $80 million. So, according to Hollywood accounting, it needs to gross $225 million just to turn a profit. How do producers make these decisions? What role does race play in the process? Why can’t even one African American green-light a film? I decided to ask a man who can.
I went to Malibu to meet the man who green-lit
Daredevil
—the head of New Regency Productions, Arnon Milchan. As one of the film industry’s most powerful producers, Milchan has a seat at Hollywood’s high table. And he was comfortably honest with me about how the numbers work.
“What percentage of films are profitable?” I asked.
“In a good company—one that stays alive—maybe three out of ten films are profitable, maybe three or four break even, and three or four lose money. That’s what you need to stay alive and build. If you have a better track record than that, better than three out of ten, you’re a genius for a day. And if you have less, you’re dead.”
“Of the A-list actors, what percentage are superstars?”
“Of the white actors in Hollywood, there are a few guys and a couple of girls—probably five or six actors—that are on the A-list, if we define that as anyone who makes over $10 million on a film . . . Out of those who make $20 million, I would say probably 5 percent, 10 percent, are really superstars
. . . I guess all combined, there are maybe ten people, twelve people, that I would say yes to anything they want.”
“Right now, the black superstars are who?”
“Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith, Sam Jackson, Halle Berry, Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock. Oprah Winfrey
was
a superstar.”
“Wow, when I hear you talk, it sounds like Hollywood is all black!” I said. “So why do so many people say Hollywood is racist?”
“I found a lot of French actors who say that Hollywood is racist because practically no Frenchman can get a part on account of their accent,” Milchan answered. “I’ve found that, with the exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger, nobody with a German accent can get a part. It’s an endless thing. But how far do we want to take this? . . . Of course there is racial discrimination. I am Jewish; I know there are problems.”
“But the average black person would say that Hollywood is closed to black people, for the most part,” I said.
“Some people talk like Oliver Stone, as if there’s a conspiracy,” Milchan replied. “They say the studio system is a closed white boys’ club. But it’s actually about money. Someone is making $200 million if they can afford to pay Denzel or Chris Tucker $20 million, so who wants to share that? I would say, first of all, people are too selfish here, so they don’t have time to have a conspiracy . . . Maybe it’s about African Americans and whites not hanging out in the evenings, so maybe that dinner, or that party at the beach, or a long weekend where you’d kind of drink and watch the Lakers or something, is very white or very black, or very whatever. Like Wall Street used to be . . .
“There are a lot of gray areas,” Milchan continued. “The issue is not so much worrying about audience perception and racism; it’s worrying about the credibility of the story . . . Audiences are changing their views now, with several black superstars on the A-list.”
Without what Hollywood thinks of as a universal sort of light-skin beauty— “light and bright and damn near white,” as they used to say—it can be a rocky road in the film industry for black women. How does Hollywood decide who’s got this look and who hasn’t? I was invited to lunch with Matt Rochester and a group of struggling young actors and actresses to discuss one of Hollywood’s darkest secrets: the color line within the race.
“In Hollywood, when you’re talking about playing opposite your leading males, I call it color coding,” said one of the actresses.
“Is it white people who are making these decisions?” I asked.
“It’s both. It’s the industry. I’ve experienced it more with black people.”
“I was eighteen years old in 1968, the year of ‘Black Is Beautiful,’ ” I said, “and I never dreamed that in the year 2002, if I were still alive, we would be sitting around in somebody’s living room, in a place like Hollywood, talking about the whole industry being color-struck.”
“But who said black is beautiful?” said one of the actresses. “Black people say that. Who’s running Hollywood? Not black people!”
“Do you think that black people are as color-conscious in Hollywood as white people?” I asked.
“Yes,” said another, “because they have to follow the rules; they’re not the ones who make the ultimate decision.”
“And it all rolls back down to money,” said a third actress, “to who’s got the money and the power.”
“How do you know when it’s a matter of race, and when it’s a matter of your own lack of talent?”
“When you see a TV show, or when you see a commercial that you went out and read for, and you see that on TV and you look at the person they chose, and you look at yourself and you know what you did in that audition— that’s when you know.”
“You’re not kidding yourself?”
“Are all of us kidding ourselves? Can you see this woman who’s sitting here—black men looking at her would say she is beautiful—can you see her playing opposite Sean Connery? A white woman the same age, not as attractive as her, would get that part, purely because of the color of her skin and for no other reason.”
So black is not beautiful in Hollywood. I can’t believe that in the twenty-first century, such small variations in skin tone can make or break a black woman’s career. Despite all the progress we’ve made, it’s as if dark complexions are not universal, or not beautiful. That light-complexioned ideal goes all the way back to the twenties and thirties, starting with Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, and Dorothy Dandridge, and extending all the way to Halle Berry and even Alicia Keys. Their great talent notwithstanding, their beige color certainly helped their careers. “If you’re black, get back; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re light, you’re all right.” I guess that old black saying still holds true.
I met Nia Long, star of the hit black movies
Boyz N the Hood
and
Love Jones
. I wanted to find out if the superstar roles—and salaries—remain elusive for black women even when they have enjoyed box office success.
“The A-list, the mythical A-list,” I said, “seems to have more black men on it than black women.”
“Whether you’re black, white, purple, or yellow, it’s harder for women,” said Nia. “Men can be gray and balding and they’re seen as being just sexier
. . . There are very few movies where you see an older woman with a younger man. The minute a woman goes into menopause it’s like, oh well, you can only play a grandma now. Women have a shorter time span in their career to get in there and hit it good.”
“So with the same career that you’ve had, had you been white, how much more would you be making?” I asked.
“If I were a white woman with the amount of blockbuster success films I’ve starred in, I’d probably be making at least $4 million more per film. And I don’t get paid $1 million a movie, so let’s be real about that too.”
“Do you think that you have to be light-complexioned?”
“Black women are probably the most intimidating species that God has ever created . . . We are beautiful, we are smart, we are strong, and we can appear threatening when we speak our minds. We are also vulnerable, compassionate, and sensitive. Maybe this is why dark-complexioned black women have a harder time making it in Hollywood than light-complexioned black women do. Most white people can identify across the color line with that light-complexioned black woman.”
“Do you think you have suffered more because of race or because of sex?” I asked.
“Black women are discriminated against more because of race than because of gender, in my opinion . . . When Matt Damon has a love interest, they don’t go, oh, let’s bring in Nia Long—we really like her work. They might say, well, sure, we’ll see her. They don’t want to say no, because they don’t want to feel like, oh my God, we said no to the black girl.
